Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Board of Health approves mandate for face coverings for employees of essential businesses

I took my notes with Twitter to capture the gist of what was happening at the Board of Health meeting, Monday, April 27, 2020. The meeting had two agenda items. The agenda doc can be found linked below.

Effectively, the Board of Health approved a mandate for employees of essential businesses to wear facial coverings and to reinforce the advisory that residents should wear facial coverings when visiting retail establishments. This is an interim step to be effective 4/29. There is another meeting to be scheduled for next week as a follow up and to review a new item that came up during the meeting (a clarification on golf per Governor's revised statement).

My Twitter notes were all tagged as #boh0427. As I went from this meeting to the Economic Development meeting (which had started at 5:50) I made a few mistakes by tagging some of the EDC notes with this same #boh0427 tag instead of #edc0427 - oops.

The individual tweets can be found with this search result:  
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23boh0427&src=typed_query

  • Real time reporting underway for Board of Health mtg
  • New guidelines from Attorney General referenced. Consider mandate for employees of essential business to do so as a step. Reserve N95 for health and first responders
  • Some of the citizen complaints to the Health Dept are around lack of grocery store employees not wearing cloth coverings (mask) #boh0427 . Health Director prefers advisory rather than mandate
  • Concerns expressed about the mental health of the residents as we won't be observing the smiles of neighbors. Fear of going out because people are observed wearing masks.
  • New FDA update on masks and types of just came out today. Mandate for employees, suggestion for residents to be clear. No single metric is perfect for effective of enforcement
  • Questions and discussion around enforcement, in some cases would need to be by the retail business, BoH not wanting to get Franklin Police involved, they have other and better things to do
  • Motion to adopt mandate for employees of essential business, recommended for posting of residents recommended to wear, motion approved; discussion on what effective date #boh0427 by close of business by April 29, notification coming, approved 3-0
  • Hopefully the incremental approach will bring results, if not we can go further
  • Discussion on expanding items for sale by restaurants and essential business, modify temp food permit to provide the steps/guidance for the business to do so. #boh0427 Health Director to come up with listing of items
  • Motion for food establishments to sell grocery items, approved by 3-0 vote. Golf question came up in chat, can't add to this agenda. Will consider for next week meeting TBD #boh0427 motion to adjourn, passed via roll call

The new FDA update on masks as mentioned during the meeting is found here
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bckh-j1LwwNztxa52Jdsk4K5fVQALY_G/view?usp=sharing






screengrab of Zoom meeting early in the meeting
screengrab of Zoom meeting early in the meeting

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