Boston is on the right track in its recovery from the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, Mayor Martin Walsh said, citing statistics from hospitals and testing sites.
“The data tells us that we continue to move in the right direction, and we have met the initial benchmarks that we set moving forward in the gradual reopening,” the mayor told reporters in a press conference on Thursday.
Walsh said that in April, during the peak of the continuing outbreak, the local hospitals’ intensive care units were operating at 120% of their capacity — but that number has dropped significantly.
“We set a benchmark of 85%,” Walsh said. “As of today, we’re down to 81%.”
The Boston Hope Medical Center — the ad-hoc 1,000-bed hospital set up within a week inside the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center — has discharged its last remaining patient, Walsh announced. That field hospital, which was created to handle homeless people with the disease and overflow of less-severe cases from hospitals, will remain “in suspended operation” in case it’s further needed.
“It is truly a Boston success story,” Walsh said.
Walsh also pointed to access to testing, and the positive test rate. The mayor said the city set the threshold of 1,500 tests a day by June 1, and said the city met that. He touted his administration’s work to get funding to community health centers and senior facilities for testing, and to use the mobile testing sites the city created. He also noted that they’ve sought to allow some testing for people who don’t even have symptoms, but could be at risk given their work or medical issues.
He said the cumulative positive test rate in the city is below 23%, which Walsh called “a good sign.” Last week, the positive rate was 7.5% for the seven days ending Saturday.
“Both of those numbers are new lows since the crisis began,” the mayor said.
Walsh did caution that now it’s been two weeks since the the state began its phased reopening plan — and in the past it appeared to have taken about two weeks for a surge of infections to show up as a bump in hospitalizations, as the virus can take up to that long to begin to present.
“So we are monitoring data very closely to see if there’s any change in the trends,” Walsh said.
The state is heading toward entering Phase 2 of Gov. Charlie Baker’s four-phase reopening plan, with specifics coming Saturday on that stage, which will involve more businesses being allowed to open and restaurants being allowed to serve food outside.
Boston now has had 12,906 confirmed cases of the virus. Of those, 7,377 residents have recovered, and 658 died. Statewide, 7,201 people have died, out of 102,063 total cases. At least 78,108 people have recovered, the state says.
