City officials Tuesday urged residents not to hold large St. Patrick’s Day parties this weekend, noting that just 10 percent of Boston adults are fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
At a City Hall news conference, Mayor Martin J. Walsh said the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade through South Boston has been canceled for the second consecutive year because of the pandemic.
“I’m asking people not to have house parties, not to have parties with people that are not your immediate family member or in your immediate bubble,” Walsh said. “There is a light at the end of the tunnel . . . there is no question about it, we can see it. So don’t put our progress at risk.”
Marty Martinez, the city’s health and human services chief, said officials will be monitoring businesses this weekend to ensure they’re following safety protocols.
“We will be stressing to make sure that there aren’t those lines that are forming, not because we don’t want people to have a good time, but because we don’t want people to get the coronavirus,” Martinez said.
Testing for COVID-19 remains a key strategy in containing the virus, he added.
“In Boston, 90 percent of folks are not fully vaccinated,” Martinez said. “And so I stress to folks that we have to make sure that if you’re exposed or you’re connecting with others or you’re not feeling well, that you get tested.”
As of March 3, more than 113,000 Bostonians 16 and older had received their first vaccine dose. More than 56,000 residents are fully vaccinated.
Both Walsh and Martinez reiterated the city’s commitment to ensuring the vaccine is available to people of color and others hit hard by the pandemic.
“We are working to increase equity in this process for any resident or community that may face barriers,” Walsh said. “We are focusing on access in the Black community, the African-American community, the Latino community, the Asian community, and the immigrant community.”
Walsh touted both the mass vaccination sites and smaller locations in neighborhoods. On Friday, the city launched a mobile clinic at the Martin Luther King Towers in Roxbury, he said.
“More mobile clinics will be offered at [Boston Housing Authority] communities moving forward,” he said. “We’re working on that now.”
For the week ended Feb. 28, the city’s seven-day COVID-19 positivity rate was 3.6 percent, Walsh said, a marked improvement from earlier this year.
“These numbers are much better than the numbers we were seeing, certainly in January,” Walsh said. “So we’re excited to see that. We have seen a little bit of an uptick over the last 10 days, however, which is unfortunate.”
Governor Charlie Baker, meanwhile, expressed hope for better days to come as the herculean vaccination effort continues.
“If we can get a significant portion of our population vaccinated, and if the feds can amp up the supply in a big way, the possibilities and the opportunities there for us to get back to something that looks like what I would call, what I’ve been thinking of as sort of the next normal, is very real,” Baker said at a virtual event to announce MassDevelopment grants for renovation projects in several communities.
Residents 65 and older and those with two or more qualifying health conditions are eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine under Phase 2 of the state’s program. On Thursday, eligibility will extend to K-12 educators, staff, and child-care workers, who will be able to book appointments at state sites about a week after CVS pharmacies expanded their eligibility list to include school employees.
Demand for appointments has been extremely high, and the state has come under sharp criticism for problems with its appointment website and for what critics have said is a lack of urgency in providing equitable access to the vaccine across socioeconomic lines. The Baker administration has pointed to its efforts to improve the website and target communities hardest hit by the pandemic and noted that Massachusetts ranks first in administering total vaccine doses per capita among states with at least 5 million residents.
Baker also touched on what he called the future of work, observing which has been upended during the pandemic as many companies shifted to remote work.
“I think we are all going to need to figure out how to lean into some of the changes that have taken place over the course of the past year, because some of them I don’t think are going away,” Baker said.
Baker said it’s critical that “we’re investing in making the opportunities to accentuate the positive or mitigate the negative of some of these changes.”
“It creates great opportunities for people at the state and local level to work together, and perhaps even put some federal resources to work to try to make some of this stuff happen,” he said.
Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.