In the midst of the holiday season, COVID-19 data continues to paint a grim picture in Berkshire County’s largest community.
“Today’s COVID update, we are going to look into the surge that we continue to experience," said Andy Cambi, now officially the city’s new permanent public health director after a stint in an interim role. “We’re still climbing up with our daily cases. Our daily hospital census remains low.”
Mirroring last year’s mounting cases heading into the cold season, Pittsfield has gone from one daily case per 100,000 in July to over 70 by mid-December. Downtown’s Berkshire Medical Center has seen 39 hospitalizations from COVID-19 over the past two weeks.
“The case data for the last 14 days- again, like I mentioned, we are still with that increase, that holiday gathering that we saw," said Cambi. "We're experiencing those numbers as a result. Our contact tracers are still working hard to reach out to everybody. And the testing centers are still very busy at BMC’s site. Those testing sites have increased their testing. We will be delivering at home testing kits as well, further details for that at the next meeting.”
As for Pittsfield’s vaccination rates, Cambi reported a drop in the percentage of city residents with at least one shot. After reaching a height of 84%, it’s now settled back to 82%.
“We did receive an update from the state as far as the numbers go," said Cambi. "They were able to make do accounts for the mix and match of the vaccine administration. So that's why we see a change in the one shot, the decrease that we had from last time we had the presentation. So what they're able to do is take into consideration any people that were double counted, and so that's why we're seeing that decrease in there.”
Pittsfield’s full vaccination rate remains at 71%. After a meteoric rise from the low 20s to 60% from March to mid-July, it’s only risen 10% over the past five months.
With surging case rates and concerns around the appearance of the Omicron variant in Massachusetts, Cambi says the city’s public health officials are continuing to react.
“One of the responses that we did to the increase in the cases is that we got the COVID taskforce together again, and we will be doing a COVID vaccine clinic at BCC on the 18th," he told the council. "We have over 1,000 appointments, it's all booked up. So it's a great response from the community to get their boosters, to get their vaccines.”
With the success of the booster clinic, Cambi says more mass clinics could be in store. He says efforts to administer vaccines to young people have been going well.
“COVID vaccine clinics that we did at the school, they were very well attended," said the public health director. "And we, even the same day, we had walk-ins, so it's been very well attended. So we’re going to see a very good spike on that.”
Pittsfield has had an indoor masking directive for public spaces and businesses in place since early November. To date, at least 81 people in the community of around 44,000 have died from COVID-19.
