Don’t forget your mask if you’re 5 or older and plan to enter a Wellesley municipal building, be it Town Hall, the Tolles Parsons Center or police station, come Sept. 1, per the Board of Health and Select Board. It’s been clear that the Board of Health was headed in this direction based on recent public meetings.
Town employees must wear masks whenever engaging with the public indoors, and unvaccinated employees need to wear masks at all times when in municipal buildings.
There are some medical and other exceptions to these COVID-19-inspired rules.
The town, which will provide you with a mask if you forget one, will revisit its rules based on available data.
Wellesley Public Schools also start the year in mask mode for students and staff regardless of COVID-19 vaccination status. The schools will be limited visits by volunteers and others to start the school year, which begins Sept. 1.
Here are latest weekly Massachusetts Department of Public Health vaccination figures for Wellesley. The overall vaccination rate remains at 66% over the past week, with the percentage of 12-15-year-olds seeing the biggest increase, from 87% to 89%. Wellesley added 69 new fully vaccinated residents over the past week.
*It’s unclear why the Department of Public Health reports more individuals with at least one dose in the 50-64 age range than there are individuals in that age range…
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Because of the increase in COVID, the neighboring community of Newton requires all residents above the age of 5 to wear a mask regardless of vaccination status.
If there is a pandemic and we hope to curtail transmission of the virus, it makes no sense to only require masks in municipal spaces and for government employees.
Frankly, I was very disturbed to find that only a few employees at my hair salon were wearing masks in spite of close and prolonged contact with clients.
Enforcement of a mask requirement would definitely be difficult. I would argue that the lack of a mask mandate will hurt business rather than help. After many years of going to the same Wellesley shop, I will now take my business to communities that require masks in all public spaces.
Curious. If I am understanding this correctly, employees must wear a mask when they’re working with non employees. When the non employees aren’t around it is suddenly safe to remove their masks. The public must wear masks in government buildings regardless of what they are doing there. So we have protected our town employees (as we should) but we don’t seem to be worried about the safety of the anyone not in a government building.
Don’t we either need an indoor mask mandate of all buildings the public enters or none at all(?) This current rule seems a bit self-serving. That all said I don’t know if a town mandate for all public indoor spaces is somehow more complicated and that’s why it wasn’t written that way.
Stupid!!!