Hosmer urges council return to remote meetings, citing latest COVID surge

LACONIA — Mayor Andrew Hosmer is pushing for the City Council to return to remote meetings due to the skyrocketing number of new coronavirus cases, both locally and statewide.

“I think for our next meeting we should go back to Zoom until we get through this surge,” Hosmer said during Monday’s council meeting.

Hosmer told the council that he was particularly struck by Gov. Chris Sununu’s comment on Sunday that the state could be seeing between 500 and 1,000 new cases a day by the end of November.

“Sununu has been very measured in his approach to COVID. He’s not an alarmist,” Hosmer said in explaining why, given the latest data, he thought it was prudent to return to remote meetings for the foreseeable future.

The council returned to in-person meetings on Sept. 26, after meeting remotely for six months. Since then the meetings have been held in the culinary arts dining room at the Huot Career and Technical Center, next to Laconia High School, which has enough room to ensure social distancing — both among councilors and members of the public.

Last Friday, Dr. Benjamin Chan, the state epidemiologist, reported substantial community spread in seven counties across the state, including Belknap County. He also announced that on that day the state recorded a record number of new cases in one day — 252.

Belknap County had 63 active cases as of Monday, the most since the pandemic began.

Chan said on Friday there has been a change in the pattern of the disease. Fewer cases are being seen at long-term-care facilities and more are associated with people catching the virus while out and about in the community.

“We know that when community transmission increases at that point, you increase the number of people who potentially are introducing it into various businesses and organizations,” Chan said.

“I’ve liked the in-person meetings. I think it’s been great that we’ve all been together,” the mayor said. “I know remote meetings can take longer and can be more inconvenient.”

He invited councilors to weigh in on how they felt about returning to remote meetings, but none offered any comment on the idea. After the meeting Hosmer said he would continue to press for remote meetings starting with the next scheduled council meeting on Nov. 23.

In a notable departure from recent in-person council meetings, all meeting participants on Monday were wearing face masks. Hosmer said it was decided after the Nov. 9 meeting that everyone should be wearing a mask.