Paul Bass Photo
Edgewood skate park this week: Not at this point part of the closure order.
Mayor Justin Elicker announced Sunday that the city will close playgrounds to seek to stem the spread of Covid-19, as cases continue to mount.
He made that announcement at his administration’s daily online press briefing about the public health crisis.
Among the developments:
• The city now has 71 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, although the real number is believed to be far higher. Some 41 percent of the cases involve people between 25 and 49 years old, according to city Health Director Maritza Bond.
• The decision to close playgrounds followed continued reports of “large numbers of people congregating” at them around town, Elicker said. Parks will remain open. (“But please please please, people, remember to keep six feet away from each other.”) Fences (where they exist) around playgrounds will be locked. Signs will go up informing people of the ban. Police will respond to reports of people on the playgrounds and inform people to leave, the mayor said. “We’re not going to be arresting people or fining people at this point.”
• Management at the Bella Vista senior housing complex has increased security to seek to enforce a visitor ban. “They’re working much harder to restrict access to unauthorized visitors,” the mayor said. Meanwhile, Fair Haven Community Health Care, which has a clinic at Bella Vista, will begin offering telemedicine services to everyone at the complex. FHCHC also has the capacity to do Covid-19 testing.
• FHCHC and city are also working to get Bella Vista seniors access to groceries if they’re in need, part of an emerging broader citywide effort to meet food, medicine, and mental health services. Elicker said the city is looking to work with existing nonprofit efforts: “We want to make sure there is a blanket across the city rather than a lot of patches [to] make sure that no one that has needs is missed.”
• Eight firefighters are awaiting Covid-19 test results, along with two police officers.
• Elicker said his team hasn’t yet decided whether to take up Yale’s weekend offer to house cops and firefighters who don’t test positive for Covid-19 but need to self-isolate. The city is proceeding with a similar plan it had already started working on with University of New Haven, whose president had immediately offered to make dorm rooms available after Yale had initially balked.
• Among his top aides, “nobody has had a day off for almost three weeks” amid the Covid-19 crisis, Elicker said. He said discussions have begun about doing some rotations to enable people to day a “half day or a day off” from time to time as cases are expected to mount. “We are in a marathon,” Bond said.