#

Parents of West Running Brook Middle School students in Derry are being warned that children who do not wear “properly-fitted masks” will be sent to special detention sessions, according to an email obtained by New Hampshire Journal.

Principal Justin Krieger recently wrote to parents that the need for well-fitted masks is required for all activities in the building. Students who fail to comply will be punished.

“Students who are unable to wear a properly-fitted mask despite encouragement, prompts, and support from staff will be assigned an after-school detention on Friday (2:00-2:30 p.m.) of each week,” Krieger wrote.

The purpose of the detention is not to punish the students, he explained, but instead to educate the middle schoolers on the importance of wearing masks.

“We will use this time in concert with our school nurse to provide more education for students to stress the importance of compliance,” Krieger wrote.

Krieger did not respond to a call on Monday from New Hampshire Journal. Derry Cooperative School Board Chair Erika Cohen did not answer questions on Monday about whether or not the board agreed with Krieger’s policy. 

“This was a school-based decision. The school board was not involved,” Cohen wrote in an email.

Krieger wrote in the email to parents that the special detention will be dedicated to “education.”

“Students deserve to understand the ‘why’ of mask-wearing and we intend to dedicate all this time to that end,” he wrote.

The new policy is not intended to punish students who occasionally have their masks below their noses, but it is aimed at students who “chronically” fail to wear their masks properly, he wrote.

State Rep. David Love, R-Derry, said Kieger is in the wrong with the new detention policy. As far as Love is concerned, masks don’t work.

“I think he’s stepping way out of bounds. I don’t know where this is all going to end. Masks, they don’t work. People have been wearing masks and getting vaccines and the vaccinated and masked are still getting COVID,” Love said.

Love has introduced a bill that would allow parents of students in a school that requires masks to transfer to another school at no expense to the family.

“The bottom line is the schools are going to do as they damn well please until we hit them in the pocketbook,” Love said. 

While Rockingham County is seeing high levels of COVID-19 transmission, the middle school does not appear to be overrun with cases, according to the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services’ COVID-19 dashboard.

As of Jan. 21, the latest reporting date available, West Running Brook had two active cases in the school community. The state dashboard does not distinguish between student cases and staff cases, so it is not clear if those infected are children or adults. The dashboard indicates there are no current outbreaks or clusters within the West Running Brook community. 

While there is no statewide mask mandate, schools, municipalities, and businesses are free to craft their own policies. Most schools in the state have been requiring the use of masks indoors since late fall, according to WMUR’s list of more than 400 school mask decisions.

The need for masks may start to change quickly, as many health experts expect the Omicron variant to peak in the coming weeks. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, said this week on “Face the Nation ” that it is too soon to get rid of masks in schools, but that could change rapidly.

“I think it is too soon to do that because a lot of schools have built their preparations around the use of masks and whatever we want to say about the benefit that masks are providing, it’s providing some benefit,” Gottlieb said. “So, to withdraw it right at the peak of the epidemic, I think it’s imprudent. We should wait. I think within two weeks we’ll be able to make that decision.”

Just hours after President Joe Biden held a press conference defending his federal COVID-19 mandates, Nashua’s Board of Aldermen passed one of their own.  The city’s residents are being told to put their face masks back on as the board overwhelmingly voted in favor of a temporary mask mandate. 

The ordinance, approved with 12 votes Tuesday night, will require the wearing of face masks at indoor public spaces through the end of January. The ordinance carries a maximum $1,000 fine, though there is no enforcement mechanism for the measure. 

It is not clear who will end up making sure people will wear masks, as Aldermen said police are already stretched thin.

Nashua’s Director of Public Health Bobbie Bagley said the mandate is needed as COVID-19 cases surge around the holidays. Nashua hospitals are already overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients and there are no ICU beds available in the city.

“Our goal is really to have an impact on the next four weeks to really keep these cases down,” Bagley said.

COVID has swamped the state as cold weather moved in. Bagley said the post-Thanksgiving surge that has inundated hospitals is starting to recede, right in time for the Christmas gatherings which will bring more anticipated spread. The hope is that the temporary masking order will reduce the spread over the next few weeks, until cases start going down again.

Alderman Ben Clemons was the lone holdout against the measure. He said people can choose to wear a mask, just as they can choose to get vaccinated.

“To me, it is a matter of principle. I don’t believe in mandates. I will never vote for mandates,” Clemons said.

Clemons said the vaccines have been available for people for more than a year, and those vaccines are largely effective against serious illness and death. It’s a choice to get vaccinated, and a choice to wear a mask, he said.

“The majority of folks who end up on ventilators are unvaccinated. I find that is their problem,” Clemons said.

A University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll released Monday found 81 percent of Granite State adults have been fully or partially vaccinated, while just 18 percent say they are refusing the vaccine.

Alderman Dave Tencza once sided with those who see mandates as a personal liberty issue, but said his thinking on mask mandates has changed as the pandemic has continued and the science shows how individual decisions impact communities. 

“I used to think wearing a mask was more of a personal liberty issue, like wearing a seatbelt. Now, I really think it’s comparable to drunk driving. No one has the right to drive under the influence of alcohol,” he said.

Nashua joins a small group of municipalities that have brought back the mask mandates enacted in the first year of the pandemic. Last week, Keene’s city council restarted its mask mandate, as did the town of Exeter.

Andrew Sylvia with Manchester InkLink reported Tuesday night that Manchester’s Board of Alderman split on a mask mandate, ending with a six-to-six tie. Mayor Joyce Craig broke the tie, bringing the mask mandate back to Manchester.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu announced a new executive order during his weekly COVID-19 press conference Wednesday allowing the Department of Health and Human Services to assist hospitals in setting up COVID surge sites within the hospital’s campus. It is part of the state’s attempt to address surging numbers of COVID-19 cases as temperatures keep falling.

