WESTFIELD – The City of Westfield reported a new weekly high of COVID-19 cases Dec. 2, with 117 new confirmed cases.
The Westfield Health Department also reported two deaths due to COVID-19 this week. There are 76 confirmed confirmed COVID-19 related deaths in Westfield since the pandemic began.
Westfield’s total number of confirmed COVID cases in 2020 is 1,073. This week is the first time 100 or more cases have been reported in one week since the pandemic began in Westfield. As of Wednesday, 142 people were in isolation for COVID-19.
“We are now in a state of full-scale community spread,” said Health Director Joseph Rouse.
Rouse said that there are no specific case clusters anywhere in the city and there is no known superspreader event that would have caused the surge in cases.
“It is literally all over the place,” said Rouse, “Other than all of them being Westfield residents, there is no other commonality that we can see.”
Rouse hesitated to completely blame Thanksgiving gatherings for the rise in cases. He said some of the cases this week could have come from holiday gatherings, but he expects that the bulk of those cases will be present in next week’s report.
Though COVID-19 is widespread throughout the city, Rouse said that schools remain mostly unaffected and he does not recommend a change to the current learning model.
“Schools are still holding steady. They are not considered a source of transmission at the moment,” said Rouse.
He has not yet received hospitalization data for Westfield residents in this wave of the pandemic. Rather than constantly updating municipalities, hospitals in Massachusetts will report to a city or town’s health department if there is an abundance of hospitalized COVID patients coming from that area.
The report by the city Wednesday came at the same time that Massachusetts reported its highest number of daily new cases since the pandemic began with 4,613.
