MANCHESTER, NH – Over the past year, the Manchester Health Department has taken a lead role in the city’s emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic, from providing free testing to underserved communities, manning an information hotline and conducting contact tracing and case investigations. Now, they’re at the front lines of the vaccination efforts for teachers, students, communities of color and the elderly, and even some neighboring communities.
But Health Department Director Anna Thomas says their 70 full-time and part-time employees get little credit for their hard work.
“I think we never get the credit for it,” Thomas said. “What gets said in press conferences with the governor is all about what DHHS does … but never recognizes the work of two city health departments.”
Manchester and Nashua are the only two communities in the state with city health departments, making them uniquely suited and prepared to deal with an infectious disease emergency. Other areas are served by a local health officer and by less formal and relatively less-resourced regional health networks, Thomas said.
The Queen City founded its health department in 1839 to help deal with the spread of infectious diseases in the mills, Thomas said. Since then it has evolved into a multi-faceted agency with four branches, of which infection disease remains “the most historically relevant arm of the department,” she said.
The other branches include family and neighborhood health, environmental health and emergency preparedness, and school nursing.
Thomas said the department’s existing infrastructure, boots on the ground and integrated army of school nurses, gave them a leg up in responding to the pandemic early and effectively.
Mayor Joyce Craig agrees.
“Over the past year, the Manchester Health Department has guided our community through the COVID-19 pandemic, leading the charge in helping to inform difficult decisions regarding the closure of events and institutions,” Craig said in an emailed statement. “Everyone in the Health Department has worked tirelessly seven days a week since the first case of COVID was diagnosed, establishing the City’s COVID-19 Hotline, assisting with contract tracing, establishing testing sites, vaccinations and monitoring the rise of the virus throughout the city, state and country. I am so thankful for their work.”
“Manchester’s Health Department is a star performer, positively impacting nearly every aspect of life in our city,” said Barry Brensinger, Manchester-based architect and philanthropist.
Most recently, the department has been instrumental in partnering with the Manchester Fire Department to vaccinate about 1,400 school staff in closed-pod clinics. The first two-day event was March 12 and 13, and the second injections were administered on April 9 and 10.
“We were one of the first ones to vaccinate teachers, for example, and certainly the largest,” Thomas said.
Thomas said they had to accelerate their timetable for teacher and school staff vaccinations by about one or two weeks earlier than planned because they learned of the governor’s mandate to require it through a press conference.
Now, they’re working to vaccinate students. High school students aged 16-18 were able to get vaccinated through department-run clinics held last Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Each event was capped at 120 students. Their second doses will be scheduled for May 10, 12 and 13.
“We are also assisting surrounding school districts with vaccination of their 16- to 18-year-old students,” Thomas said.
The department is also hosting a regular weekly vaccine clinic at Beech Street School for the public, every Tuesday night, serving about 150 to 180 people each week, and mobile pop-up clinics at various other places like the Mental Health Center of Greater Manchester, churches and mosques, in an effort to reach so-called “equity” populations (defined as people of color, people with mental illness, mobility issues, the homeless and elderly).
So far, they’ve administered between 6,500 to 7,000 doses and 32 percent of that have been received by people in the equity population. And about 120 of those have been homebound people that the city worked with Convenient MD to vaccinate in their homes.
Thomas said they’ve done this while continuing to provide testing, answering hotline calls, investigating cases, as well as regular business like inspecting 700 restaurants and more.
Contact tracing and case investigations are done by a core team with the help of other department employees on an ad hoc basis. Thomas estimates about 70 percent of the public health workers have been directly involved in contact tracing at some point.
School nurses have been an integral part of this.
“The school nurses are sort of your unsung heroes in your community,” Thomas said.
Manchester is unique in that its school nurses are staffed and overseen by the city health department. As such, they were conscripted to train (with the help of a CDC Foundation Grant) and conduct investigations over the summer break last year. And when school started up again in the fall, they were uniquely equipped to deal with cases and clusters as they occurred, Thomas said.
“They were absolutely more prepared because they had the benefit of working on COVID throughout the summer,” she said.
Overall, Thomas said the department has a “very seasoned” staff with years of experience. Thomas has been there for 27 years, she said, and many of the full-time staff have been there for 20 years or more.
With a $10 million annual budget (60 percent of which comes from 22 federal, state and foundation grants), the department fielded 12,000 calls for appointments, questions and crisis, investigated over 11,000 COVID-19 cases among Manchester residents and nearly 20,000 close contacts to a positive case, according to Thomas.
It conducted “countless” cluster investigations among long-term care facilities, schools, businesses, nonprofits and city departments, and tested more than 8,000 residents with the help of the fire department, and assisted about 2,000 individuals with basic needs with the help of the Granite United Way Relief Fund.
Throughout the past year, Thomas said public health workers have sacrificed holidays and whatever else was needed at the time to get the city through this pandemic.
“All of these employees have been working crazy schedules, because obviously, the pandemic functions seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” Thomas said. “I just can’t say enough for all that they have sacrificed this past year as a public health team.”
