Provincetown town is recovering from a July outbreak of nearly 1,000 COVID cases — many of which were among vaccinated people — but town manager Alex Morse said Tuesday that "this is a positive story in some ways" because most of the cases were minor, showing that vaccines work.
"Absent the vaccine, this would have been an incredibly different, dangerous situation," Morse told Jim Braude on GBH's Greater Boston. "We have not seen severe illness, a spike in hospitalization, and we’ve seen zero deaths out of roughly 1,000 cases related to the cluster,” because such a large percentage of the population is vaccinated. He added that seven were hospitalized.
The spike in cases, driven at least in part by the delta variant, followed Fourth of July gatherings. Data collected on transmission among vaccinated people in the town drove the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to reverse its mask guidance last week, recommending that vaccinated people return to wearing masks indoors in public.
The town saw a positivity rate — which measures the percentage of all COVID-19 tests that return positive — as high as 15% on July 15th. That is now under 5% and there are only 56 active cases remaining, he said.
Morse said the town's health department is working on offering certificates to businesses that require thier employees and their patrons to be vaccinated. But he added that Provincetown can’t “do this on its own.”
People should come to Provincetown and have a good time, he said, but "to fully enjoy the Provincetown experience, you need to be vaccinated."
WATCH: Town manager Alex Morse on the state of Provincetown