4.14.26 Local Health World Cup Preparedness
Mass.gov Transcript
(Sam Wong)
Today, we have a jam-packed agenda ready for you to talk about 2026 FIFATM World Cup public health response planning for local public health. Next slide, please. On the agenda today, we have a welcome message from our Chief of Staff for the department.
We’re going to have an overview of the FIFA World Cup coming in Boston this summer.
We’re going to focus on several topics afterwards, health systems readiness, infectious disease planning, local public health coordination, environmental health concerns, and hopefully we have some time for Q&A and next step for continued engagement. Next slide.
At this point, I’d like to welcome Emily Dally, our Chief of Staff for the Department to give a welcome message. Emily.
(Emily Dally)
Good afternoon, everyone. It’s so nice to be with you. My name is Emily Dally.
I’m the Chief of Staff and Assistant Commissioner here at the Department of Public Health, and a pleasure to be with you on this webinar today.
On behalf of Commissioner Goldstein and all of us at the department, I have the easiest job of all of us this afternoon, which is to just say welcome.
And we’re very excited to continue our collaboration with all of you around preparedness efforts for the FIFA Men’s World Cup and to thank you also for all that you’ve done to date and all the work that we will continue to do together over the coming months.
We know that this is top of mind for you as public health leaders, for municipalities and for our colleagues across state government, local government, the health sector, and then of course, fans alike.
And I hope that some of you are getting a good opportunity to also enjoy the World Cup as it comes to our localities.
But just a message to say thank you. We look forward to collaboration, and we’re excited to share with you some of the important work that we are doing and that we are engaging with many of you on.
So with that, I will turn it back to Sam. Thank you all.
(Sam Wong)
Thank you, Emily.
Next slide, I would like to invite Kerin, our Director for the Office of Preparedness and Emergency Management to provide an overview.
Kerin.
(Kerin Milesky)
Thanks so much, Sam, and good afternoon, everyone.
It’s a pleasure to be able to join you on this gorgeous day to talk about the FIFA World Cup. Next slide, please.
OK. So, we’re going to start with a little bit of level setting just in terms of terminology and looking over to the left-hand side of the slide.
To begin with, when we talk about the 2026 FIFA World Cup, we’re referring to the organizers of the international soccer tournament that’s held every four years.
The 2026 tournament is going to be held this year in three countries, so the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
It’s going to be held across 16 host cities, and it includes 104 matches played by 48 national teams.
The opening match is going to be held in Mexico City’s fabled Azteca on June 11th and the World Cup final is going to be on June 19th at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
You’ve likely also heard or will hear reference to Boston 2026 Soccer World Cup, Boston 2026, Boston 26, or B26 and those all refer to the same entity, which is the host organization that’s planning the competition and the non-competition events here in the city.
Boston 26 is planning on the seven matches that are going to be held at the Boston Stadium in Foxborough in the group stage, the round of 32, and the quarterfinals.
And then they’re also supporting and planning all of the non-competition events such as fan fest, fan walks and whatnot that we’ll talk about in just a minute. Next slide please.
So, here are the Massachusetts match dates, times and pairings. Since I had the opportunity to speak with some of you several weeks ago, the June 16th game has been determined. Iraq was the winner of the March 31st final that was played.
So, we do have the full line up for those initial first games until we get into the round of 32 in the quarter final. So, you see that within Massachusetts we’ll have activations between June 13th and July 9th of our department operation center and then supporting the events at various operation centers across the state. Next slide, please.
This slide gives an overview of the status of ticket sales that’s sliced by international, domestic, and local to New England. And while this is a snapshot from late February, I’m actually trying to get a new slice of data from Boston 26. It is notable to see that only approximately 20% of the visitors at this time are coming from international locations.
Now what we know about that is that sometimes these international travelers wait until closer to the games to make final plans to attend. So, it will be really interesting when we can get an updated slice of the ticket sales.
And certainly, you know, what’s going on internationally across the world could be leading to some, you know, questions about whether to travel or not to travel.
So, this is something that we’re looking at closely and is absolutely playing into the plans that that we’re doing in Massachusetts just in terms of supporting the travelers to the state, be they international or domestic travelers. Next slide, please.
