SAUGUS — Vaccination rates are rising according to Board of Health Director John Fralick.
Fralick told The Item that Saugus’s vaccination rate is at 62 percent, with 67 percent receiving at least one dose of the vaccine.
For the health director, the numbers are a testament to the residents of Saugus who are looking to put the pandemic to rest, and he said the town is in a good spot.
Fralick also mentioned that the Board of Health continues to monitor positive COVID-19 cases in the area and that for the last three weeks they have been in the “negligible threat area.”
Recently, variants of COVID have run rampant on certain populations across the globe, and the most well known, the delta variant, appears to be more contagious than past versions of the virus.
Fralick stressed that it’s important for residents to stay on their toes. His goal, and the goal of the town moving forward, is for residents to stay vigilant.
“Just kind of knowing that (COVID-19) is present. It can pop up. Just judging by the way it’s mutated over the course of a year, we have to stay vigilant. Again we’ve had several different variants over the course of the time we’ve been tracking it. A year’s time having four to five different variants coming from different parts of the world. That’s obviously a cause for concern. I know that a lot of folks won’t get vaccinated based on principle. A lot of folks want to get vaccinated just because it’s a good option. I think the goal moving forward is just going to be to kind of maintain that level of vigilance we have been asking from the get go.”
While Massachusetts, along with the rest of the country, continues to do well, Fralick mentioned that the way the virus is mutating could put the country right back in the same position it was a year ago.
“We have to maintain that certain level of vigilance, just making sure that we’re at least performing our due diligence as a community.”
So while the vaccination rate continues to rise in Saugus, COVID-19 is still spreading and doesn’t appear to be going anywhere any time soon.
