Governor Andrew M. Cuomo returned on Monday to the scene of one of the most important moments in the epic battle against the pandemic COVID-19, announcing the opening in the coming weeks of 10 more mass vaccination sites across the state, including three on Long Island.
The locations here will be located on the Suffolk County Community College campus in Brentwood, on the SUNY Old Westbury campus and on the SUNY Stony Brook campus in Southampton.
“Thanks to the increased supply of vaccines from our partners in Washington, we are able to make more use of our state’s capacity to distribute doses and, once opened, these new locations will allow us to continue to deliver vaccines on a large scale,” said Cuomo. in a statement.
The state already operates mass vaccination sites in Jones Beach and on the campus of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook.
New York City will also receive an additional vaccination site at a site yet to be announced in the Bronx, Cuomo said. The state has not yet set specific dates for these vaccination posts to start operating.
The impending surge in vaccination options, announced on a day when the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that fully vaccinated people can gather indoors without masks, was welcomed by Nassau County executive Laura Curran , which said that 23.5% of county residents have received at least one COVID-19 fired so far.
Two of the three approved vaccine formulations require two injections to be effective.
“The new CDC guidance released today confirms that vaccination is the best tool we have to return to some kind of normality,” said Curran in a statement. “My message to the residents of Nassau is simple: when you are eligible and have the opportunity, I recommend that you try.”
The governor made the announcement at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, revisiting a place that was turned into a mass emergency hospital last year, when New York was spinning out of an epidemic that hit the city and the state and brought much of it of society to a disconcerting standstill.
Cuomo, rejecting perhaps the worst crisis of his political career amid allegations of sexual harassment and covering up the number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, instead focused on Monday on how the huge convention hall turned vaccination site, it had been a “sea” of army cradles to treat victims of the deadly virus while hospitals were filled to capacity in the spring of 2020.
He described the fear he saw on the faces of National Guards and Army personnel who worked at the center in the early days, when scientists knew little about the virus.
Converting the center into a huge emergency hospital was something “no convention center on the planet has ever done,” said Cuomo.
He remembered how he spoke to the National Guards.
“They are in this place that looked like a scene from a sci-fi movie. It looked like it was after the apocalypse,” he said. “And the National Guard was scared. I could see it in their eyes.
“But they showed up. And that’s what was so powerful for me. In this scary scene – jeeps, army trucks, body bags – they showed up … They had the courage to show up.”
‘A painful year’
Cuomo praised the state’s progress since the peak of the pandemic and urged state residents, especially in minority communities, to take advantage of the vaccine’s availability and the various locations that are now operational. A dozen black clerics were after him, and he appointed them as supporters of the vaccines. One was shot during the event, which was broadcast live.
“It was a painful year … Death, suffering, anxiety, loss, but we have overcome it,” said Cuomo, starting with how his live briefings were conducted to close the event for the press, citing COVID-19 restrictions as the reason. “We are now at the end, or the beginning of the end. Because? Because we have a vaccine, ”added Cuomo.
He said the Javits Center, which was open 24 hours to administer injections for COVID-19, “made more vaccinations than anywhere else in the United States of America” over the weekend.
The center recorded 13,431 shots fired over 24 hours on Saturday and Sunday, and then 13,713 from Sunday to Monday morning, he said.
Cuomo also said that about 40,000 vaccines have been administered at 48 temporary sites across the state so far.
The seven-day state average for positivity in the COVID-19 tests was 3.19%, state data showed. Of the 146,456 test results reported on Sunday, 3.62% tested positive for a total of 5,309 new cases in the state.
The seven-day average on Long Island was 4.28%, with the number persisting above 4% for several days. The number of new cases confirmed in Sunday’s test results was 453 in Nassau County, 552 in Suffolk County and 2,747 in New York City.
Across the state, 64 people died on Sunday from virus-related causes, including six in Nassau and one in Suffolk.
In NYC, a day of remembrance
Meanwhile, New York City will mark the one-year anniversary of its first COVID-19 death on March 14 with a day of remembrance, Mayor Bill de Blasio said at his daily news conference.
“We will mark Sunday with a day of respect and love for families that have 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 strength, 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 will begin at 7:45 pm, will be broadcast live on social media, including Twitter and Facebook.
The city vaccinated 100,000 over the weekend, bringing the total so far to 2.32 million New Yorkers, 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 elderly people at home with the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine over the next seven weeks. The door-to-door effort began in the Co-op city in the Bronx, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, Queens. The plan is to vaccinate at least 1,200 elderly people who stay at home every week, said de Blasio.
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