So, this is a busy slide. This is looking at both the competition and the non-competition venues that are associated with the tournament.
As I noted previously, the matches are going to occur in Foxborough, which has been renamed as the “Boston Stadium” for the duration of the event.
I will say this has led to a fair amount of confusion for travelers to Massachusetts who are not necessarily familiar with the state. And when they’ve heard that, you know that the events going to be at Boston Stadium, thinking that that the stadium is within the city of Boston, where, you know, we all know it’s 30 miles outside. So, you will see in most of the materials whenever the Boston Stadium is referred to now they have Foxborough in parentheses.
Team France and Team Ghana are going to be staying in the area. Team France, their training site is, is now at Bentley University in Waltham.
When we spoke last, they were looking at a different venue and they’re going to be staying at The Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, and they have the full room block for that stay and they’re staying over the course of the entire tournament.
Team Ghana is going to be training at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, and staying in Providence, Rhode Island. And when Ghana is playing matches in Massachusetts, they are going to continue to be staying locally in Providence.
You see below the venue-specific training sites. These are the locations where the arriving teams who’ll be playing the seven matches, practice ahead of their match.
The Revolution Training Center in Foxborough is going to be used for the group stage, the round of 32, and one of the quarterfinal teams and then the other quarterfinal team will be practicing at Bryant University.
Going over to the right side of the slide, you see the information that we know of right now, which could still be a little tentative in terms of the timing for the Fan Festival, which is at City Hall Plaza in Boston. We’re still waiting to get additional information on the timing for that event and, and there still is a little bit of movement around the exact date. So we’re tracking that closely.
Did you see the airports that are going to be having visitors coming in? Hanscom is going to be used for the teams that are coming in domestically, Boston for international travelers, and then Ghana is going to be going in and out from TF Green.
And then the hotels that are used for the visiting teams as well as the referees and the VIPs will be hotels in Boston, Foxborough, and Quincy. Next slide please.
And then in terms of other activities, while there appears to be a lot of interest from across the Commonwealth and watch parties and we know that there have been some funding opportunities that have been released, there’s no indication yet of FIFA having issued viewing licenses for any interested jurisdictions or venues. So, we are watching that very closely.
I’m of course, you know, I assume that all of you are very interested in knowing if there’s going to be a watch party in your community. So that is something that we’re tracking very closely with Boston 26.
Also tracking other activities, including a youth soccer roadshow that we know Massachusetts Youth Soccer is planning. There are fan walks that are being planned to South Station ahead of the games. There are fan houses and other cultural events. Next slide, please.
So, this is going to look at our key risks and hazards for the tournament, and really the public health planning for that builds around what we recognize as the key risks and hazards.
So, weather-related hazards including extreme heat, severe storms, unhealthy air quality, mass casualty events and other events that may surge healthcare demand, infectious disease outbreaks, including those not commonly experienced in the United States, and foodborne illness.
So, when we go to the next slide, please, we look at what really DPH is doing and we are doing extensive planning.
We have a cross-agency planning effort in place with specific work groups that are focused on situational awareness tools to be able to share information with you all, healthcare coordination, disease surveillance and outbreak response, environmental risks, contingency planning, and doing all the planning around our emergency activations.
And then the last bullet there is public information, and if we can go to the final slide, wanted to make sure that you all have visited our public information tools on our web page that we have posted at mass.gov/WorldCupHealth. That page is active and live now and is being updated regularly as we receive new information.
It’s focusing on accessing healthcare, extreme heat, mosquito tick exposure and foodborne illness. We’re also working on topic- and audience-specific fact sheets.
So, I do hope that you all receive the healthcare planning considerations that were pushed out last week and we’ll soon have additional information on environmental health risks coming to you soon.
And Sam, I think I’m going to hand this back to you now to introduce Brendan.
Thank you.
(Sam Wong)
Thank you, Kerin.
Next up on healthcare readiness from Brendan Murphy, also from Office of Emergency Management and Preparedness.
(Brendan Murphy)
Thanks Sam. Appreciate it and, thank you, Kerin for laying a great base down of the tournament specifics. You can go to the next slide please.
