As Massachusetts nears 5,000 confirmed deaths attributable to COVID-19, a reopening task force in the state is nearing its deadline.
The state of Maine is reopening some more businesses. Connecticut is a little over a week away from allowing outdoor dining at restaurants. Rhode Island let some more stores open over the weekend. And Massachusetts took some baby steps over the past week.
Reporter Matt Murphy of the State House News Service joins us to talk through where we are today.
Matt Murphy, State House News Service: If you look at what [Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker] has been saying all along — that states will be doing this on their own timetables, depending on what they're seeing in the trajectory of the virus, and where we stand today — there continued to be some positive signs over the weekend, in terms of total new cases reported. It was down to just over 1,000, which may not sound great, but when the peaks were up around 2,000 or more new cases a day, that is progress.
The governor is looking for this trend to continue into the week, which can sometimes see an influx because of lags in reporting over the weekend.
But assuming we continue to see this positive trending of the spread of the virus, I think you can expect to see, starting after May 18, some types of businesses be allowed to reopen, probably with strict conditions.
We, of course, are awaiting this report to Karyn Polito and the advisory committee that she is leading.
But we started to see, last week, some signals about what types of businesses would allow to be reopened, when they allowed golf courses to reopen in the limited capacity, and florists, bookstores — people that can fulfill orders behind locked doors.
I think what you'll see, at the very beginning, is these types of places, where it's easiest to social distance, and easiest to separate customers and workers, and keep workers apart. Those are the ones that will go first.
So how cautiously do you expect to see Baker proceed at this?
I think probably fairly cautiously, at this point. If you take the governor at his word that [it's all] going to be driven by the data, and what we're seeing in the hospitals, and in the virus caseload, Massachusetts is still fairly high, even if we are seeing those positive trends coming down.
So there is a threat of resurgence if you move too fast. The governor has repeated that over and over again. It's clearly weighing on his mind. That leads me to believe you'll probably see a fairly slow, phased-in approach to reopening some businesses.
The president of the state Senate, Karen Spilka, has been driving the point home in recent days that any reopening of the economy has got to be very hard for a lot of workers with no schools open, and only limited day care. How is that playing into the debate?
Certainly, day cares have been part of the conversation. They've been talking with the advisory group. The governor has been asked about this, and he has said that this was being taken into consideration.
But if you look at his order, it would keep day care centers for non-emergency personnel closed through at least the end of June. That does create a problem for bringing large quantities of workers back to work.
I think you're going to continue to see them encourage people to work from home, if possible, while they figure out how to safely reopen day cares, because you don't want kids to start contracting this, as you started to see some cases of some other diseases that may be linked to COVID-19 crop up in New York, and then have those kids bring viruses — even if they're not acute cases — back home, and infecting parents and grandparents.
That is something they are going to be mindful of, but I don't think there's anyone who doesn't understand that day care and a large, full-scale return to work go hand-in-hand.
One key effort from the state to limit the spread of the coronavirus has been the contact tracing program that's made thousands of phone calls to people who got sick, or may have been in contact with someone who did get sick. But you reported this has been hampered by people who just don't answer the phone. What are state officials doing about that?
Just think of the number of spam calls that you get, and sometimes, your phone maybe flags them as spam. Sometimes, it's just an unknown number, and you don't answer it.
The state has worked with the telecom companies. So this should come up from only very specific numbers, starting with 833 or 857. It should say MA COVID TEAM in the caller ID. Tthey've started running public service campaigns in multiple languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese.
They're trying to get the message out that you should answer your phone.
And as the Department of Public Health makes initial contact with the infectious people, they're also encouraging those people to tell their friends — as they gather names and phone numbers to call — tell your friends, make sure they answer the phone, because it snowballs out from the person who has the virus to their close contacts, to their contacts' contacts.
The more people that they can reach, and help to quarantine and isolate themselves, the faster they can get a handle on the spread of this virus. They're doing it through social media, and other means like that.
