THE CAMPAIGN TO CONVINCE The Elm City needs 130,000 vaccinations. It’s not going to happen without a fight.
By Zachary Groz Design by Natasha Gaither
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’m immune. I don’t leave the apartment. You got sick last April. We don’t know how long it’ll last. I won’t take it. You have a civic responsibility. No, I don’t. If you don’t take it now, it’ll be months before you’ll have the chance again. I’ll live with it. So it was settled. My grandfather, 89, newssavvy, sophisticated, sartorial, middle name Alfred, usually sweet, crippled by Covid, whose wife, my grandmother, died of it months before, refused the vaccine. There was no convincing him. The next day, my mother tried again. In New Haven, in the next days and months, hundreds of volunteers––organizers, clergy, students, and doctors––will be trying to do en masse what my mother tried to do with my grandfather. They’re part of the city’s campaign to convince. Now that two vaccines are effective and available, what’s left is persuading enough people to take them for their efficacy to matter. That campaign depends on two conditions. First, infrastructure: having the sites––converted Yale gyms, parking lots, churches––having the personnel, and having the shots. And second, unburdening healthcare workers––cutting transmission with masks and distance––so they can get out of permanent crisis mode, and onto prophylactics. So far, the city’s opened five mass vaccination sites: at the City Health Department, the Fair Haven Community Health Clinic, and the Cornell Scott Community Health Center, and in huge hangers like the Lanman Center and the Floyd Little Field House. Each shows an extraordinary human effort and the problems inherent–– that, as impressive these proofs of efficiency and scale are, they’re only a fraction of what’s needed.
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As of this writing, New Haven has the capacity to vaccinate 1,100 people per week, according to Gage Frank, the city’s Director of Communications. And with that capacity, in the week of February 3rd, as tallied in the Connecticut Department of Health’s dataset, the city administered just over 900 first doses. Roughly 80 percent of nursing home residents, the first group eligible, have been vaccinated with at least one dose––past the threshold conferring “community immunity,” where the virus is buffeted from viable hosts by walls of inoculated ones. Close to 45 percent of city residents 75+ have received at least one dose (2,481), which ranks New Haven sixth among all Connecticut municipalities––still missing the state-wide mark, in that age group, of 53 percent. Achieving immunity in a city of 130,000 will require a pace of vaccination an order of magnitude faster than it’s currently moving. To make that possible, the city has to plan many thens for many ifs. If the city gets more than the 600 weekly vials it receives now (on top of its original stockpile), which it must in order to reach community immunity before 2023, then it’ll need the staff to administer them; if it has the staff, then it’ll need the facilities; if it has the facilities, then it’ll need recipients. But the pandemic is still raging in New Haven, and it isn’t immediately obvious how to meet even the first condition. Doctors and nurses are working 16-hour shifts. In-patient hospital services are at 95 percent capacity. Dr. Everett Lamm, a pediatrician at Fair Haven Community Health, told me that, even as the state’s positivity has plateaued at about 3.5, the rate in Fair Haven, a low-income neighborhood on the city’s East Side, has been static in the double-digits––12 percent