So I’m going to talk a little bit about sort of how our planning structure is set up across the state with regards to different disciplines and how public safety and public health and medical services are co-opted here.
So, well working with Boston 26, the host committee, FIFA, the larger international organization, and different state agencies, there are 14 different planning groups that are stood up. Many of these are safety and security oriented.
There’s some on intelligence, investigations, tactical operations, communications, interoperability, but there is one that's specifically focused on public health and medical services.
I’m co-chairing that working group along with Boston 26’s Chief Medical Officer, who is one of the stadium medical directors and an emergency physician at Mass General Brigham.
And within our working group or our planning group, we have three subgroups that are sort of geographically-centered. One of them is at the stadium and in Foxborough.
That’s primarily working with the hospitals that routinely receive patients from stadium events, as well as Foxborough Fire, who provides primary 911, and Coastal Ambulance Service, which is the EMS partner that covers most of the events down at the stadium.
Then there’s Boston Celebration Zone, Fan Fest and Fan Walks, so that’s working closely with Boston Public Health Commission, Boston EMS, and some of the other partners that are working to support that.
Dim Z is the vendor that they’ve contracted with to set up Fan Fest, who is a known entity in Boston that’s worked a lot of their big events. So there’s a strong relationship there.
So, the two things I’ll say there is we’re working from a strong base, both in the stadiums plan, having hosted many large events and having, you know, their plans pretty well in place, as well as Boston, who routinely hosts these things.
The third group is the non-comp venues, which Kerin had mentioned earlier, but that’s team base, camps, hotels, training facilities, and those have come more into focus over the last few weeks.
And so we’re starting to do a little bit more planning with each of those venues outside of Gillette. The primary one being Bentley and the Waltham team, which we will loop in a few hospitals there as well as Armstrong Ambulance Service, and integrated within that working group.
So there’s a lot of state-level partners. There are EMS agencies and then the host committee has a few medical folks as well as FIFA has their own health medical considerations. Those are largely around player and FIFA VIP considerations and how certain specific characteristics around their medical planning need to take place. Next slide, please.
So, a few of the main planning priorities that we’re looking at sort of across the healthcare spectrum. And this is not only for the specifics that are close to the stadium and Fan Fest, but really across the Commonwealth as we anticipate many, many visitors from abroad and from other parts of the United States and North America.
So, one of them is healthcare access. So, you know, right care at the right place at the right time, messaging those kinds of things, as well as making sure that each of the venues have a plan in place so that there’s routine access. If there’s first aid needs, if somebody gets sick, EMS, and first aid stations.
Then there's looking at all those venues and making sure that they have their plans honed for MCI preparedness, mutual aid or surge events. So, knowing that some crowds might be bigger in certain areas, making sure that there are adequate pathways and contingency plans for all of those heat mitigation strategies. So, I think my colleague Terry is going to discuss this in more depth later on.
But making sure that each of those venues have strong plans in place for heat mitigation so that if we do get a really hot stretch in June or July, that we’re not creating an MCI or sending numerous people to the hospital when that can be avoided with preparation.
And then we’re looking at the tournament characteristics. There's a lot of really specific things with FIFA, not only athletes and some of the expected VIPs there here, but this is going to spread into Rhode Island, as Kerin mentioned.
So there’s a team base camp at Bryant and Smithfield. There’s a team staying in Providence. There’s other events there around this area. So it’s working with our partners in Rhode Island as well.
And then there’s some transportation changes that you may have seen in messaging. So many of these fans were ticketed are not from here. They do not have vehicles. So unlike a Patriots game when the majority of attendees drive to Gillette Stadium, there’s a plan in place to move far more people are far more attendees by train coming out of South Station. So, making sure that we have plans in place to handle those volume changes and transportation. Next slide, please.
So, what have we done for healthcare system engagement up to this point? So, the fire departments and EMS agencies that are going to be responsible for coverage on all of these areas, we have met with them, we’ve briefed them in on events, and we are meeting with them at routine intervals depending on where they are.
