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As the Burlington region has successfully “flattened the curve” and limited the spread of the coronavirus, city officials are starting to plan how to emerge from the current “stay home” phase of fighting the pandemic.
The city is planning for a gradual reopening featuring widespread testing, contact tracing and quarantine of infected individuals and those they came in contact with.
Mayor Miro Weinberger held a town hall Tuesday evening to discuss the city’s strategy with University of Vermont Medical Center president Dr. Stephen Leffler and Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, who oversees the office of public health practice and training at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Weinberger said that the city was ready to start discussing how to move toward reopening as the rate of new infections is very low and the state has built out its public health infrastructure to set the groundwork for slow and careful reopening.
“We’re going to need to figure out, as a community, how to manage the risks of the virus for many months to come as we attempt to suppress it, live with it, and turn on more and more of our economy while the threat of the virus still remains,” he said.
Since the virus spreads exponentially, Sharfstein said reopening too fast could be dangerous.
“Even in areas where the number of cases have come way down, there is still a risk that the number of cases could start up again,” he said.
But Sharfstein said a safe, careful reopening in regions that have gotten the spread of the disease under control is possible.
He said that a proper public health response follows the “box it in” strategy. This strategy requires widespread testing to identify those who are infected, followed by identifying people who could have been exposed to those individuals. Those individuals need to quarantine and be isolated from the rest of the population, Sharfstein said.
“It’s pretty hard to find everybody, but the important principle here is if you find most of the people, you can have an enormous impact on transmission,” he said.
Those in quarantine need access to food and medicine, Sharfstein said. Isolating individuals also need space to be alone and access to their own bathroom, he said.
“A successful isolation strategy is a lot more than telling people, you need to isolate yourself,” he said.
While the Holiday Inn in South Burlington was a Covid-19 recovery site, the state closed the facility due to the lack of demand. The state is still operating a recovery site in Rutland.
Weinberger said he was in regular communication with the state about isolation sites, and said the city was also considering community support for those in isolation.
“There are still elements of this that we are building out, and will be building out for some weeks and even months,” he said.
With a careful reopening combined with a public health response, Sharfstein said that communities can break chains of transmission when they happen.
“When you combine those two things, then hopefully we will be able to achieve essentially a new normal where a lot can happen that is important for the economy and for our lives,” he said.
Vermont is one of only four states that have a reduced risk during reopening according to Covid Act Now, alongside Montana, Alaska and Hawaii.
Leffler said the University of Vermont Medical Center is only treating two Covid-19 patients, neither of whom is on a ventilator or in an intensive care unit. He said that the state has built out its supply chain and acquired more personal protective equipment, testing and ventilators.
“The mitigation that we did in Vermont, that bought us time to blunt the curve so we could have enough PPE, enough testing and build capacity, has served us well,” he said.
The hospital is planning for occasional spikes over the next couple of years, Leffler said.
“We’ll see a bump of cases, then we’ll have to do a strategy of quarantining those people and tracing back to cases and getting everyone in quarantine so it doesn’t turn out to be a spike,” he said.
Weinberger said that while there was much more work to do in the fight against the virus, “it is exactly that kind of discipline that is going to be necessary for the journey ahead, and I think we should take confidence into this next stage from this early success,” he said.
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