Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo returned to the scene Monday of one of the most pivotal moments in the epic battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, when he announced the opening in the coming weeks of 10 more massive vaccination centers across the state, including three on Long Island.
The locations here are on the campus of Suffolk County Community College in Brentwood, the SUNY Old Westbury Campus and the SUNY Stony Brook campus in Southampton.
“The increasing vaccine supply from our partners in Washington will allow us to use more of our state’s capacity to distribute doses, and once they open, these new locations will allow us to continue shooting at scale,” said Cuomo. in a statement.
The state already operates massive vaccination sites on Jones Beach and the Stony Brook University campus in Stony Brook.
New York City is also getting an additional vaccination site in an yet to be announced site in the Bronx, Cuomo said. The state has not yet set specific dates for those vaccination sites to become operational.
The imminent increase in vaccination options, announced on a day when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said fully vaccinated people can congregate indoors without masks, was welcomed by Laura Curran, director of Nassau County, who said 23.5% of the county’s residents have at least one COVID-19 shot to date.
Two of the three approved vaccine formulations require two injections to be effective.
“New CDC guidelines released today confirm that vaccination is the single best tool we have for getting back to some sort of normal,” Curran said in a statement. “My message to the residents of Nassau is simple: if you qualify and have the opportunity, I urge you to shoot.”
The Governor made the announcement at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, visiting a place that had turned into a massive emergency hospital last year, as New York City was spinning an epidemic that had swept the city and state and a major part of society. mind-boggling downtime.
Cuomo, who fended off arguably the worst crisis of his political career amid sexual harassment allegations and obscured COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, Monday instead focused on how the massive convention hall became a vaccination site, a ‘sea used army cots to treat victims of the deadly virus as hospitals became overwhelmed in the spring of 2020.
He described the fear he saw on the faces of the National Guard and the army personnel who manned the center in the early days when scientists were still little aware of the virus.
Converting the center into a massive emergency hospital was something “that a convention center in the world has never done before,” said Cuomo.
He remembered talking to the National Guard.
“They’re 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 I found that so powerful. In this terrifying scene – jeeps, army trucks, body bags – they came … They had the courage to appear. ”
‘A painful year’
Cuomo praised the state’s progress since the pandemic’s peak and urged residents of the state, particularly in minority communities, to take advantage of the availability of vaccines and the many sites now operational. A dozen black clergymen were behind him, and he pointed to them as advocates of the vaccines. One got a shot during the event, which was streamed live.
“It was a painful year … Death, suffering, fear, loss, but we got through it,” said Cuomo, starting from how his live briefings were held to close the event to the press, taking COVID-19 limitations as the reason. . “We’re at the end now, or the beginning of the end. Why? Because we have a vaccine,” added Cuomo.
He said the Javits Center, which is open 24 hours a day to administer injections for COVID-19, has “given more vaccinations than anywhere else in the United States of America this weekend.”
The center registered 13,431 shots delivered over 24 hours on Saturday and Sunday, and then 13,713 from Sunday through Monday morning, he said.
Cuomo also said that about 40,000 vaccines have been administered at 48 temporary pop-up sites across the state so far.
The statewide mean over seven days for positivity in COVID-19 tests was 3.19%, state data showed. Of the 146,456 test results reported Sunday, 3.62% came back positive for a total of 5,309 new cases in the state.
The seven-day average on Long Island was 4.28%, with a figure remaining above 4% for several days. The number of new confirmed cases in test results Sunday was 453 in Nassau County, 552 in Suffolk County and 2,747 in New York City.
Statewide, 64 people died on Sunday from causes linked to the virus, including six in Nassau and one in Suffolk.
In NYC, a memorial day
Meanwhile, New York City is celebrating the one-year anniversary of his first death from COVID-19 on March 14 with a day of commemoration, Mayor Bill de Blasio said at his daily press conference.
“We are going to mark Sunday with a day of respect and love for the families who have lost loved ones in this crisis,” he said. “We will remember the people we lost. We’re going to hold them close. But it’s also a time to reflect on all that this city has been through and the strength, compassion and love that New Yorkers have shown. ”
Relatives who have lost loved ones to the virus can submit names and pictures here. The memorial, which starts at 7:45 PM, will be streamed live on social media, including Twitter and Facebook.
The city vaccinated 100,000 people over the weekend, bringing the total to 2.32 million New Yorkers so far, de Blasio said.
The goal, he said, is to vaccinate 500,000 city residents as soon as the supply increases.
The city also announced plans to vaccinate between 14,000 and 23,000 homebound seniors with the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine over the next seven weeks. The door-to-door efforts began in Co-op City in the Bronx, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, Queens. The plan is to vaccinate at least 1,200 homebound seniors every week, de Blasio said.
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