North Shore COVID-19 5 Years Later: Response Celebrated, Ongoing Challenges Exposed

PEABODY, MA — Stores and businesses were shuttered, while first responders and emergency workers were celebrated, as fear and uncertainty gripped the nation and the world five years ago in what were still the early days of the COVID-19 health crisis.

Gov. Charlie Baker's State of Emergency — which would remain in place for the next 15 months — closed schools and would soon sentence them into extended remote learning, while many restaurants, bars and hospitality venues forced to lock their doors on the eve of St. Patrick's Day would never reopen.

The apprehension of the day put great faith in public health officials in a way not seen for decades. But as the pandemic and understanding of the virus and eventually the vaccines designed to combat it evolved, patience and trust eroded for many in the same institutions charged with protecting residents — especially those most vulnerable to a respiratory illness unlike any seen in a century.

"The strength of community partnerships is what sticks with me the most in terms of what worked well," Peabody Director of Health and Human Services Director Sharon Cameron told Patch. "Other government departments, local social service agencies, and business groups stepped up to support the community response."

Cameron said some of those examples included the North Shore Community Action Programs that worked with local health departments to implement and staff a public information system to answer questions on everything from business closures, support for those in isolation and quarantine, and recommendations for residents in need of medical advice.

In Peabody, the school district and Haven From Hunger worked together to distribute food each day to families in need — in partnerships that were mirrored in cities and towns across the North Shore. Local Chambers of Commerce worked with municipal governments to get workplace safety protocols distributed to anxious business owners eager to prioritize safety but also wary — proven rightfully so — of the initial 21-day shutdown that wound up including more than a year of capacity, spacing, facemask and other myriad restrictions.

• MA Coronavirus Restrictions, Masks May Be Here 6 to 9 More Months

Churches opened their doors so public health officials could provide information and access to testing and vaccination, as well as translation with Spanish-, Portuguese- and other foreign language-speaking residents across the region.

"I am extremely proud and grateful to serve in a community that works together so compassionately and effectively in an emergency," Cameron said.

Terms such as social distancing, hybrid learning, positive-test rate and wastewater sample data became common parlance. Once businesses began to reopen, there were one-way aisles, plexiglass partitions, footprints 6 feet apart on the floor — and at times curfews, 90-minute time limits and food-ordering requirements at restaurants, as well as mask mandates that shifted from recommendations of cloth masks, to surgical masks, to K-95s.

Yet, the collective spirit that began in the early days of the Trump Administration's "15 Days To Stop The Spread" public campaign soon frayed under changing directives, mounting skepticism of government and media messaging, and, ultimately, coronavirus fatigue.

• North Shore Restaurants Say 'Cheers' To End Of 9:30 P.M. Curfew

"Information was changing so rapidly as scientists learned more about the virus and how it spread, so responses and recommendations changed accordingly," Cameron said. "Decision-makers did not always communicate the rationale for these changes effectively to the public, and so it undermined trust in the response and in public health agencies, in general."

Each time health officials pushed to reinstate mask requirements and other isolation methods amid surges in virus levels, the pushback among large segments of even the population once fully inclined to "follow the rules" grew.

Local Boards of Health, which had often operated in obscurity in sparsely attended meetings, became a community focal point — often a subject of ire and angst — with hundreds logging on to Zoom calls to plead their cases for both more or less aggressive measures to contend with a virus mutating into new strains with differing symptoms, levels of contagion and public threat.

• A Second Year On The North Shore In The Time Of Coronavirus

While the vaccine was cheered in many circles as essential to helping wind down the pandemic, some of the vaccination requirements to maintain employment and enter hospitality and entertainment businesses in cities such as Boston and Salem, were challenged — and collapsed within weeks of their implementation amid declining virus rates, as well as the lack of regional support and universal compliance.

• North Shore Medical Center Chief: Vaccination Is An Obligation

"Although limitations on the quantity of vaccine we received were in place for much of the pandemic, our vaccination efforts were never limited by staffing resources or knowledge of how to deliver mass
vaccinations," Cameron noted.

It was Memorial Day weekend in 2021 — nearly 450 days after the initial State of Emergency was declared — that most COVID-related restrictions were lifted in Massachusetts. It would be another eight months before mask requirements, COVID testing, and other preventative measures were removed in some of the schools that had to be dragged back into full-time classroom learning a year earlier.

Five years later, the COVID-19 pandemic and the immediate and extended response remains a third rail of discussion among those who vary between reflecting on it as one of the great public health responses of our time and a cautionary tale of government overreach.

• North Shore Leaders May 'Restrict Unnecessary Indoor Activities'

Lost in the escalating political conflict that is undoubtedly part of the pandemic's legacy are some of the societal inequities that were revealed, fully acknowledged but never answered in any sort of lasting and sustainable way.

"The pandemic revealed a lot of gaps in our social safety net that have yet to be addressed," Cameron said. "Many of the workers in our community who were providing essential services and services that could not be delivered remotely were part-time, often lower-wage workers without access to essential benefits for paid sick time.

"Those workers were many times faced with the difficult decision of going to work while sick in order to provide for their families and to deliver the services that our state deemed essential, or to stay home to protect their health and the health of the broader community, but jeopardizing their paycheck and possibly their job."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)