“There is an extremely high level of COVID in your community,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Marylou Sudders said, addressing people in those places. She urged them to “respect the virus” and take steps such as wearing masks, staying 6 feet apart, washing their hands, and staying home from work if they are ill.
Citing average daily cases per 100,000 residents as a metric many states use to measure community health, Baker said the 33 communities, which had more than 4 cases per 100,000 residents “require specific strategies to attack COVID there, and to work with them to stop the spread.”
Baker said he and Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito had reached out to leaders in the high- and moderate-risk communities in the past couple of days “because we want to partner with them in whatever way makes the most sense to help them deal with the spread in their communities.”
He said the state’s “key strategy” was to work with local government. “Every community is different,” he said, but the state could help with “additional testing, tracing, and isolation resources. And we’re also implementing stepped-up enforcement measures, and we’ll also work with these communities on messaging and other communication strategies as we and they see fit.”
“The good news here should not get lost,” Baker said. “Three hundred eighteen communities here in Massachusetts are at or below national benchmarks with respect to containing COVID-19 in their communities.”
But he also warned, “I want to be clear on one point. Regardless of where your community sits, COVID is not going away. Your actions, no matter where you live or where you work, will determine in many respects how this virus spreads.”
“We’re asking everyone to recognize that this virus continues to affect, injure, and kill people every single day,” he said.
The state released a color-coded map of all the cities and towns in the state showing them in red, yellow, green, and white, depending on their current level of coronavirus.
Baker said red indicated a community had more than 8 average daily cases per 100,000, yellow was 4 to 8 per 100,000, green was less than 4 per 100,000, and white indicated less than 5 total cases had been reported in the most recent 14 days.
Chelsea, Everett, Lynn, and Revere were the only communities marked in red on the map, which officials said would be updated weekly. Boston, Worcester, and Springfield were among the communities in yellow.
Baker noted that he had announced on Friday the creation of a multi-agency enforcement and intervention team and said its mission of ramping up enforcement and coordinating local intervention efforts “would make the most sense” in the moderate- and high-risk communities.
“The virus doesn’t care about boundaries. It certainly takes every opening any of us give it. We’re making progress and have made progress in our fight, but we have seen the effects of too many people letting your guard down,” he said.
Baker also suggested the numbers argued for letting children return to schools, something some parents in less-affected towns have advocated.
“We would certainly hope that, based on this data, if you’re in a green or white community, I can’t imagine a good reason not to go back, whether it’s full-time or in some sort of a hybrid, because for all intents and purposes, you meet all the benchmarks that are being used across the country, across New England, to make decisions about whether it’s safe to go back to school,” he said.
Both Baker and Sudders emphasized the importance of wearing face coverings, especially for those in higher-risk communities.
”Masks work,” Sudders said. “Wear a face covering at all times when outside of your home.”
Sudders even urged people to consider wearing a mask inside their homes “if an older individual or someone with a compromised medical condition is part of your immediate household, and safe distancing cannot be maintained and other members of your household are going to work [or] participating in recreational activities outside the home.”
Sudders also noted that Baker’s new gathering order, which went into effect Tuesday, now requires face coverings at private events where more than 10 people from different households will be mixing.
Baker underscored that point, noting: “If you’re putting a bunch of people in your house or backyard and they’re not the immediate people you have in your house every day that you live with, people need to wear face coverings, and they need to respect the fact we have a lot of asymptomatic transmission going on.”
Baker’s office didn’t immediately release a list, but a Globe review of the map indicated that, in addition to the four high-risk communities, the 29 moderate risk communities were: Northampton, Holyoke, Chicopee, Springfield, Longmeadow, Granby, Belchertown, Charlton, Auburn, Worcester, Marlborough, Framingham, Maynard, Wrentham, Taunton, Fall River, Brockton, Randolph, Quincy,Hull, Boston, Winthrop, Malden, Saugus, Peabody, Salem, Middleton, Lawrence, and Georgetown.
In other news from Baker’s news conference, the Republican governor expressed concern about the controversial executive order by Republican President Donald Trump to extend unemployment benefits to people in need during the pandemic.
Baker said his biggest concern was that the federal share of the benefits would come from money from Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief funds.
“You can make an argument, a credible one, that FEMA money would be an appropriate resource. It’s an emergency and all the rest,” he said. But he said the problem was that states were already expecting to apply for the FEMA funds as reimbursement for costs that they incurred in March, April, May, and June during the early days of the pandemic.
The unemployment funding “needs to be done through a separate appropriation, not by taking money from FEMA,” he said.
The coronavirus surged through the state this spring but is now at much lower levels. The state has recorded 8,741 confirmed and probable deaths from coronavirus as of Monday. One model says the death toll will likely climb over 10,000 by Dec. 1.
The state is in Phase 3 of a phased reopening process, but recent upticks in coronavirus metrics have sparked concerns among state officials and public health experts.
Peter Bailey-Wells of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Martin finucane can be reached at martin.finucane@globe.com Jaclyn Reiss can be reached at jaclyn.reiss@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JaclynReiss
