Page last updated on February 15, 2022 at 3:16 pm
Hi, this is Mayor John Hamilton. It's February 15th, 2022. Just a quick public update on the status of the pandemic here in Bloomington. Thank you for all you're doing. We do continue to see the Omicron surge reducing. I know that's not news to you. The data that we're watching, while we still have hundreds of cases happening a week, and we'd gotten below a hundred, but we had also gone over a thousand, we see in many of our indicators that the Omicron surge seems to be diminishing.
We are very appreciative of all of you who have gotten vaccinated and boosted. That's particularly helpful against Omicron. There's a lot of room for more people to get boosted, and that's a big help. There are still people getting sick and dying from this surge. We don't want to underplay what's happening, but the direction of the numbers is good. We have the mask mandate, which we believe continues to help slow down the surge and protect our healthcare system. We, of course, will continue to make vaccines and testing available.
I'm pleased that more and more city employees are signing up and getting vaccinated and boosted, and that's great. We're going to continue to incentivize that. The governor has extended the emergency order, which means we're continuing many public meetings in hybrid or remote form, but that may change by March. We'll be watching that closely as the weather warms up, and we can do more things outside. We're very hopeful that we'll continue to see this progress as it goes forward. Our school system's working so hard, our teachers, our healthcare workers, our first responders, of course, all of you, we appreciate that.
Please stay the course; keep doing what you're doing a little longer. We're seeing good progress, and that's the way we want it to go. We're hopeful there won't be a shift and a twist and a new turn in the road with a different variant or something like that, but for now, we're going in the right direction, the work that you're doing, the steps you're taking really do help, and we appreciate that. We'll keep you posted as we go forward. Thanks so much for all you're doing.
