WESTWOOD—Mayor Ray Arroyo, one of the valley’s most visible and engaged champions of vaccines in the fight against Covid-19, is fielding messages of love and support after he recently tested positive for the virus.
He said he’s quarantining until symptoms subside and was sad to anticipate missing his first meeting of the governing body since he was elected to council in 2011 and installed in 2012, and a meeting with Suez about flooding and the operation of the Woodcliff Lake Dam.
He wrote residents Nov. 8, “I share this with you all as I have transparently shared my understanding of Covid-19’s presence in our community over the last 19 months. Now I must report that it is in me.”
Arroyo wrote, “I had been waiting to get the third (booster) shot. I’d wanted to get a blood test to determine my level of antibodies. I should have just gotten the third shot as soon as I was eligible.”
He said, “I believe had I done that I might still have gotten infected. But I doubt I’d have even minor symptoms.”
He said he and his wife, Jo Ann, were informed they were exposed to someone with symptoms, and the couple’s subsequent tests showed that, fortunately, Jo Ann was negative.
Arroyo observed that he recently wrote about the year’s wonderful Halloween festivities in Westwood as a great contrast to the situation in 2020.
“I wrote that Covid seemed a bad dream: a night terror gradually receding from memory as we emerge from a fitful sleep. [See Letters, page 2.] A week later, I woke from a fitful sleep to a head cold, scratchy throat, and some minor congestion. I didn’t think anything of it. It reminded me of the questioning we’d all done, recalling allergy-like symptoms at the beginning of the pandemic, and wondering if we’d actually had experienced mildly symptomatic Covid-19 before we knew what it was,” Arroyo said.
He added, “But I was informed that during the week I’d been around someone who’d come down with symptomatic Covid-19. So my wife and I went and got the rapid test. She and I are both double-vaccinated.”
He said, “We are all fortunate to live in the country that has rapidly produced and distributed effective vaccines and healing, antiviral drug therapies in response to the pandemic. The pharmaceutical scientists responsible for these advances have turned what was once a death sentence for so many into a mostly tolerable flu or bad head cold for 95% of those who are vaccinated. And they did it in less than two years. That is truly remarkable.”
Arroyo said the council president and borough administrator would attend the Suez meeting in his stead.
“And I’m going to miss Veterans Day [observances on Thursday]. So I am sad about that. But I’m probably not going to die from Covid-19. And I am extremely happy about that.”
This reporter reached out to Arroyo to wish him well, as so many have done on Facebook and elsewhere, and observed that his announcement might help others to go for the vaccine.
“That was absolutely my rationale for sharing my misfortune,” he said.
He shared that he’s been struggling somewhat with insomnia but did recently get a better night’s sleep. “I think it’s my stress about not giving it to my wife and son.”
Arroyo is the second Pascack Valley mayor to have been diagnosed with Covid-19, to our knowledge. This March, Township of Washington Mayor Peter Calamari, a fellow Republican, was briefly hospitalized with it — and similarly had many supporters to thank for their concern and care.
In late September Arroyo released the borough’s latest Covid-19 numbers, saying PVMC had just reported one Covid-19 in-patient in a medical — not an ICU — bed. Four emergency room walk-ins were treated and released.
The transmission rate was still above 1.0, at 1.06, “meaning each individual infected is still infecting slightly more than 1 additional person,” he said.
He said at the time that PVMC administration had advised that “the Northeast is the area with the lowest Covid numbers, and this has been the case for about a week now. That is a big change since the inception of Covid. The change is attributed to the high vaccination rates in the community.”
He added that although area breakthrough infections are possible, “statistics suggest the unvaccinated are at far greater risk of contracting the disease and, depending upon age and general health, ending up severely ill, hospitalized — or worse.”
In July, Arroyo had the pleasure of seeing his nominee, resident Lisa McKoy, named a Fifth District Hometown Hero for her work leading a group of Westwood Borough volunteers assisting Hackensack Meridian Health Pascack Valley Medical Center on Westwood’s vaccination days.
“She worked long hours and went door-to-door in her neighborhood to reach out to seniors without social media, helping get hundreds of Westwood seniors, residents, teachers, and workers vaccinated,” he said.
Arroyo added, “Lisa epitomizes the kind heart and unbreakable resolve of Westwood: When things were at our very worst she was at her very best.”
And he lauded the work of Councilwoman Cheryl Hodges, Westwood’s council liaison to the Board of Health — and the council’s first liaison to Pascack Valley Medical Center, where she was instrumental in arranging vaccines to seniors, teachers and merchants.
She said during her re-election campaign she was working on a program to administer booster shots to those same residents who need them.