Health

New York State has opened Covid-19 vaccinations this week to anyone 65 or older and the immunocompromised, members of police and fire departments, health workers at outpatient facilities including private medical and dental practices, teachers and school staff, child care workers, transit workers, and grocery store workers who interact with the public.

Since I started in my office on Shelter Island, I have had seven patients die. Having never started an essentially new primary care practice location before, I have no idea how that number compares. I just know that, in the context of a year full of more suffering and death among those for whom I am privileged to care for, those seven names stand out.  

The East Hampton School District will restrict classes to remote-only at the John M. Marshall Elementary School starting Friday, and will extend this week’s virtual instruction at the middle and high schools through next week.

The Sag Harbor School District on Monday unveiled a preliminary plan to begin administering Covid-19 tests to its students and staff members within the next two weeks.

The list of New Yorkers eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine was expanded this week to include those 65 and older, the immunocompromised, members of police and fire departments, health workers at outpatient facilities including private medical and dental practices, teachers and school staff, child-care workers, and grocery store workers who interact with the public.

With East Hampton High School reporting 13 active Covid-19 cases this week and the middle school reporting another nine among staff and students, the two schools will switch to fully remote classes next week, the district announced Friday afternoon.

Emergency medical service personnel on the South Fork reported this week that 911 call volume was down in 2020 as a whole but up in the usually quiet months of November and December. "People are, I think, afraid to go in the ambulance to the hospital, so things we normally see, we're not seeing people calling for," said Deborah O'Brien, president of the Sag Harbor Volunteer Ambulance Corps.

Due to a limited supply of Covid-19 vaccines, and the slower-than-expected pace of inoculating frontline health care workers, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday that it would be at least a month before members of the general public can begin receiving vaccinations. 

A drive-through Covid-19 testing site is scheduled to open at East Hampton Town Hall on Wednesday. The outdoor site, which will be open seven days per week from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., has been established in response to the surge in coronavirus transmission across Long Island and in New York State. 

By most measures, Suffolk County had its worst month of the pandemic so far: New cases per day were above 1,000 on 27 days, and hit a new high of just over 2,000 on Dec. 30. The total cumulative Covid-19 cases increased by 50 percent in the five East End towns during December.

Undaunted by quarantine-imposed isolation and a lack of supplies, Anne Kothari and Yuka Silvera spearheaded an effort to make personal protective equipment for hospital workers last winter and spring, ultimately donating hundreds of hand-sewn masks and caps.

The Rev. Tisha Williams of the First Baptist Church of Bridgehampton would say her biggest accomplishment during Covid "was remaining relevant in a digital space with consistent worship."

After shoppers cleaned out the aisles at Montauk's only grocery store, two fishermen with a boatload of fish began handing it out to anyone who wanted it.

The government meetings of East Hampton Town and Village abruptly migrated from municipal buildings to remote video conference, and LTV, East Hampton's public access channel, was instrumental in hosting those meetings and virtually connecting the public to elected representatives.

In the pandemic's early days, the owners of two Long Island businesses, Ken Wright of Wright and Company Construction in Bridgehampton, and Matthew Aboff, who has 32 painting supply stores across the Island, stepped up big time when it became known that a severe shortage of personal protective equipment for the Island's health care workers was looming.

For Carolyn Fitzgerald, a lifelong resident of East Hampton and a 30-year employee of the East Hampton School District, working in the school cafeteria every weekday from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. was a way to take her mind off the harsh realities of the Covid-19 pandemic.

John Daniels, the head custodian at the Bridgehampton School, is no stranger to the concept of clean. Forty years in the job not only means he knows how to take care of maintenance, but he also knows for whom he is doing it.

"I call them my babies. I get to see them all the way from pre-K to graduation," he said the other day.

When you know his background, it's easy to understand why Michael Donovan came to the aid of thousands of schoolchildren by donating Chromebook computers for them to do remote schooling during the pandemic.

Few groups had their worlds upended during the pandemic as much as students and teachers. Put to the test, many teachers became students of new technologies and rose to meet the challenges that distance learning presented.

With Covid-19 beginning to invade the South Fork, the Amagansett Library director closed the doors for the start of an expected two-and-one-half-week shutdown. The library would not reopen to the public for months.

When Covid-19 made safely practicing face-to-face medicine difficult, the Family Service League was able to pivot to telemedicine almost immediately — and its mission of caring for people's mental health was suddenly more important than ever, as the pandemic began to take a toll on the emotional well-being of many.

When the Eleanor Whitmore Early Childhood Center got a call from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's office asking if it could open its doors to provide free care to the children of essential workers, the staff made it happen.

The region's post office clerks, mail carriers, foremen, and other employees have been doing some of the heaviest lifting of all: processing and delivering a record-breaking volume of packages and mail for more customers than ever.

Being a school nurse has always been a mixture of care, compassion, and common sense. Now, you can add "contact tracing" to that list.

What started out as a kids' summer art program has taken on an entirely new life during the pandemic. Marit Molin expanded Hamptons Art Camp into Hamptons Community Outreach to reflect the organization's new, additional priorities: food insecurity, mental health, crisis support, and children's services.

Brett Surerus, a property manager who leads several nonprofit initiatives, and Alex Graham, a marketing adviser at Compass, lead the Shelter Island Action Alliance, which was quickly established in March to simultaneously feed those critical health care workers and support the island's restaurants.

In the spring, when Stony Brook Southampton Hospital began to fill up with patients who were "all so sick at the same time with the same thing, that's when it really got hard . . . and everything we were doing felt like it wasn't helping," recalled Samantha Jiudice, an intensive care unit nurse there. "Now, when the patients come . . . we have a checklist. It's not easier, it just comes more comfortably because we've experienced it already."

Andrew M. Cuomo announced updated quarantine guidelines for New York State on Tuesday, aligning them with those of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

George Dempsey, medical director of East Hampton Family Medicine, told The Star on Wednesday that a suite dedicated to testing for the novel coronavirus will open shortly after Christmas at the health care provider’s office at 200 Pantigo Place in East Hampton.

The battles we fight, from the surge here in New York in the spring to the bigger surge in spots across the country this summer, to the cresting wave from coast to coast that we are struggling against right now, are all battering down our defenses. But the vaccines offer hope, and every health care worker I know is sprinting like mad to get one.