Zoom
Health Director Bond at presser: Ready to spread gospel.
• 1st up: frontline workers, 1st responders, frail seniors.
• Other shots start “in a few weeks.”
• Goal: 100 a day.
• “Medical Reserve Corps” volunteers sought.
• Moderna preferred over Pfizer.
• Pop-ups, Meadow St. site planned.
• Public education campaign readied.
• City positivity rate soars to almost 3x “red zone” minimum.
• YNHH bed-occupancy hits 75 percent.
• New wave slams Fair Haven hardest.
• 120 new hotel beds for homeless.
City Health Director Maritza Bond and city Director of Public Nursing Jennifer Vazquez talked through those details of the city’s recently-completed mass vaccination plan during a virtual press conference held Friday afternoon on Zoom and YouTube Live.
The local public health officials said that the city submitted its mass vaccination plan to the state Department of Public Health on Dec. 3.
Federal approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is expected any day now. An approval of the Moderna vaccine is likely to come next week. The city health department has its sights set on getting shots into the arms of New Haveners in as soon as “a few weeks,” Bond said.
“We know right now that the vaccines help produce antibodies that fight the virus,” she said. “We know that vaccination can help prevent infection of Covid-19. And we want to make sure that people at risk of Covid get vaccinated. We will be working closely with state partners with the launch and implementation through the different phases.”
City of New Haven
The vaccines are on their way as New Haven — like much of the region and country — experiences an ongoing surge in new Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations.
The city currently has a positive case rate of 41 per 100,000 people, Bond said. That is well above the 15-per-100,000 rate that puts a municipality in the state’s “red zone.”
A recent spike in hospitalizations.
There are currently 225 Covid-positive inpatients in New Haven’s hospitals, including 61 in local Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Bond said Yale New Haven Hospital is currently at a bed-occupancy rate of 75 percent, with 53 percent of ventilators in use.
The city has recorded a total of 5,857 positive cases and 129 Covid-related fatalities since the start of the pandemic in March.
Logistical highlights of the health department’s mass vaccination plan covered in Friday’s briefing include:
• The city has asked the state to provide it with enough vaccines to for the health department to be able to administer “100 doses a day,” Bond said. Beyond that estimate, she said, the city is not certain how many dosages of which vaccines it will ultimately receive from the state.
• When the two leading vaccine candidates are ultimately approved by the federal government and make their way from the state to the city, Bond said, the city health department will primarily administer just the Moderna vaccine, and not the Pfizer vaccine. That’s because the former has a shelf life of 30 days (as opposed to five days for Pfizer), and it can be refrigerated (as opposed to frozen on dry ice, as is required by Pfizer). “Our main distribution will be the Moderna vaccine,” she said.
• The city is looking for Medical Reserve Corps volunteers, including those with and without medical training, to help roll out the mass vaccination plan. Vazquez (pictured) said that those with medical training would help actually administer shots at the health department’s 54 Meadow St. headquarters and at popups held across the city. Those without medical training would help with registration, intake, crowd control, and setting up popup clinics. Interested volunteers can sign up here.
• The city health department has requested that the state allow it to be one of the municipal health agencies to participate in the Phase 1A statewide vaccination effort, which could begin as early as next week and will focus on vaccinating frontline health care workers, nursing home residents, and medical first responders.
• What about winning the confidence of a potentially skeptical public? “We certainly are not going to mandate the vaccine,” Bond said. The city has, however, conducted has begun conducting anonymous surveys of its own emergency response staff to gauge employees’ opinions on whether or not they’d feel safe taking the vaccine. She encouraged other businesses to conduct similar anonymous surveys of their workforces to get a handle on how comfortable people are with it, and on what people’s concerns might be.
Bond also said that the city is also coordinating with Yale New Haven Hospital and other local healthcare providers to make sure that they are providing consistent messaging to the community about the safety, efficacy, and availability of vaccines. “We will be testing our messaging with key communities to make sure that our testing messages are not biased,” she said.
“I’m cautiously optimistic that this will be easier than we think,” Mayor Justin Elicker said, based on conversations he and his staff have had in various communities across the city with people eager to get the vaccine.
120 New Hotel Beds For Homeless; Surge Slams Fair Haven
In other Covid-related updates, city Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal (pictured) said that last weekend the city worked with regional homeless support providers to open up an additional 120 hotel beds in hotels throughout the region to protect vulnerable populations during the cold.
Those are added to 200 hotel beds the city already had available before last weekend as part of a months-long strategy of decompressing homeless shelters and putting the houseless in less dense, and therefore less dangerous, living environments during the pandemic.
Dalal said that roughly 70 percent of those hotel beds are currently filled.
City Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli said his department will host several webinars next week to advise and support local businesses during the ongoing “dark winter” of the pandemic. That will include a webinar specific to restaurants about direct advertising strategies, one specific to hotels, a canvass of the Hill North neighborhood, and a promotion of the minority business loan program available through the Community Foundation and the continued availability of grants from the Yale Community Fund.
Elicker and Bond said that the latest Covid surge has seen the Fair Haven neighborhood particularly hard hit by new cases. Elicker said the city is working on more Spanish-language outreach encouraging residents to wear masks and maintain social distances when possible.
“Social gathering continues to be a major issue, especially in my culture,” said Bond, who is Latina. “It’s been really hard not to be able to socialize outside our household. It is a culture shift, and frankly a shock for many.” She said that her department is stepping up outreach to Fair Haven small businesses and faith leaders to get the word out about how best to minimize the risk of infection.
First, thanks to Maritza Bond, Jennifer Vazquez, and their colleagues.
Second, have the city or state established priorities for Phase 1B? A substantial share of the population will be eligible for inoculations in this phase, including me. I'm 66, healthy, and retired. There is a good case for giving someone my age who works with the public or who has co-morbidities priority over me. But this quickly could get very complicated.