NAHANT — Nahant is grappling with a rapid rise in COVID-19 cases as the town suspends operation of its only test site.
During Thursday’s virtual Board of Selectmen meeting, Nahant Public Health Nurse, Deb Murphy, reported that the community had detected 35 new cases of the virus — 22 percent of the town’s total number of cases since the pandemic began in March — between Dec. 20 and Jan. 2.
“We have kids as young as 1 (who have tested positive), and we have adults as old as 80. It’s not really concentrating on one particular age group,” Murphy said, adding that many of the exposures have been household clusters as family members pass the virus, sometimes unwittingly, to others living in close proximity.
“If somebody in a household tests positive and then maybe everybody else tests negative right at the same time, what we’re seeing is a week or eight days later, other people in that family will convert to positive because the incubation period can be up to two weeks,” Murphy said. “So we have some families that have four or five people, and every time a new person in the family converts to positive, that extends the quarantine for the rest of the family.”
According to Murphy, 740 tests were administered to Nahant residents during the last 14-day reporting period.
“If anything, the spread is just increasing everywhere,” she said. “I think the more tests you do, the more positives you’re going to find, but I also think that this post-holiday two-week period that we’re in, you could see there was a lot of movement and a lot of traveling.”
Nahant, which has consistently received a low- to moderate-risk designation in the state’s bi-weekly COVID report, joined Lynn, Lynnfield, Peabody, Revere, Salem, Saugus, and Swampscott last week as a high risk community.
The news came just days after Town Administrator Antonio Barletta announced Nahant was suspending testing at its St. Thomas Aquinas Church site indefinitely because the town’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act fund had been depleted.
“We, like many other communities, were provided CARES Act funding to use for services like testing, and, like other communities, we were acting under the guidance that that funding was ‘use or lose’ by the end of 2020,” Barletta said.
However, on Dec. 20, the federal government passed a new COVID-19 relief bill extending the 2020 CARES Act past its original Dec. 31 deadline, but without providing local governments with additional funding.
Last week, Barletta told The Item his biggest concern with this new development was that the test site’s closing would force Nahant residents to travel to farther communities for testing, reducing the likelihood that asymptomatic cases will be detected before spreading to other households.
“One of the best tools to help prevent transmission when you’re dealing with a disease that’s mostly asymptomatic is convenient, local, free testing,” he said. “If you don’t have symptoms, you’re not going to drive some place and spend your own money just to get a test.
“However, if it’s free and right down the street from your house, you might go and come up positive and then we can follow the guidelines in place to prevent potential transmission from that asymptomatic case.”
He added that the town is in the process of advocating for additional COVID-19 funding from both the state and federal government. In the meantime, Nahant will be forced to dip into its own budget to fund necessary virus precautions.
Essex County currently has the highest case count in the commonwealth. Nahant, a town with a population of just under 3,500 people, has seen 158 cases, including six deaths, since the pandemic began in March.
“I think the only thing left for us to do at this point is move forward and vaccinate as many people as we can,” Murphy said. “None of the other efforts we’ve put into place have really seemed to be able to stop the spread (of the virus).”