The New Canaan Fire Department launched a new policy with respect to wearing masks after two municipal employees—neither of them firefighters—tested positive for COVID-19, officials said Tuesday. All personnel in the fire house will wear a surgical mask when there are two or more people in the same room, and if firefighters are unable to social-distance in the trucks, they will wear masks there, too, according to Fire Chief Jack Hennessey. “Community spread is out there, so we assume everybody we run into could be potentially infected, so we are protecting each other and ourselves from everybody,” Hennessey said during the Fire Commission’s regular meeting, held via videoconference.
He added, “We are trying to get better testing for our personnel but that is not available yet because they are still only testing symptomatic people and there is no antibody test available to the general public yet. So we are kind of in a holding pattern. No firefighters that I am aware of have tested positive or have COVID, but we do have a number of family members that are sick so we do have three or four people that have been missing work because of sickness in their families and we want to make sure that it does not come into the firehouse.”
Town Hall has been closed to the public since March 23.
