Author: Press Release

Housing instability has been a persistent threat during the COVID-19 pandemic, as families work to stay in safe, stable living situations in an unpredictable economic environment. The Legislature passed a temporary moratorium on non-essential evictions at the beginning of the pandemic to protect those in imminent risk of homelessness, and significant state and federal funding has already been dedicated toward housing support.

We spend a lot of time in Massachusetts collecting and reporting state and local COVID-19 data so we can better understand the trajectory of the pandemic here in the Commonwealth as well as the effectiveness of our pandemic response. We report detailed data broken down community-by-community as well as state aggregation of a number of key public health metrics.

As both K-12 and higher education continue to operate in a variety of learning models, many of which incorporate in-person learning whenever possible, engaging in school-specific testing and data collection helps us ensure we are keeping our students, staff, and learning communities safe.

Based on this week’s numbers, Southborough is now in the higher risk category, Holliston has moved back to the moderate risk category, and Hopkinton and Westborough are in the lower risk category. These categories are determined by the daily case rate per 100,000 over a 14-day period. Higher-risk communities have a rate of >8 per 100,000, which in a community of 10,000 people would mean 11.2 cases confirmed over 14 days.

As of yesterday, communities with local COVID-19 case rates in the lower- and moderate-risk categories are now allowed to enter step 2 of the “Vigilant” Phase III of reopening.

Countless public servants, volunteers, communities, and experts have worked to ensure that the ongoing pandemic does not prevent all of us from exercising our most significant civic duties in a safe, accessible manner. I wanted to share two brief updates on these efforts.