State wide hospitalizations, case numbers and percent positives are all continuing to improve significantly. Despite a continuing positive decline they all remain higher than the thresholds for pandemic control. We need to continue with our existing effective interventions continue to support this decline quickly back to more manageable numbers we saw last spring and summer.
Exeter Hospital’s situation continued to improve over the weekend with Monday starting off with a normal, manageable total census of 78 including only 6 active COVID inpatients.
For the moment Exeter continues operating under its Incident Command (IC), crisis response structure but we are also continuing to lower some of the protective precautions we were forced to put into place as this current wave grew. Later this week we will be partially expanding visitation access to our outpatient departments and practice locations. For an update on our visitation policy visit Exeter Hospital - COVID-19.
According to the State’s website we still have over 40% of the NH population who are unvaccinated and therefore at serious risk from the virus. Therefore we continuing to strongly encourage our legislators, towns, schools and local businesses to continue to support masking, vaccinations, boosters, social distancing, hand washing, and staying home when people are experiencing symptoms. All of us want to get the pandemic under control as quickly as possible.
Our numbers are dropping very quickly thanks to the precautions all of us have put in place. The worst thing we can do is pause our effective efforts too early and sacrifice the significant progress we are now making.
If you have further questions let me know and I will work to respond to them in future updates.
Our next update will be on Thursday 2/17. We are also scheduling another open Community Call on 2/17 at 2pm
Mark
Mark H. Whitney
Vice President, Strategy, Community Relations and Development
Exeter Health Resources
(603) 580-7437