Mayor Domenic J. Sarno and Health and Human Services (HHS) Commissioner Helen Caulton-Harris stress that in order for the City of Springfield to reopen much more testing is needed from federal and state sources.
Mayor Sarno stated, “Following the President’s plan to Governors about reopening our country and economy and in consultation with my HHS Commissioner Helen Caulton-Harris, we are currently nowhere close to being ready to reopen. Like everyone else, I’d like to reopen yesterday, but there is still a dramatic need for testing kits. We have one shot to get this thing right in order to build strong public, business, consumer and hospital confidences, that we can identify, isolate, mitigate, contact trace and just as important, heal potential hot spot areas and individuals. Again, Helen and I call on federal and state government sources to step up their efforts to get our City of Springfield 50,000 testing kits (roughly 1/3rd of our city population) in order to do target testing. This is a balancing act, but we must work together, not only locally, but regionally with other states too. It might take a little bit longer to reopen, but done right, full confidence to get back to a sense of normalcy will be long lived – not short lived.”
