Health

The summer brings with it not only the joyful opportunity to spend time with friends and family or explore the outdoors, but also an associated increase in minor wounds and lacerations.

High Covid-19 vaccination rates on the South Fork are giving residents and visitors the confidence to return to their pre-pandemic routines albeit with a dose of caution. 

Yet another variant of SARS-CoV-2 has arisen to cause concern, the Delta variant, which seems to spread faster and make people sicker. If you're like many people lately who have been wondering what precisely this means for the pandemic, you're not alone.

Health care is immensely complicated at times, and there are only so many minutes in the day. Finding a means both to make sure all of a given patient's concerns are addressed while still making sure the time allotted to other patients is not unfairly infringed upon is one of the hardest balancing acts that health care providers are asked to accomplish, and delineating clear expectations from the start of the visit can work wonders in this regard.

"The emergency is over," Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Wedneday. Fifteen months after invoking emergency powers to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, he announced that the state of emergency will end on Thursday.

As of Monday, 71 percent of New Yorkers 18 and older had gotten at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control. To make it easier for people 12 and up to join the ranks of those partially or fully vaccinated locally, New York State will add Tuesday and Wednesday evening hours at its mass vaccination site at the Stony Brook Southampton college campus. 

Clearly, some sort of benefit does come from going out into the world and engaging with the micro-organisms waiting to be found in the dirt of playgrounds and on the snot-covered tables in classrooms. But there is no way of knowing which encounters with micro-organisms will be relatively benign and lead to increased immunity, and which have the potential to be devastating.

The Bridgehampton School's Future Farmers of America Club and its adviser, Judiann Carmack-Fayyaz, have designed a memorial dedicated to transportation workers who died during the pandemic.

On Tuesday, exactly one year, three months, and one week since the day that Suffolk County's first Covid-19 patient was admitted to Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that more than 70 percent of adult New Yorkers have received at least one vaccine shot and lifted most of the remaining pandemic restrictions on retail stores, restaurants, offices, gyms and fitness centers, amusement and family entertainment centers, hair salons and barber shops, and personal care businesses.

New York State Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said this week that when 70 percent of the state's adult population has gotten at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine most of the remaining pandemic restrictions will be lifted. While much of the rest of New York State has yet to reach that mark, East Hampton Town has already surpassed it, Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc announced Tuesday.

"I remember exactly what I was wearing, I remember exactly who was in the class, and I remember how hard I cried," said Colleen Saidman Yee of Yoga Shanti of the day in March 2020 when she closed her Sag Harbor yoga studio because of the pandemic. After barely surviving a 15-month shutdown, Yoga Shanti in Sag Harbor is seeking to regain its footing with new protocols designed to make students breathe easy about returning to group classes.

Bridgehampton School's fifth-grade book club battled a dragon over the past year and three months, though this particular creature wasn't the scaly, fire-breathing type from fantasy lore. It was worse. Their dragon went by the name Covid-19, and the battles played out in letters the students wrote that are on display at the Hampton Library.