Page last updated on September 6, 2021 at 4:10 pm
Hi, this is Mayor John Hamilton. It's Monday, August 3rd, and just wanted to pass this message out, updating on a few things.
First COVID related, we do continue to see some indications of resurgence locally, not dramatic, but real including hospitalizations, which actually have caused the hospital to begin to have to move some patients to other locations or even other systems. Primarily because testing delays, meaning they have to isolate more people for longer in their rooms and takes up hospital space but that's an indicator of challenges, we know tens of thousands of students will be arriving, we know of course the school system locally here, they're doing online first, but all of these are indicators that explain why we had to take the step to back that we did a couple of weeks ago, including changes at bars and restaurants, and also changes in social gathering sizes.
Now those step backs may not be enough. We are going to have to continue to monitor what's been going on and we will continue to monitor and it may be like some cities, Indianapolis, you've probably seen have had to step back even further. We may need to do that. If so, it will probably happen in short days or weeks, we'll continue to watch that.
So your mask-wearing, your physical distancing are making the difference that we need to see. We need to have that continue, avoiding indoor gatherings when you can really, and large ones are really where we worry about super spreader events with large numbers of people indoors. So we're going to continue to look at that and your continuing to do those protective measures are really, really important to help our community get through this. So stay tuned. We'll continue our afternoon press conferences every Friday at 1:15.
Also, we're continuing to work on the budget and some other things happening. Recover forward, which is the way I've tried to talk about how we get out of this pandemic and the right way moving toward economic justice, toward racial justice, toward climate justice. This week, there'll be a city council hearing Wednesday night looking at a first phase of that. We'll also see actually on Thursday night, there's a public meeting for planning for the hospital reuse. So work continues in the city, but the Recover Forward is a front of mind effort to think about how do we come out of this in the right way. We know people are struggling, unemployment is high, stress is high. We're continuing to work together in the government to try to do all that we can to move us forward in the right ways and we'll continue to do that.
Please reach out to me. If you have any questions, concerns, through the office, happy to try to connect and please keep taking care of yourselves. Take care of Bloomington and we'll look forward to continuing to update you on items that are happening. Thanks.
