BURLINGTON — The city is beginning to plan a phased reopening, starting with a loosening of restrictions in its parks this weekend.
Mayor Miro Weinberger said the city plans to open dog parks, tennis courts, pickleball courts and the waterfront skatepark. It also is also planning to operate its youth programming this summer and is putting together a task force to evaluate outdoor restaurant and retail options for this summer.
The University of Vermont Medical Center has seen a continued decrease in coronavirus patients, with only two coronavirus-positive patients currently at the hospital, neither of whom is on a ventilator, hospital president Stephen Leffler said Wednesday.
The hospital had around 20 Covid-19 patients at the virus’s peak in the state in mid-April.
Leffler said the hospital had sufficient intensive care unit capacity, personal protective equipment and testing capacity to be prepared for the next increase in Covid-19 patients.
Weinberger said there was a growing sense in the scientific community that there is a much decreased risk of outdoor transmission compared to indoor transmission.
“Having these facilities open has high value, we know there is a great desire for activity, for exercise, and these are all outdoor activities,” he said.
Basketball courts and playgrounds will remain closed due to the close-contact nature of those facilities, he said.
The city is planning on offering youth programming this summer, although the programs will likely be different from last year, he said. Weinberger said that while the details haven’t been finalized, it was likely children would be in smaller groups and there would be fewer field trips.
Weinberger said the city will offer its camps if the pandemic continues to trend in the right direction.
“If we can find a way to have as much youth programming going as is safely possible this summer, it’s going to be really good for our community,” he said. “It’s going to be good for our kids who have been pent up in our homes and have had really limited enrichment opportunities, they will really benefit if they can have full summers.”
Offering camps will also provide relief to parents who have had to provide child care, he said.
The city has also established a working group to develop a streamlined application process for retailers and restaurants to use outdoor spaces like sidewalks to reopen this summer, Weinberger said.
“We have the best months of the year coming up, and we really want to see what we can do to use the public right-of-way to make more of these activities that have been so severely curtailed in recent months possible during the warm weather months and during the summer,” he said.
Though there are many details to figure out, Weinberger said the city wanted to have a plan in place by Memorial Day weekend for businesses to apply to reopen using outdoor spaces.
Weinberger said the city wanted to have a plan in place for when the governor and Department of Health greenlights the opening of outdoor business activity.
“I don’t have a way of projecting, at this point, when that kind of in-person dining is going to be allowed,” he said. “But in anticipation that could happen around the end of the month or in June, we want to be ready to move when it does.”
Weinberger said the data shows that the region now has the public health infrastructure and surge capacity it needs to handle future upticks in cases. He said this means the city can take some slow, deliberate steps to move toward re-opening some aspects of society.
“These steps are needed for our collective physical, emotional and economic well-being,” he said.