So, certainly within those subgroups, we’ve briefed basically every hospital in the state at this point on the events through the HMCC structure. But the hospitals that are closest to the events and likely to receive patients have been more involved in the planning and then working with many of you on the local health side as well supporting agencies and resources.
So, working with some of our state-level partners regarding some EODC burning considerations and things like that.
And then event awareness. So we’ve provided briefings as we get more information as the event details come into focus. We routinely meet with our healthcare partners and brief these out.
And we’re working internally at DPH. We have a healthcare coordination subgroup that’s looking at how we can communicate this out. So we pushed out a communication last week that involved included lots of planning considerations, but future meetings, future resource guides from different healthcare disciplines that we’ll push out. Next slide, please.
So, some of the ongoing coordination and upcoming objectives, one of the pieces that we’re looking at is increasing our level of coordination awareness with private email and services and how those they are built into mutual aid plans. We identified that as an area that could accept a little bit more work. So we’re working with them to enhance that coordination and then urgent care engagement.
So, we anticipate a lot of visitors may access care appropriately at urgent care centers. So, making sure that they’re messaging things out like folks who may not have traditional commercial insurance and increasing service cost transparency as well as starting to report to the department on syndromic surveillance so that we have good situational awareness of what they’re being seen for. Next slide, please.
And then what things will look like as far as healthcare coordination during the 39-day activation? So the Department of Public Health Operations Center will be physically stood up for the seven matches. We also may have some virtual activations as other State OC’s are stood up, but we will also have staff at MEMA, the UCC, at Boston's Summer Special Events Operations Center.
We plan to have coordination calls with all the healthcare partners close to the events the day prior to a match to talk about any last minute considerations and just huddle and then evaluating our data, evaluating what we're seeing in the first matches and seeing how we can adjust our posture going forward.
Next slide. Just to sort of recap and review all these, what are we asking the healthcare system to do at this point and going forward? So it’s staying informed of all the details that come out and the guidance the DPH and other state agencies are pushing out.
It’s asking everybody to take a look at their mutual aid and MCI plans, just a plan for those contingencies, being aware of anything the department sends out regarding infectious disease awareness or bulletins, looking at steps that can be taken to prepare for a large amount of visitors.
So, translation services, cost transparency, things like that. And then also looking at heat and environmental risks as we’re in the summer months. And next slide, I think I’m turning it back to you now, Sam, thank you.
(Sam Wong)
And then next up, infectious disease planning, we have Dr. Katie Brown.
(Dr. Katie Brown)
Thanks, Sam. Good to be here. Let’s go ahead and keep this going and go to the next slide. Great.
So, I don’t have to tell you all that Massachusetts has a robust infectious disease reporting system already, right Maven? We share this and we have the required kind of bi-directional sharing with local boards of health, and includes our electronic laboratory reports.
We also have an existing system for rapid interstate notification about, you know, cases of a reportable disease in a Rhode Island resident who’s diagnosed in Massachusetts or vice versa.
So, things do get a little bit more complicated when we’re talking about individuals who are not residents of the United States. So we are planning currently drafting a memo to providers and facilities and we’re going to focus on emergency departments and urgent cares, but not it won’t be exclusive to them emphasizing that, you know, there will still be a need to report immediately by a phone for certain critical diseases.
So we will remind people about the full list of reportable conditions. But what we really want to focus on is making sure they understand and will call us either you all as local parts of health or us at the Department of Public Health if they identify a case of something that’s going to require pretty prompt public health intervention.
So, measles is a good example of one of those types of diseases, bacterial meningitis, right. Neisseria would be another situation where we want to know about that no matter where that person actually resides most of the time. So you will see that memo at some point in the near future. Next slide.
So, what are we going to do with those reports, right?
So, you know, I hope you all feel I certainly do, that local boards of health and the epis of the Department of Public Health always partner on investigations, right?
And, some of us in the department are going to have access to WhatsApp for international numbers because that’s always a group of folks that we have trouble sort of reaching. But we’ll be able to use WhatsApp for that type of initial contact. Folks who are non-residents, but who have one of these sort of critical, you know, urgent public health response diseases, we’re going to we'll be assigned to the municipality where they are staying, and in order for us to do that, we’re going to have to utilize sharing and tasking in Maven.
