WHATELY — The Board of Health recommended during its Tuesday meeting that public meetings stay remote, but opened the option of hosting in-person meetings with several COVID-19 health safety precautions in place.
To host in-person meetings, town boards and committees must have the following safeguards in place: limit capacity to 50%, wear masks, practice social distancing, and have air purification and ventilation systems (which are already in place in Town Hall). Plus, any person with illnesses or who is showing symptoms of COVID-19 must stay home, attendees must sign in for contact tracing and meetings must be held in a hybrid format to allow remote participation.
Board of Health Chair Francis Fortino said the board continues to recommend remote meetings, even though the option for in-person meetings is on the table.
“I’d like to preface it by saying, we first and foremost want to recommend public meetings …. take place remotely for the time being,” Fortino said. “We still recommend remote meetings and vaccination as a primary way to prevent and mitigate COVID spread.”
Fortino said the recommendations the board laid out for in-person meetings are the same ones that were in place during the summer, and the COVID-19 case numbers are in a place where the board feels comfortable loosening restrictions a little bit.
“We used to have these in place pre-upsurge in the past couple of months,” Fortino said. “It aligns pretty closely with what other towns are doing.”
Any meetings held outdoors, such as Saturday’s upcoming special Town Meeting, do not need to follow any specific recommendations.
As for non-municipal events, the Board of Health recommended in October that those events could be held in Town Hall with all of the above precautions, plus a vaccination mandate that would be enforced by event organizers. Fortino said the board will be talking to town counsel to see if that policy is legal.
“It’s an up-in-the-air question if we can mandate vaccinations or a negative COVID test in the last 72 hours,” Fortino said Tuesday. “We’re still going to hear from him later in the week. I don’t want to tackle it again tonight until we hear from him.”