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According to Nathan Burnett,founder of TickZone, a free site that scores tick risk for every town in the country and updates it every morning, Norfolk County has a CDC Lyme rate of 81 cases per 100,000 people a year, among the highest in the country. In fact, it ranks in the top 10 percent of U.S. counties for reported Lyme disease.
At the summer peak, modeled tick risk across the county tops out in Dover, and the spread between towns comes down to habitat: how wooded each town is, and how broken up that forest is.
According to Burnett, Medway
scores 60 at the summer peak, fifth in the county alongside Wellesley.
Franklin scores 58, which puts it in the upper middle of the list. Both
are in the county's wooded group.
Norfolk County is tightly packed at the top. The leading 17 towns are separated by 3
points, 61 down to 58, and the county only spreads out below that,
falling away to Quincy at 43.
The score in the table, below, is the peak-season
score, where each town sits at the height of tick season on a normal
warm day. Peak here refers to the time of year, not to best-case
weather, so it is not a ceiling. Each town's page shows today's live
score instead, which moves with the actual forecast, and because weather
is modeled per town the two numbers can sit either side of each other.
On Wednesday morning, Medway reads 62 against its peak of 60 and Dover reads 62
against 61, while Franklin reads 52 against 58. Both are correct and
they answer different questions. The table is the stable number and the actual website page shows today's score.
Every
one of the 28 towns lands in the Moderate band. There is no High-risk
town in Norfolk County and no Low-risk one either, and that is a real
result rather than a gap: 155 of the 351 Massachusetts towns we score
reach High at the summer peak, and none of them are in Norfolk. This is
the developed end of the state.
Since
all 28 towns share the same county disease baseline, what separates
them is habitat. Forest cover runs from 91 percent in Dover to 50
percent in Quincy and tracks the ranking almost the whole way down.
Franklin is 81 percent forested and Medway 83 percent, which is what
puts both in the upper group. Franklin is also the largest town in the
county by land area at 26.6 square miles, so there is a lot of that
woodland edge in it, noted Burnett
[Tick image courtesy of URI)
