Governor Andrew M. Cuomo returned on Monday to the scene of one of the most important moments in the epic battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, as he announced in the coming weeks that ten more mass vaccination sites should be opened across the state, including three on Long Island.
The sites here will be located on the Suffolk County Community College Campus in Brentwood, the SUNY Old Westbury Campus and the SUNY Stony Brook Campus in Southampton.
“Thanks to the increasing vaccine supply of our partners in Washington, we can use more of our state’s ability to distribute doses, and once it is open, these new sites will enable us to hold large-scale shots,” Cuomo said. said in a statement.
The state already operates mass vaccination sites at Jones Beach and the Stony Brook University campus in Stony Brook.
New York will also get an additional vaccination site at a location yet to be announced in the Bronx, Cuomo said. The state has not yet set specific dates for vaccinating sites.
The looming increase in vaccination options, announced on a day when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said fully vaccinated people could congregate indoors without masks, was welcomed by Nassau County CEO Laura Curran, which said 23.5% of the country’s residents have had at least one COVID-19 shot so far.
Two of the three approved vaccine formulations require two shots to be effective.
“New CDC guidelines issued today confirm that taking the vaccine is the best tool to return to some kind of normal,” Curran said in a statement. “My message to Nassau residents is simple: if you qualify and get the opportunity, I urge you to give it a try.”
The governor made the announcement at the Jacob Javits Conference Center in Manhattan and made a revisit about a place that was turned into a mass hospital last year, when New York was turning from an epidemic that affected the city and state. seized and a large part of society after a staggering standstill.
Cuomo, who is defending the worst crisis of his political career amid allegations of sexual harassment and disguising the number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, on Monday rather focused on how the massive conference hall became a “sea”. of army beds to treat victims of the deadly virus as hospitals are overwhelmed in the spring of 2020.
He describes the fear he saw on the faces of the national guards and army personnel who manned the center in the early days when scientists knew little about the virus.
The conversion of the center into a massive emergency hospital was something no conference center on the planet has ever done, Cuomo said.
He remembered talking to the National Guardsmen.
“They are in this place that looked like it was a scene from a science fiction movie. It looked like it was after the apocalypse,” he said. ‘And the National Guard was scared. You could see it in their eyes.
“But they showed up. And it was so powerful for me. In this terrifying scene – jeeps, army trucks, backpacks – they showed up … They had the courage to show up.”
A painful year ‘
Cuomo has highlighted the state’s progress since the peak of the pandemic and has urged state residents, especially in minority communities, to take advantage of vaccine availability and the multiple sites now in use. Dozens of black clergymen stood behind him, and he identified them as supporters of the vaccines. One received a shot during the event, which was streamed live.
“It was a painful year … Death, suffering, anxiety, loss, but we got it right,” Cuomo said, deviating from how his live briefings were presented to close the event for the press, citing COVID-19 restrictions as the reason. . “We are now at the end, or at the beginning of the end. Why? Because we have a vaccine,” Cuomo added.
He said the Javits Center, which was open 24 hours a day to deliver shots to COVID-19, did more vaccinations over the weekend than anywhere else in the United States.
The center registered 13,431 shots fired during 24 hours Saturday and Sunday, and then 13,713 Sunday through Monday morning, he said.
Cuomo also said that so far, about 40,000 vaccines have been administered at 48 temporary pop-ups across the state.
The state’s seven-day average for positivity in COVID-19 tests was 3.19%. Out of 146,456 test results reported on Sunday, 3.62% returned positive for a total of 5,309 new cases in the state.
The average of seven days on Long Island was 4.28%, with a number of days exceeding 4%. The number of newly confirmed cases in Sunday’s test results was 453 in Nassau County, 552 in Suffolk County, and 2,747 in New York City.
Across the country, 64 people died Sunday from causes of the virus, including six in Nassau and one in Suffolk.
In NYC, a day of remembrance
Meanwhile, New York City will celebrate the first year of its first death to COVID-19 on March 14 with a day of remembrance, Mayor Bill de Blasio said at his daily news conference.
“We are going to celebrate Sunday with a day of respect and love for the families who lost loved ones in this crisis,” he said. “We will remember the people we lost. We will keep them close. But it is also a time to think about all that this city has gone through, and the power and compassion and love that New Yorkers have shown.”
Family members who have lost loved ones to the virus can submit names and photos here. The memorial, which begins at 7:45 p.m., will be broadcast live on social media, including Twitter and Facebook.
The city vaccinated 100,000 over the weekend, bringing the total to 2.32 million New Yorkers, de Blasio said.
The goal, he said, is to vaccinate 500,000 residents of the city as soon as supply increases.
The city has also announced plans to vaccinate between 14,000 and 23,000 elderly people with the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine over the next seven weeks. The house-to-house effort began in the Co-op City in Bronx, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, Queens. The plan is to vaccinate at least 1,200 senior residents a week, de Blasio said.
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