A total of 19 Massachusetts communities now run the greatest risk of coronavirus transmission, nine less than last week, health officials said Thursday. This is the seventh consecutive week that the number has dropped.
The coronavirus risk data per city classifies communities’ risk levels on a scale from red, the highest to gray – this put 28 Massachusetts communities in the red zone last week. Less than two months ago, there were 229 communities in red, reflecting a dip in the state’s COVID-19 statistics as the latest surge subsides. (See the full list of red zone communities this week.)
Coronavirus statistics in Massachusetts have been declining since about the new year, indicating that the state’s second boom is slowing. The decline in communities in the red zone appears to be another sign that the boom is slowing down, although experts believe the more contagious coronavirus variants now appearing in the state could cause a new boom.
Here’s where everyone stands in the coronavirus vaccine rollout plan in Massachusetts.
See Thursday’s coronavirus information by town here.
Massachusetts COVID hot spot
The following 19 communities are at the highest risk level from Thursday: Black stone, Chicopee, Clinton, Val River, Freetown, Hadley, Haverhill, Lawrence, Ludlow, Lynn, Methuen, New bedford, Peabody, Plainville, Springfield, Sterling, Sutton, West bridgewater and Weymouth.
Of these communities, six are just red on the list this week: Clinton, Hadley, Ludlow, Plainville, Sterling and Sutton.
And 15 communities fell out of the red: Acushnet, Ashburnham, Brockton, Cohasset, Lakeville, Lowell, Middleborough, Plymouth, Revere, Rutland, Southampton, Southbridge, Taunton, Templeton and Westminster.
To qualify for the red, high-risk category under the new criteria, communities with populations below 10,000 must have more than 25 cases. For medium-sized communities of between 10,000 and 50,000 people, they should average more than 10 cases per 100,000 people and have a positive test rate of more than 5%. And for larger communities of more than 50,000 people, they should have more than 10 cases per 100,000 people and have a positive test rate of more than 4%.
Previously, the state used the number of cases detected on average each day for two weeks to determine whether Massachusetts communities were at high risk for coronavirus transmission. The new list of factors in population size and positive test rate.
Read this week’s full report here, with data on community positivity, provincial and state data and more.
The Department of Public Health no longer contains a map of the community level risk in the weekly report. An official told NBC10 Boston that the map is no longer considered as useful as it used to be, now that cases of coronavirus have been reported in most communities.
Vaccine data in Massachusetts
Just under 2.4 million doses of coronavirus vaccine have been sent to Massachusetts since Thursday’s daily COVID-19 vaccination report, and 80.5%, or 1.93 million, have been administered so far.
The state’s weekly COVID-19 vaccine report, which was issued Thursday but covers a period from this Tuesday to the previous Wednesday, showed progress during the previous week in the number of doses administered in the state: 309,340 compared to 215,571.
Changes to Massachusetts Hot Spot Data
The weekly report has a history of somewhat sudden changes.
When health officials in Massachusetts first unveiled a digital coronavirus dashboard in early January, they stopped releasing weekly coronavirus statistics from town to town as it was recorded on the “city and town” page of the interactive dashboard . It shows communities’ positive test score and overall test score, but not other criteria included in the old format.
‘Data previously found in this report, including per-city affairs and testing reporting, can now be found in the daily interactive dashboard,’ reads a comment in this week’s rounded weekly report. But a new version of the report was released later that evening and brought the information back.
More significant changes ahead of time have dropped the number of communities in the red zone from 121 to 16 as the definition of a high-risk community has changed. Officials said the Massachusetts adjustment is more in line with risk levels in other states.
However, the numbers grew again over the course of the week and eventually rose to 190 communities in the red area before the data was switched to the interactive dashboard.
In this week’s report, the map with the coronavirus data per city was also displayed. It showed where in the state communities there was a high, moderate or low risk of transmission, but officials said it is no longer very informative.
In the weeks before, officials added information about COVID-19 clusters, both about where large clusters were identified – they are listed in the report with an asterisk – and about trends among clusters.
The color-coded town-by-city data was released in August, and the Baker administration announced that the state would focus its strongest COVID mitigation efforts on towns in the red category. Communities can only move to step 2 of Phase 3 of Massachusetts’ reopening plan, which was announced in late September, if they are not consistently in the red.
Prior to the introduction of the data, the standard for measuring focal points was the positive COVID test rate during the preceding 14 days. The weekly report of the Department of Public Health still contains the information, along with other metrics such as how many tests are done locally and how many cases have been reported locally.
Some of Massachusetts’ smaller towns have pointed out that their risk is assessed on a per capita basis. They said that when a city has only a few thousand people, an outbreak in just one household could put it in the red at the time: 8 cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 inhabitants.