Six years ago, Massachusetts state government launched an unprecedented series of actions as COVID-19 started spreading within the state.
On March 10, 2020, then-Gov. Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency around the coronavirus outbreak. Over the next week, he announced what started as a three-week school closure, limited restaurants to takeout-only, and restricted how many people could gather in one place.
Before all that happened, state Sen. Bill Driscoll, then a member of the Massachusetts House, was watching on social media as experts discussed new developments and shutdowns started in other countries where the virus was detected earlier. Driscoll, who had a career in disaster response before his election to the House in 2016, remembers talking to fellow lawmakers early in 2020 about the idea that “the world was going to shut down at some point, it looked like.”
With a toddler at home, Driscoll said he’d start the conversations with a comment about not knowing how he’d get rid of dirty diapers if trash pickup had to stop for a while.
“And that was my inroads into ‘Something’s happening, we should be paying attention,’” the Milton Democrat recalled Monday.
Driscoll served on a working group that helped the House figure out how to hold votes by conference call and keep legislating throughout the pandemic. He’d go on to lead a committee, with Northampton Sen. Jo Comerford, that issued a 52-page report in 2022, examining the state’s response to COVID-19 and recommending policy moves to better prepare for future emergencies.
Comerford, also a Democrat, was in her first term in the Senate in 2020, co-chairing the Legislature’s Public Health Committee. That committee held an oversight hearing on March 4, 2020, to assess the state’s preparedness for the virus, hearing from doctors, epidemiologists and Baker administration officials.
Comerford said one thing that struck her when the pandemic hit was the importance of public health infrastructure.
“They’re invisible until they aren’t, and they’re almost taken for granted until they’re needed,” she said. “And then all of a sudden overnight, we needed them, these public health workers.”
One of the Legislature’s early responses to the COVID-19 pandemic was a public health grant program, Comerford said. Another new law, in 2024, overhauled the local and regional public health system with new statewide standards.
The 2022 report, from the committee led by Comerford and Driscoll, recommended that the state strengthen its local and regional public health infrastructure, with required quality standards and ongoing extra funding.
The report also recommended Massachusetts maintain a long-term stockpile of masks, personal protective equipment and medical supplies that can be distributed when needed. Driscoll said that stockpile has grown and changed over time, but that state public health and emergency management officials are “doing a good job” with its inventory.
He said he’d like to see the strategic stockpiling of gear written into state law, to make sure future leaders keep it up.
Driscoll said it’s also “massively important” that Massachusetts continue its public-health surveillance of wastewater, testing for signs of COVID-19 or potentially other illnesses that spread quickly.
He said wastewater surveillance is passive, tracking disease prevalence without requiring an active effort from the public.
“I think one of the big lessons that I certainly learned, that all of us learned, is that I think the general public is willing to do things that are not passive for a certain period of time, but like anything else, it gets old,” he said. “And I’m talking about PCR tests or at-home rapid tests or wearing masks.”
Comerford said a lesson that stands out to her is the importance of the state’s ability to feed its own residents, without worrying about supply chain disruptions. A state food security infrastructure grant program launched in 2020. She said that program has helped farmers and other food producers scale up, be more self-sufficient, and reach more people.
“It’s what farmers and growers and producers and micro-businesses tell me was the most effective program they’ve ever seen come out of the state,” Comerford said. “And it was a product of then a pretty difficult time, and it was product of a state administration and Legislature coming together, not unlike we did with public health, trying to seek a solution that would help our people.”
