Suffolk: Ramping up COVID-19 vaccinations for residents struggling with access

Suffolk County officials said Tuesday they are ramping up COVID-19 vaccine distribution efforts, including through the activation of more pop-up community sites and pursuing at-home vaccinations for homebound residents.

The county is targeting groups that have struggled to access vaccines, such as people who are homeless or detained at county jails and industrial workers who had been excluded from eligibility, officials said. The state expanded eligibility Tuesday to include anyone 16 and older.

County Executive Steve Bellone said the stepped-up efforts came after he spent months "advocating for the state to expand eligibility to include our industrial workforce because the economic success of our region is directly tied to the strength of the business and manufacturing sectors."

Meanwhile, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo warned Wednesday that the fight against COVID-19 is far from over.

"COVID is still a threat," Cuomo said at a livestreamed briefing that centered mainly on the state budget. "This is a race between the increase in COVID infection and how quickly we increase vaccinations."

He noted that 59 New Yorkers died of causes related to the virus on Tuesday, and more than 400 in the last week.

"We’re not past COVID," he said.

Suffolk County plans to vaccinate about 100 homebound people a week at their residences with its public health nursing staff of five administering those shots, chief deputy county executive Lisa Black said.

The at-home program began as soon as the county received Johnson & Johnson doses last week, she said. The one-shot dose of that vaccine formulation makes it logistically easier to vaccinate more people, she said. The other two options, the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, require two doses spaced out over several weeks.

State figures show 34.3% of Suffolk residents had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine by Wednesday morning, while 41.2% of Nassau County residents had received first shots.

Suffolk is also deploying police medics to administer doses at community sites, Black said. They have given the shots in Coram and the Mastic and Shirley neighborhoods, among other communities, and will be deployed to Wyandanch on Saturday.

The county is planning to administer 300 Johnson & Johnson doses at the Masjid Darul Quran, a Muslim mosque and community center in Bay Shore, on Thursday, before Ramadan starts next week. Officials are looking to ensure second doses aren't due through the month's religious observances, Black said.

The county plans to partner with Northwell Health next week to administer Johnson & Johnson doses to people experiencing homelessness, Black said. Suffolk began giving the one-dose shots to jail inmates last week.

Bellone announced Tuesday that the county is reserving its Hauppauge mass vaccination site for workers at the Long Island Innovation Park at Hauppauge through Friday. Police medics administered 225 doses to manufacturing workers at Amneal Pharmaceuticals Tuesday night.

The county aims to administer about 1,800 first doses of the Pfizer vaccine for industrial workers at the H. Lee Dennison building over three days.

The county’s other mass vaccination sites, in Selden and Brentwood, which each administer about 1,000 doses a day, remain open to the general eligible public, Black said.

In the Town of Smithtown, officials said Wednesday they are partnering with St. Catherine of Siena Hospital staffers to administer approximately 400 Moderna vaccines to the town’s senior citizens between Wednesday and Thursday. The pop-up clinic is at the Eugene Cannataro Senior Citizens Center, running from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days.

"Today marks the culmination of months of work for our most vulnerable in the community," Smithtown Supervisor Edward Wehrheim said in a statement.

New York still plateauing on virus

COVID-19 levels continued to stagnate in test results statewide from Tuesday, state data released on Wednesday showed.

The daily positivity level in testing for the virus was 3.25% from 221,674 test results statewide, with a seven-day average of 3.48% statewide and 4.27% on Long Island. The level in New York City was 4.11%.

The number of new confirmed cases of the virus was 553 in Nassau, 662 in Suffolk and 3,467 in New York City.

Of the 59 people who died of coronavirus-related causes on Tuesday across the state, five were in Nassau and six in Suffolk.

Cuomo said that one of every three New Yorkers has received at least one vaccination shot, and one in every five is fully vaccinated. More than 10 million New Yorkers have been injected so far.

He ordered the state Department of Financial Services to extend until April 30 an emergency regulation that requires all health insurers to waive copays for the COVID-19 vaccine.

Cuomo said the move is aimed at ensuring there are no barriers to New Yorkers getting the vaccination, which he called "the weapon that will win the war against COVID."

The measure first went into effect Dec. 16.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday that the city government plans to begin offering special services to so-called long-haul sufferers of COVID-19, who experience lingering health symptoms from the virus.

Dr. Mitchell Katz, who is in charge of the city’s public hospital system, said: "While it may not be yet clear that there’s a single, you know, pill to take for long COVID — it’s very unlikely that that will be true — as physicians, we do know how to treat the symptoms that are disabling people, and that will be our focus."

The aftercare program will include ways to help the long-haul population go beyond the medical effects to include family, stress, economic and other consequences, said Dr. Amanda Johnson, who said the program might include a virtual support group and non-mandatory research studies.

With Matthew Chayes and Nicholas Spangler

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