Nantucket Cottage Hospital is mourning the loss of Charles Balas, a longtime member of our Board of Trustees, who passed away last weekend.

Mr. Balas served as Chairman of the Nantucket Cottage Hospital Board of Trustees from 1995 to 2001. As Chair, Mr. Balas led the hospital through some of its most important initiatives, including the creation of the Boston Pops on Nantucket fundraising event and the Campaign for the 21^st Century.

In light of his extraordinary record of service to the hospital, in 2012 Mr. Balas was appointed a Lifetime Honorary Trustee of Nantucket Cottage Hospital.

Nantucket can be proud of its leaders for acting early and decisively to protect the community from the threat of coronavirus, and I am in awe of the collective actions of all island residents to physically distance, stay home, wash their hands diligently, and adhere to the emergency orders put in place. Thanks to those actions, to date we have been able to limit the deadly impact of this virus and prevent significant community spread on the island. So far, so good.

But we know it takes only one person to change that. It takes only one person who may be carrying the virus unknowingly without showing symptoms to set us on a dangerous path of seeing more cases, more severe illness, and potentially a surge of COVID-19 patients that could threaten to overwhelm the healthcare resources of our remote island.

The coronavirus is amongst us and it remains a threat to our community. While we have welcomed the recent streak of days without a confirmed new case, we should not let this good news allow us to become complacent. Our island and our economy are tied to the mainland in so many ways, and we can all see what is happening just a short boat ride away on Cape Cod, in Boston, and New York where the coronavirus continues to have a major impact.

• The coronavirus testing criteria continues to evolve, and in some cases it changes day to day, but it has become less restrictive from the time we launched the drive-through evaluation site on March 16.

• Our current testing capacity essentially allows us to test all those patients who the clinical team feel have a need to be tested. If you are experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness, such as cough, sore throat, shortness of breath, and fever, please come to the drive-through evaluation site. The turnaround time for test results has been reduced to 24 hours in most cases.

• Patients coming to the drive through should know that specimens are sent out daily, weather permitting, at 3 p.m. to the mainland, so there’s a faster turnaround time if patients are swabbed before then. Coming after 3 p.m. means turnaround time could be around 48 hours.

April 2, 2020

Nantucket Cottage Hospital has now confirmed nine positive cases of COVID-19 on the island, and while this may seem like a relatively small number, we want to emphasize that the coronavirus threat is still very real, vigilance is imperative, and we must continue to stay home, practice physical distancing, and adhere to all the measures put in place to protect our community.

For most of the COVID-19 cases we have confirmed, we know of presumed positive family members and social contacts, all of who are appropriately quarantined but not counted in the total number of confirmed cases. In a household with a COVID-19-positive patient, they have likely already spread the virus to those in close contact, before their symptoms developed. So if those people develop symptoms a few days later, or not at all, they are presumed to be infected and not necessarily tested. The entire family of a COVID-19 patient is ordered to remain quarantined together for 14 days after exposure, and receives extensive CDC-issued instructions and guidance to prevent further infections.

As part of Nantucket Cottage Hospital’s ongoing coronavirus response and planning efforts, the hospital will welcome four members of the Massachusetts National Guard and Massachusetts Air National Guard this week who will assist with security needs, traffic control, and other logistical support at NCH. These service members will help NCH to ensure the safety and security of our patients during this challenging time.

The National Guard service members have been dispatched to Nantucket under orders from Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, detailed to the Nantucket Police Department, and assigned to NCH by Police Chief Bill Pittman.

The National Guard service members will serve as part of the Hospital Incident Command structure. We anticipate that they would play a critical role in providing security and traffic control in the event of a surge of coronavirus patients at NCH that could result in a large number of patients, visitors, and vehicles seeking access to the hospital campus and facility.

We are sensitive to the fact that the presence of these National Guard service members could be intimidating for some residents of Nantucket. We want to assure the community that their role is simply to assist in the hospital’s ability to respond effectively to the coronavirus threat, and they will not be involved in any federal immigration enforcement activities.