I know that may bring up like COVID PTSD for many of you and I'm sorry, but that that is actually the most efficient way for us to continue to be able to share information on non-residents.
And we’ve already been talking with Scott and Hillary in particular, who will be focusing on providing updates and refresher trainings for all of you about how that sharing and tasking actually can work. So again, I said this, but I am just going to say it again so case investigations for non-residents, we're not expecting that we’re going to have to do full investigations for every single one of the types of our, you know, infectious diseases.
So, for instance, I will be sorry if one of our visitors gets one of our tickborne diseases, but because there is no sort of immediate, you know, person-to-person and risk during those, those are not going to be our focus.
So, we are going to, we all of us, the public health system, are going to continue to focus our efforts on immediate diseases where there is sort of a necessary public health intervention. Next slide.
We are also relying on our syndromic surveillance system to help us maintain situational awareness in like three different areas.
I think most of you know, if you don’t, syndromic surveillance is near real-time automatic reporting from all of our acute care hospital emergency departments and a subset, a subset, but a growing subset of our urgent care facilities.
Brendan mentioned that we’re actively working to try to on-board urgent care facilities, particularly those that are sort of in the in the geographic area where we anticipate most of our visitors will be spending their time. And the data from syndromic surveillance is going to give us three things. So, it gives us routine situational awareness. We can use it to look at trends in injury and infectious disease and sort of as examples, we can look for heat-related illness visits, motor vehicle accidents, alcohol-associated visits and then things like gastrointestinal or respiratory illness.
We can also use it as sort of a backup to reporting, right. So, you know, healthcare providers should report to us if they have a case of what they think is, is measles. But sentinel surveillance, the syndromic surveillance is also useful for identifying individual visits that are likely to be associated with a high-impact pathogen like a measles visit.
And, and so that can be flagged for us at the Department of Public Health. We can do a little bit of follow-up, see if it actually is something we need to know about and then can work with all of you and we can all do the public health work that we need to.
And then sort of the new thing, new capacity that syndromic surveillance is going to be able to provide for us. And I'm super excited about this is, you know, normally like for the routine situational awareness piece of this, we have to tell syndromic surveillance what to look for. We’re like, this is the ICD-10 code we want you to tell us about. But anomaly detection is this new capability. And really what it’s going to do is it uses an algorithm that will help it identify any unusual trends that where we don’t have to tell them in advance what to look for. So, it’s going to utilize those diagnosis codes to identify kind of rapid unexpected changes in any of these temporal trends.
And that will also then be, you know, that information will be shared and we’ll work with you all to sort of suss it out and see if there’s a there, there and something that requires public health intervention. Next slide.
You all are pretty familiar with our state public health laboratory and they are of course also making sure that they are staffed and ready to go to provide testing for anything that they already provide testing for. So, we’re thinking sort of two types of groups of testing specifically.
One is, you know, they are heavily involved when it comes to investigating foodborne illness outbreaks, not just in testing people, but also sometimes in testing food so we can figure out what's going on. So that’s one category of types of work that they’re prepared for.
And then of course there’s the specialized testing that right is not generally available through commercial laboratories and they will be available for that. In addition, our state public health laboratory is, you know, our link to additional testing resources that might be necessary at CDC or other public health labs in the in the network throughout the United States. Last slide.
And then just there’s some other resources that are going to be available to us to help us kind of watch everything that’s going on. So again, in the realm of situational awareness, we’re going to be utilizing BEACON, which is a program out of the Boston University Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases that utilizes a combination of artificial intelligence, large language models, and then also this network of humans, global experts, right? To look at what the AI comes out with and say, “Oh yeah, this is a thing. We want to make sure we're watching it” or, “Oh no, this is not a thing.”
And they have a public website, you know, right, it’s all, it’s all out there. But they will also be providing us and other host cities specific situational awareness, awareness materials that are going to be a little bit more in-depth.
And they are then also working with the Georgetown MedStar National Center for Health Security and Resilience, which is based in DC and they will be sharing information. The National Center will also be hosting calls with jurisdictions for information sharing and will be producing other reports as well. So there’s going to be a lot of information.
