With fewer than two weeks before the end of her term, outgoing Mayor Kim Janey on Friday looked back at the work she's done addressing the COVID-19 pandemic in Boston.
"I'm really proud of the work that we've done here," she said, thanking her top health officials and front-line partners.
"We are one of the most vaccinated big cities in the country," Janey continued, crediting work at City Hall and places like hospitals, community health centers and community groups.
Mayor-elect Michelle Wu will take office on Nov. 16 -- after a much shorter transition than most incoming mayors get -- and Janey said Friday that she speaks with her counterpart daily.
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She hoped that Boston will be able to keep up the momentum in the fight against the virus.
"We will continue the mask mandate -- we were the first to implement a mask mandate in our schools. We have done a lot of important work to slow the spread, it's why we remain below all of our … metrics of concern, in terms of COVID, and we just need to continue to do everything to get folks vaccinated. That is our best protection against this deadly virus," Janey said.
Among the metrics below the threshold of concern is the city's test positivity rate, Janey said, which recently stood at 2.1%.
As of Thursday, there have been 83,911 COVID-19 cases in Boston since the start of the pandemic, with 80,071 having recovered and 1,454 deaths. Nearly 66% of the city's population is now fully vaccinated and over 72% of residents have received at least one dose.
Boston is currently averaging about 90 new COVID-19 cases per day. Back Bay, Hyde Park, Roxbury, South Boston and the South End currently have higher rates of coronavirus than the city's other neighborhoods.
Massachusetts reported another 1,586 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 23 new deaths on Thursday. The report pushed the state's number of confirmed cases to 801,567 and its death toll to 18,671.
Massachusetts' COVID metrics, tracked on the Department of Public Health's interactive coronavirus dashboard, dashboard, are far lower than they were in spring, and while all of the major ones have risen from their lowest points, some have dipped in recent weeks.
Massachusetts' seven-day average of positive tests ticked up to 1.84% Thursday. It was once above 30%, but had dropped under 0.5% until the delta variant began surging in the state.
The number of patients in Massachusetts hospitals with confirmed COVID-19 cases fell 509; the figure was once nearly 4,000, but reached under an average of 85 at one point in July. Of those currently hospitalized, 168 are vaccinated, 147 are in intensive care units and 83 are intubated.
More than 10.3 million vaccine doses have now been administered in Massachusetts.
That includes, from the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, over 5 million first shots, more than 4.4 million second shots and over 543,000 booster shots. There have been more than 320,000 doses of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine administered.
Health officials on Thursday reported that a total of 4,751,045 Massachusetts residents have been fully vaccinated.
