COVID-19 Vaccines Arrive on Nantucket
December 16, 2020 – They’re here! The first shipment of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine arrived on Nantucket this morning. Tomorrow we will begin vaccinating frontline NCH staff members most closely involved in COVID-19 patient care and testing. Today is a monumental day in our fight against the pandemic. The vaccine is the most important intervention that will help us bring COVID-19 under control and get us back to normal.
Nantucket Cottage Hospital & Nantucket Health Department Joint Statement on New COVID-19 Cases
Dec. 5, 2020
For immediate release
On Saturday morning, we reported 64 new cases of COVID-19 among patients who were tested at Nantucket Cottage Hospital. This number includes some test results that were still pending from Wednesday, and nearly all of the testing results from Thursday and Friday. This is obviously a significant number of new cases, and while it is important to know these daily testing results as they are returned from the lab, it is more important to look at the trend, which is also very concerning. A total of 159 new cases of COVID-19 have been identified on Nantucket over the past week, and the seven-day positivity rate, which is the percent of tests that come back positive, has climbed to 10.9%. That is the highest rate we have seen since the start of the pandemic.
Among the individuals who have tested positive this week, we have seen an age range from 9 months up to 60 years old. The majority are people in their 20s and 30s. This is important because we know that COVID-19 has more severe impacts on people who are older, and have underlying health conditions. We are seeing transmission of the virus within households, and at this time we believe that this surge is impacting between 40 to 60 homes across the island.
COVID-19 cases have reached record highs in Massachusetts and across the country, and Nantucket is experiencing a similar surge that requires our vigilance. We are grateful, and lucky, that none of these recent active cases of COVID-19 have required hospitalization yet, but the sheer number of people we have diagnosed over the past week is very troubling.
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