And then lastly, I would say we are of course utilizing some wastewater as well. You know, wastewater is not the answer to everything. I think we hoped it was going to be during COVID, but it is definitely helpful. It there is some inherent delay in data availability, just like testing humans, right?
But we do have a current plan that through June and July, we’re working with a contractor who’s going to provide some expanded testing for us looking at COVID, RSV, influenza, A and B and subtype.
So, it could tell us like if they saw Avian flu, for instance, measles, norovirus, Hep A and then mpox. And all of those are things again, not like actionable in and of themselves, but will be that information in addition to some of the other case reporting and syndromic surveillance may give us signals that that we need to respond to. So, you will hear more from us as we move forward.
And I'll go ahead and turn it over to Sam. Thank you.
(Sam Wong)
Thank you, Katie.
Next up on local public health coordination, we have Kristin from our Shared Services unit at the Office of Local and Regional Health. Kristin.
(Kristin Black)
Good afternoon, everybody. It’s nice to be here. And next slide, please.
So we’ve been hearing a lot from our different partners at DPH and just sort of want to bring that together to make sure you know how to stay informed throughout the process of World Cup planning in the summer months.
So again, we are providing FIFA World Cup updates on our monthly Tuesday webinar that you routinely turn into. We are hosting this today as a special webinar.
This is their only one I know of on the books right now to provide you information specific to World Cup and always look in the weekly bi-weekly newsletter the Pulse where they’ll be updates specific to World Cup as well.
And we do have some planned direct engagement with select local health departments. Foxborough, you know, we were talking about you, but others as we see fit regarding some of these locations across the state that might see higher impacts due to the World Cup. Next slide, please.
So, things local public health should be planning about, you guys know best some of this, you see it coming, but you'll hear in a few minutes about from Terry Howard about unhealthy heat and how to plan for that in your community outreach, cooling centers, all the things you’re used to around emergency preparedness and unhealthy heat.
I really want local public health to tune into considerations for regulatory impacts and the work that you routinely do.
For food, what we’re anticipating is obviously busier restaurants, more food trucks, permits for watch parties, etcetera, and also just increasing complaints, community sanitation issues around nuisance, pests, and trash.
And we’ll be providing resources on that. Housing specifically expect that your hotels will be busier than usual. They’ll be at capacity. You could expect to see a short-term rental surge, AirBNBs, etc. And, also just more crowds, you know, family, people staying, increased trash, noise complaints, etc.
Beaches are really important. This is going to be at the peak of the summer during your peak activity with beaches and so thinking about increased drowning risk, lifeguard coverage, your pool permits, your beach permits, thinking about increased crowds at these locations. It is that time of year where we see water quality issues. So being ready for signage and postage and outreach is needed.
We want to think about inequitable access. We know we have a lot of people traveling from far away.
Will some of these beaches be at Max capacity if they are trying to find a place to cool down and thinking about that inequitable access to these sites.
And also Sam raised the strange one. There are some people that actually rent private pools, sort of like AirBNB, but of pools. But that’s something to keep in mind that you might see complaints or concerns in your communities from that practice.
There are there’s discussion right now that we might see an increase in soccer camps during this time. There are groups that are playing some specialized activities. So, communicating with your recreational camps in your areas to make sure you're aware of those, those camp increases.
And lastly, septic and wastewater increased flows for any of your septic systems in your communities for these rentals at restaurant locations as well as increased demand for portable toilets. Next slide, please.
So really planning considerations what you can do in partnership with OLRH and your colleagues in public health. We’d encourage you to work across within your shared service arrangement and also across your shared service arrangement to plan for needs and surge staffing, especially considering these are your vacation months for many of you.
And so hoping that shared staff would be able to help coordinate coverage with leaves. And also thinking through adding temporary staffing, whether that’s bringing on temporary local public health staff or contractors for these communities that are experiencing higher impact during those months.
Some operational changes you could consider is allowing for temporary reciprocity for food truck permitting. I believe Foxborough is one of our groups that's already done this, but there are models where local boards of health can accept food permits from other communities that the Board of Health votes to approve. So that’s something you may want to look into.
