A Scramble to Boost Vaccinations in New York |
Weather: Mixed clouds and sun, with a high around 40. |
Alternate-side parking: In effect until Jan. 18 (Martin Luther King’s Birthday). |
 | | David 'Dee' Delgado/Reuters |
|
New York is now entering its fifth week since coronavirus vaccinations began. But the effort has been rife with complications. |
Medical providers, unable to find patients who met the state’s vaccination guidelines, have reported throwing away doses. A more transmissible variant of the virus has been found in the state. Local officials, like Mayor Bill de Blasio, have said the rollout has been slow because of their inability to distribute vaccine more quickly to groups outside of the groups the state designated. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has pointed the finger at poor execution from hospital management, among other problems. |
This weekend, officials scrambled to jump-start the effort. |
For weeks, Mr. Cuomo maintained that the first vaccinations should go only to the most at-risk health care workers, and residents and staff of nursing homes and group homes. |
But on Friday, Mr. Cuomo said that starting as early as Monday, a wider range of essential workers, including teachers, could get vaccinated, as well as New Yorkers 75 years and older. |
On Saturday, the state loosened the guidelines again. Medical providers can now also vaccinate employees who interact with the public if there are extra doses in a vial and no one from “the priority population can come in before the doses expire.” |
On Sunday, New York City opened five vaccination centers: facilities for mass inoculation at the Brooklyn Army Terminal and the Bathgate Contract Postal Station in the Bronx; and smaller “vaccine hubs” at the South Bronx Educational Campus, the Bushwick Educational Campus in Brooklyn and Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens. |
City officials are urging eligible people to sign up online to book an appointment to get the vaccine. |
More than 8,400 people are hospitalized statewide, Gov. Cuomo said on Sunday, more than double the number at the beginning of December. The statewide rate of positive test results was 6.22 percent, compared with around 5 percent at the beginning of December. |
In New York City, the seven-day average positivity rate was 8.77 percent, Mr. de Blasio said on Sunday, compared with about 5.5 percent at the beginning of December. There were 251 new hospitalizations, compared with a seven-day average of 151 at the beginning of December. |
The new Moynihan Train Hall’s hours and seating limitations are designed to keep out homeless people who have found refuge in nearby Penn Station, advocates for the homeless say. [The City] |
A police official who was assigned to combat workplace harassment, and who was alleged to have a lengthy history of racist, bigoted remarks online, has been suspended without pay for 30 days. [Gothamist] |
A woman holding her daughter in her arms jumped off a 13-story building in Hell’s Kitchen, killing them both, police said. [Daily News] |
And finally: 177 portraits of ‘Ms. Arline’ |
Growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1980s, the artist Kambui Olujimi had a fulfilled childhood in the span of a single block, on Quincy Street. |
Families shared cultural roots in the South and the Caribbean. The children played together, using the biggest tree on the block as home base for games of hot-peas-and-butter and freeze tag. Parents kept an eye on all the kids. |
Bed-Stuy in those days was a patchwork, Mr. Olujimi recalled. Some blocks were derelict and dangerous. But Quincy Street between Patchen Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard was the other kind: vibrant with family and community life. |
“This block was tight,” Mr. Olujimi said. “This was a block.” |
Mr. Olujimi’s work is eclectic — spanning sculpture, installation, drawing, photography, video — but it often addresses collective memory and how it blurs or gets erased. |
For the last six years, he has turned that attention to the block that forged him, where he spent most of his childhood and then returned for 20 years of adult life, until 2015. His tribute to the block takes the form of repeated portraits of a single person at its core: Catherine Arline, the longtime block president universally known as “Ms. Arline,” who died in 2014 at age 77. |
“Walk With Me,” his series of 177 portraits in ink on paper, is now on view at the nonprofit Project for Empty Space, in Newark, and in an online tour. Based on a single source image — a photograph of Ms. Arline at age 18 — they are at once uniform and endlessly varied. |
Jasmine Wahi, the co-director of Project for Empty Space, who curated the exhibition with Rebecca Jampol, called the series a kind of alternative monument. “What does it mean to create a monument for someone who is so impactful at a micro-community level?” Ms. Wahi said. “In examining multiples of a single person, the series speaks more than any statue could.” |
It’s Monday — be a good neighbor. |
Metropolitan Diary: Who is it? |
I graduated from a Jersey Shore high school in 1965. After graduation, a few of my classmates and I took a trip to New York City to do some shopping and see the sights. |
At one point, as we were standing at a busy intersection, we noticed an older man in a nicely tailored overcoat nearby. He looked very familiar. |
My friends and I all looked at one another, wondering, “Could that be who we think it is? No, it just couldn’t, could it?” |
We were buzzing with curiosity and excitement and frustrated we couldn’t remember the man’s name. Finally, on a dare, I agreed to approach him. |
I walked up to him slowly. |
“Excuse me sir,” I said. “Were you the Lion in ‘The Wizard of Oz?’” |
He smiled at me and nodded his head. |
Bert Lahr died two years later. |
New York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. You can also find it at nytoday.com. |
We’re experimenting with the format of New York Today. What would you like to see more (or less) of? Post a comment or email us: nytoday@nytimes.com. |
|
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire
Thank you to leave a comment on my site