“We are seeing record levels of cases, and record levels of hospitalizations,” he said. “The winter surge is rearing its ugly head as expected.”

Sununu said the idea for an in-house surge site came from the Labor Day trip New Hampshire officials took to Kentucky to see winter preparations there. 

And Sununu also had some good news: New Hampshire is getting 1 million COVID-19 at-home rapid tests through the National Institutes of Health and Amazon, the first state to take part in the new program.

“At-home tests are going to be a valuable tool,” Sununu said.

As more people will be required to take tests, especially school children, families in New Hampshire will be able to order rapid tests through the state and have them delivered to their homes via Amazon, Sununu said. New Hampshire schools are also getting tests they can hand to families in case a student comes down with symptoms and needs to be sent home. 

The state’s infection rate has soared in recent weeks, with a 7-day average of 1,014 daily cases and new 3,121 cases on Monday alone. Democrats are laying the blame at Sununu’s feet.

“It is disheartening to hear New Hampshire’s State Epidemiologist acknowledge that the Granite State is currently experiencing the highest levels of COVID since the inception of the pandemic,” House Democratic Leader Rep. Renny Cushing (D-Hampton) said in a statement released after Sununu’s presser. “Plain and simple, Gov. Sununu is failing our vaccination effort in New Hampshire.  New Hampshire has the lowest vaccination rate in New England and currently has the second-highest per-capita COVID cases in the United States, behind Michigan.

“We are in crisis,” Cushing added.

At the same time, New Hampshire still ranks number 11 in the nation for percent of its age 12+ population that is fully vaccinated — 64 percent, above the national average of 59 percent. And while cases are rising in New Hampshire, they have also shot up next door in Vermont, the state with the nation’s highest vaccination rate (73 percent fully vaccinated.)

November began with a seven-day average of 194 cases in the Green Mountain State. As of Monday, that number was up to 369 — an increase of 90 percent. And while the New England region has by far the highest rate of vaccinations, it’s also the second-highest region for new cases over the past two weeks.

Clearly, stopping the spread of COVID-19 is going to be more complicated than just urging more vaccinations.

Sununu acknowledged it’s likely the state will call up the National Guard to assist hospitals and other facilities suffering shortages in the face of rising demand for health services. “We could do it right now, and at some point, I think that need will likely be there,” Sununu said.

At the same time, Sununu doesn’t see enacting another state of emergency, or another statewide mask mandate, to deal with the pandemic. In the early days, the state did not have the resources or knowledge to fight COVID-19, and the state of emergency was necessary.

“We couldn’t even get masks and gloves, let alone testing materials,” he said. “Now, we know what to do.”

Patients and visitors arriving at Concord Hospital masked up and ready to go were caught off-guard when staff told them their cloth masks were no longer adequate and they would have to wear hospital-provided blue paper procedure masks instead.

The policy change, which went into effect earlier this month, brings Concord Hospital in line with other New Hampshire hospitals where cloth masks are being banned, in favor of disposable, medical-grade masks.

Jenn Dearborn with Concord Hospital’s public affairs department said the change reflects the fact that more personal protective equipment, like masks and gowns, are now available for use which makes it easier for hospitals to offer the masks. It’s also an acknowledgment that disposable masks offer better protection against COVID-19 than cloth masks.

“PPE supplies of masks are now at a level where we can provide all patients wearing a cloth mask a procedure mask. Procedure masks are more effective at protecting against COVID-19 when compared to cloth masks,” Dearborn said. “We are making this change because we can now safely supply patients with a procedure mask and still have an adequate supply for the hospital and practices.”

Cloth masks are currently the norm in most settings, most notably public schools where a debate over their efficacy is currently raging. On Friday, administrators at Deerfield Community School banished unmasked children to the gymnasium after the school board suddenly imposed a mask mandate with little notice. On Monday, they began turning unmasked children away.

Concord Hospital isn’t the only hospital requiring procedure masks. Lauren Collin-Cline, director of communications at Catholic Medical Center, said the Manchester hospital now requires people to wear either a paper procedure mask, or a KN-95, or N-95-type mask.

“The reason for this is consistency in filtration,” she said. “Cloth masks vary widely in materials, layers, and fit around the nose and we don’t know what level of protection they offer. In the healthcare setting, we need to be confident in the level of protection people have given the current level of transmission in the community.”

Collins-Cline said the hospital did allow for cloth masks in the summer when the virus levels were going down. But that changed as cases have gone up and the delta variant is rampant. 

“We have always had a mask requirement. Earlier in the summer, we did relax to allow cloth masks but went back to procedural and higher when the positivity rate began to climb back up,” she said.

Adam Bagni, director of communications and community relations at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, said the use of facility-provided masks has been required throughout the pandemic at their facility.

“This is to ensure the quality and cleanliness of every mask in our facilities. We carefully select and assess the masks that we provide to staff, patients, and visitors, for traits like performance, layering, and breathability. We issue a new mask each day, or visit, to ensure they are both sanitary and effective,” he said.

Martha Wassell, director of infection prevention at Wentworth-Douglass, said that in order for a cloth mask to be effective in curbing the spread of COVID-19, it must be double-layered, comfortable, fit snugly, and easy to breathe through.

While cloth masks are fine for general settings, like the grocery store, medical masks should be used in hospitals and health clinics, Wassell said.

“Medical-grade masks are typically prioritized for healthcare settings,” she said.

The debate over masks and mandates began almost as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic started, in part because public health officials told the general public — falsely, it turned out — that masks were unnecessary.

“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said during a 60 Minutes interview on March 8, 2020. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

Fauci now acknowledges he wasn’t telling the truth, out of concern there wouldn’t be enough masks for health care workers.