Concord School District will continue with its free breakfast and lunch program while students are off school this week.
“Even though it’s quote-unquote vacation week, we are still keeping the food program running,” Concord School District Business Administrator Jack Dunn said. “We know there’s still a need out there and we want to be there to support the community.”
Food can be picked up at 30 different locations throughout the city. Meals are delivered via Concord School District small yellow buses or minivans. Menus are available on the Concord School District website daily. There are three different meals to choose from each day. The district also is debuting an application, Nutrislice, which can be used to order online and view drop off locations.
Concord School District Food Service Director Donna Reynolds said food is available for any child ages 18 or younger, including preschool children.
“Any child that gets to the site who is 18 years or younger, we are going to feed,” Reynolds said.
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health has been able to validate and stand up its own reprocessing efforts for N95 masks, a crucial piece of personal protective equipment for health care workers who could be exposed to COVID-19.
The process uses hydrogen peroxide vapor to sterilize the mask without compromising function and can extend the life of one mask by 20 times.
“If you have 50,000 masks, and we have around that amount on hand, really good, high-quality N95s, if you can re-use them 20 times that gets us to a million,” said Dr. George Blike, chief quality and value officer for D-HH. “So, suddenly having the ability to have a million uses of N95s, that puts us in the range of what we believe we actually need for some of our worst case scenarios.”
Blike said similar processes were being used at Yale University and Massachusetts General Hospital and had been “well-published.” And Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon has been using hydrogen peroxide vapor since 2017 to effectively sterilize patient rooms.
“We know this process, we have the equipment, and we decided it was best for us to implement our own process for better quality control,” Bilke said. “Our process not only sterilizes the masks, but maintains its filtering, fit and seal on the face.”
The U.S. Small Business Administration reported Saturday that 11,582 loans, totaling more than $2 billion, have been approved for New Hampshire small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program. The SBA expects to have details regarding the latest spending bill passed by Congress, which will expand COVID-19 relief programs, by early next week.
For those who want some help understanding the PPP, the New Hampshire Small Business Development Center is offering a free webinar Tuesday from 10-11 a.m. titled “Assistance for the PPP Application & Payroll Calculation. The link for that event can be found at nhsbdc.org/events.
The PPP webinar is part of a two-week series from the NHSBDC, which has scheduled a free webinar every weekday for the next two weeks. The goal is to help businesses move forward during the pandemic. Other topics include the best options for the self-employed to get COVID-19 relief and advice on generating cash flow during this time.
On Saturday, the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services announced 69 new positive test results for COVID-19 in the state, bringing the total of diagnosed cases to 1,787.
Hillsborough County had the highest number of new cases with 27, which included 10 in the city of Manchester and five in Nashua. There were 26 new positive tests in Rockingham County, three in Strafford County and one each in Belknap and Cheshire Counties. The county of residence had yet to be determined in three of the new cases.
The agency also announced seven additional deaths related to COVID-19 on Saturday. Four of the deaths were in Strafford County and two were in Hillsborough County. There were five females and two males and all were 60 years of age or older.
New Hampshire-based band Recycled Percussion dropped off a large bag of “Chaos and Kindness” cloth masks to Concord Hospital. “Chaos and Kindness” is part of the band’s marketing efforts and the name of Recycled Percussion’s TV show that can be seen on Vimeo.
Concord Hospital welcomes donations of more cloth masks as well as other items on their wish list: new N-95 masks, non-latex gloves, “half-face” respirators rated P95 or above, surgical caps with ties and buttons near the ears, simple elastic headbands with buttons for masks, new digital thermometers, unscented hand lotion and hand sanitizer.
The Telegraph newspaper, based in Nashua, announced Sunday that it will be moving all weekday editions online beginning Monday. The Sunday Telegraph will still be available in print and it will be delivered on Saturdays starting this Saturday.
“With COVID-19 all around us, this is the time for change,” an article in Sunday’s Telegraph read. “In recent years, a majority of our readers have accessed the news online. We know we want to move with our readers and advertisers. Today – when COVID-19 news needs to be analyzed and published immediately – we are accelerating our move into the future.”
A Massachusetts factory that normally makes some of the nation’s most beloved board games, including Monopoly, Risk and Candyland, has pivoted to making personal protective equipment for health care workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Charlie Baker said Saturday.
The Cartamundi-owned Hasbro factory is making 50,000 face shields per week for hospitals in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the Republican said after a tour of the East Longmeadow facility.
Making games and making personal protective equipment have the same goal, President and COO John Frascotti said.
“It is our job to make the world a better place for children and their families,” he said.
For the past four weeks, the New England Patriots and New England Revolution have teamed with the USA Veterans & Military Support Foundation to provide “vital food packages” to veterans, military families and veteran service organizations. The packages contain non-perishable foods and nutritionist-developed recipes to provide three meals a day for two people for 14 days.
More than one million meals have been assembled at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., and on Saturday a Patriots branded truck delivered some of those meals to White River Junction, Vt., North Hampton and Arundel, Maine. The food packages also have been available for pick up at six different locations in Massachusetts. More deliveries are scheduled for the coming weeks with another stop in North Hampton and one in Merrimack.
(Material from the Associated Press contributed to this story.)