ALBANY – Albany County announced Wednesday that it has launched a pre-registration option on its website for health care workers and emergency personnel currently eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
Province Manager Dan McCoy said the pre-registration system was intended to facilitate the registration process for vaccines for those eligible for category 1a and 1b who have not yet been vaccinated. The province announced online registration opportunities for vaccine clinics later in the week earlier Tuesday, but the gaps are being filled almost immediately, leaving many frustrated about the turn.
“No more ‘Hunger Games’ people,” McCoy said Wednesday. “It took a little longer than I wanted … but the biggest complaint is that people are fighting to get online, the (clinics) are filling up fast and they are being taken out.”
The province encourages essential workers from 1a and 1b to pre-register via the website, which is available at albany.518c19.com. While people aged 65 and over are also eligible for vaccination, the province is not authorized to vaccinate them.
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McCoy said the site allows people to choose from a list of chronic health conditions. People with certain chronic health conditions will be eligible for vaccination from next week, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced Monday and provinces are authorized to vaccinate it. They are also encouraged to pre-register via the website.
“From next week, Albany County will be able to vaccinate (people) of any age with diseases that include 65+,” state spokeswoman Mary Rozak said in an email. “We encourage anyone to pre-register and when eligible, they will be on the list.”
Those who fill out the form will be asked how they would like to be notified, including by text message, email or phone call.
Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan said the pre-registration form would also be available on the city’s website, saying people who help friends or loved ones sign up are welcome to fill out the form on behalf of the other person.
“The wonderful thing about this is if you are not computer literate, someone can help you fill it out,” she said. ‘So you can fill it out for someone as their helper. If you have a parent who does not want them to get the call to schedule the appointment, are you their assistant or are they their child and you want to get a call, you can enter the information. So we really try to ensure that we can contact people in a way that is going to be effective. ‘
Sheehan noted that the form also asks for an address, which will be useful if providers seek to offer equity-focused vaccine clinics that focus on certain housing developments.
“The (Albany) Pharmacology College, for example, was an excellent partner,” she said. “So if they get 60 vaccines and say they want to focus on the elderly at a specific housing complex, they can go to this list and retrieve everyone who’s already pre-registered from that address. So it allows those who get it. has a tool to enable them to under-represent the populations across the province at the moment … to gain access to the vaccine. ‘
Other local provinces have also moved to a pre-registration option in an effort to alleviate anxiety.
Schenectady County has even encouraged people 65 and older to pre-register on their website if the province is finally authorized to vaccinate that age group.
The members of the local state assembly, Patricia Fahy, John McDonald and Carrie Woerner, issued a joint statement earlier this week requesting the state to create its own instrument for pre-registration. At present, people are forced to visit or visit dozens of different provider websites daily – including the State Department for the Mass Vaccination Website for Vaccination Sites – to try to sign up for vaccination, often without a waiting list or to pre-register. option that will notify them when slots are available.
Mobile vaccination update
City and county officials also revealed Wednesday that a partnership with Mohawk Ambulance to bring the COVID-19 vaccine directly to elderly residents and others in vulnerable communities led to 727 people in the mainland last week. vaccinated.
The vast majority of the doses – 624 – were administered in Albany County, and 401 of them were administered in the city of Albany.
Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan said the partnership is intended to redress the inequalities in the breeds currently seen with vaccine vaccination locally and nationwide.
Among those vaccinated by the effort in the city of Albany, 62 percent went to black residents, who make up 24 percent of the city’s population; 29 percent went to white residents, who make up 57 percent of the population; and 5 percent went to Latino and / or Spanish members of the community, who make up 11 percent of the city’s population, she said.
“Where we found ourselves underperforming was in the Latino / Spanish community,” she said.
McCoy said there was a problem earlier this week after the county learned that volunteers from the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences had already vaccinated residents of the Albany Housing Authority complex who wanted to reach Mohawk Ambulance. This led to an extra allocation of doses that the country subsequently tried to use during a pop-up vaccination.
County lawmaker William Clay said Monday he was frustrated with the attempt after being asked to bring seniors to the site to receive vaccinations.
Clay, who leads the legislature’s Black Caucus, said he was asked to take the television and encourage others to receive it as part of the province’s pressure to ensure people of color feel comfortable getting the vaccine. to receive.
After Saturday, however, he said he would no longer participate in the effort.
“Look, when people got there, 33 of the vaccination slots assigned to this group were taken,” he said.
He said he understands that everyone involved has made decisions with good intentions and that there is an overall shortage of vaccine dosages, but questions how he can advertise the vaccine process to people he knows when problems like these arise.
“I do not know who to blame,” he said. “I like to believe that people have confidence in what I say and see what I do.”
County spokeswoman Mary Rozak said the shortage on Saturday was due to greater demand for the vaccine during previous vaccination efforts over the past few days and a miscommunication between the province’s partners and Clay to let him know that the actual vaccine stock on Saturday was less than they expected.
Rozak said those who did not get a shot on Saturday will be given preference when the next consignment arrives.
More deaths than cases, hospitalizations falling
Another seven residents of the Capital Region have died as a result of COVID-19 complications.
The daily update of Saratoga County, COVID-19, showed that five additional residents had died, bringing the province’s death toll from the disease to 137 – now the second highest in the metropolitan area.
Albany and Schenectady counties reported one death every Wednesday. The Albany County victim was a woman in her 70s and the Schenectady County victim was a woman in her 80s, officials confirmed.
The main region of eight counties has now lost at least 983 residents to the coronavirus since the pandemic began, and Albany County residents accounted for 336 of the deaths.
New infections and hospitalizations due to the virus are still falling in the region from their mid-January highs.
According to Tuesday, the region averaged 354 new cases of the virus per day, lower than 362 the previous day and a peak of 1,009 was observed on January 10, according to a Times Union analysis of data provided by local provinces. The proportion of locals who tested positive for the virus on Tuesday over an average of seven days fell to 3.3 percent on Tuesday, up from 3.4 percent the previous day and according to state-sponsored data, it is a high of last month. 10.2 percent observed.
The hospital in the capital region treated 313 patients with coronavirus on Tuesday, up from 334 the previous day and a high of 553 last month.
Steve Hughes contributed.
Where do we get our information?
We monitor local, regional, and national government updates and verify facts or data before publishing them. Resources we rely on include:
Local resources: Daily reports from health departments in Albany, Columbia, Greene, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Schenectady, Warren and Washington.
State resources: The Department of Health in New York and the COVID Report Card of the Department of Health.
National resources: National data on verified test sites compiled from local health departments, health care providers and cities, provinces and states. We also rely on national, state and provincial data from the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Case Tracker and The COVID Tracking Project.
Other resources: Vaccination information collected from government agencies, the companies that manufacture the vaccines, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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