And all of you, if you do have septic systems in your community, especially restaurants and pumping of septic systems and tanks, it might be a great time to reach out through your distribution and listservs to recommend that they plan for and schedule preventative maintenance and pumping is needed.
And thinking through communicating again, reaching out to your local restaurants about any increases you may see regarding outdoor seating or the concern that you know a lot of international travelers sometimes outdoor seating and smoking, additional signage might need to be added to those establishments to address any concerns with smoking.
So that’s all I have for you today and I’ll kick it back to Sam. Thanks.
(Sam Wong)
Thank you, Kristin.
Next up for environmental health concerns, we have Terry Howard from Bureau of Climate and Environmental Health. Terry.
(Terry Howard)
Thanks Sam.
I’m happy to be here and I just have to have take a moment and say, well, I appreciate Sam’s sort of framing up the beginning of the webinar with the beautiful weather and taking the opportunity to go outside afterwards to enjoy some of it.
Nothing sets anxiety into me like looking at an April forecast when I see three days under nearly 80 degrees, which is a nice segue into what I’m going to be talking about, which is our unhealthy heat response. So next slide, please.
I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different local health departments through a couple of these webinars, and I just wanted to take a moment to refresh people if I sound like a broken record about our unhealthy heat initiative and the unhealthy heat threshold that we’ve actually implemented a couple years ago.
So, just taking it a moment to remind folks that on the right-hand of this slide is our public-facing unhealthy heat forecasting webpage, which has information on forecast heat levels with an alert banner that changes color when three or more consecutive days of unhealthy heat are forecasted in next seven days.
So, the page also has a local forecast widget for high temperatures by city and town and links to resources for preparing and responding to unhealthy heat.
And on the left-hand side are some quick links to our extreme heat resources, and that features dashboard.
Just building on some of the concerns that Kristin just flagged for folks in on a couple slides. Next slide, please.
So, celebrate safely messaging in our HHAN alerts. It’s just about that time of year.
Our Unhealthy Heat web forecast page goes live on May 1 when we kick off our season with healthcare providers using the Han, reminding folks that the first is the worst. So, when we send out that HHAN, that goes to a lot of different healthcare providers.
So that’s doctors, nurses, that is local boards of health, it’s EMTs, it’s social workers, it’s community health workers. Last year, we sent out six alerts and we reached about 95,000 healthcare providers. I just want to note that we’re this year when we kick off, our first is the worst.
For folks that are traveling from other countries like England, Norway, and Scotland, even though it's not going to be May 1st, it’s going to be sometime in June. That very well, very well could be their first exposure to high heat, which makes them that much more vulnerable to heat related illness.
And BCEH is going to be partnering again this year with our Division of Community Engagement to host our webinar with our community-based organizations. That webinar is going to be on May 7th and that’s when we kick off our community heat alerts, which is we use two different ways for alerting.
We use the HHAN for healthcare providers and our community-based organization partnership with DCE to reach out to about 280 community-based organizations and librarians, as well. This year we’re going to be using Constant Contact to send out our alerts, which is going to allow for much more easily translated information.
The other piece that is DCE is working really hard this year to build that list of community-based organizations to also include some soccer-related organizations to highlight the World Cup. Next slide please.
So, Kerin talked about this, and it was mentioned again, I think by Brendan, and I’m going to build on that a little bit more.
So, we’re working on focusing on some event planning and food safety tool kits for mobile food vendors, for health departments and for visitors around food safety.
There’s going to be a guidance document for food truck vendors on permitting and food safety. You can see that on the left-hand side, it’s just about ready.
We’ll be sharing it with folks. There’s going to be a checklist, quick reference sheet for local health inspectors.
And also on the right-hand side, you see that “Report My Meal” link, which is published on both the Division of Food Protection’s website, and I believe it’s also on the BIDLS website, and that is also going to be translated into multiple languages.
The other thing that we’re planning on doing is we’re going to reach out to the communities that will be hosting watch parties to share these tool kits to offer our support. And we would really like to include local health departments in that outreach.
We know that Kerin mentioned that we’re really trying to monitor those FIFA licenses when they come out. But we’re also looking at some of the awards that Governor Healey awarded. You can see that link there.
And we’re going to at least start out with those 25 communities that we know have at least expressed interest in hosting a watch party. So that’s some of our next plans. Next slide, please.
And it wouldn’t be an environmental presentation if I didn’t get into bed bugs. So just a couple more things to highlight to build on what Kristen was talking about.
So again, local health department should be thinking about capacity surges for hotels and motels, and where their inspections stand with those hotels and motels, encouraging hotels to train housekeeping staff on identifying bedbugs.
Also thinking about short-term rentals, if that’s something that your community does allow that there’s a likelihood that you’re going to have an increase in complaints around those short-term rentals. Next slide, please.
So, I just wanted to include those nice visuals of what those bedbugs look like. I’m sure many of you already have that, some of those. If you don’t and if you would like something like that to use for your training with whether it’s management staff, then feel free to reach out and we can get these to you. Next slide, please.
And again, this is just sort of reiterating some of the proactive tips that you can be sharing with hotel management about being proactive about bedbugs, making sure that they reserve a vacant room in case there is an emergency, training staff on how to identify those bed bugs. Of course, making sure that between vacancies, they’re conducting that self-inspection, they’re replacing and laundering linens, vacuuming floors, doing a thorough cleaning of all surfaces, both hard and upholstered.
If they do find a problem, they should be integrating, implementing integrated pest management, making sure that they understand what pests they they’re concerned about installing traps, pillows, mattress encasements, and only using pesticides when absolutely necessary. Next slide please.
And I just wanted to include this as a quick reference guide. I want to make sure we leave enough time for any questions that folks might have. But if you’re looking for a sort of what the statutory authority is, this is a quick reference for you regarding the hotels, motels and of course just sort of saying for folks that are having specific questions that are coming up either around food protection, food inspections or around housing.
That’s Christopher is sort of heading, heading this work up for the Division of Food Protection. And Catherine Daigle is back from parental leave, and she is heading this up as far as the housing code is concerned in the hotel’s motels.
And I believe that is it for me. Thank you.
(Sam Wong)
Thank you, Terry.
We have a little bit of time that we could use for Q and A. I see that there is one question. I don’t know about it. Kerin, are you still around. There is one question about what Kerin shared earlier about the ticket sales at different games, whether local attendees for the FIFA games tickets consider within Massachusetts or a wider geographic location.
(Kerin Milesky)
Thanks Sam so much. So when on the chart that I had shown with the ticket slices that was sliced by international, domestic, and the local reference was local to New England.
(Sam Wong)
Got it. Thank you.
There is another question about cannabis use. We don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think anybody on the call knows the answer. But we will get back to you when we send out the slides as part of sharing the recording and the slides with you using The Pulse newsletter next week.
And there is one more question about volunteering opportunities.
(Kerin Milesky)
Sam, I can take that if that’s helpful.
(Sam Wong)
Yeah, great.
(Kerin Milesky)
So, in terms of volunteer opportunities, there had been the opportunity to volunteer with Boston 26, I mentioned is the host committee, that window has now closed and they’re in the process of training and scheduling volunteers.
There is, of course, always the opportunity to connect with your local Medical Reserve Corps or the state team is the Massachusetts Volunteer Program. I don’t have visibility if any of the local Medical Reserve Corps are getting involved, but I certainly would suggest that you check with them for any opportunities.
We’re not currently aware of anything for the state team, the Medical Volunteer Program, but you know always across either one of those platforms encourage volunteering. Thank you.
(Sam Wong)
Thank you, Kerin.
I don’t see any additional questions at this point.
Next slide, just want to mention that this is not the only time we’re going to provide you with information about planning for the World Cup.
Please continue checking our dedicated website on how DPH is Protecting Public Health during the FIFA World Cup webpage.
If you have any specific questions, feel free to reach out to me or to Kerin. Our contact information is on the screen. Additional updates when there is one will be provided through the monthly local public health webinars.
At this point, thank you for your collaboration. I’m looking forward to talk to you soon. Thank you.