Long Island getting three more COVID-19 vaccination sites, as state’s efforts

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday returned to the scene of one of the most pivotal moments in the epic battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, as he announced the opening in the coming weeks of 10 more mass vaccination sites across the state, including three on Long Island.

The sites here will be located at the Suffolk County Community College campus in Brentwood, the SUNY Old Westbury Campus and the SUNY Stony Brook campus in Southampton.

“Thanks to increasing vaccine supply from our partners in Washington we can utilize more of our state’s capacity to distribute doses, and once they are open, these new sites will allow us to continue to get shots into arms on a large scale,” Cuomo said in a statement.

The state already operates mass vaccination sites at Jones Beach and the Stony Brook University campus in Stony Brook.

New York City will also get an additional vaccination site at a place yet to be announced in the Bronx, Cuomo said. The state did not yet set specific dates for those vaccination sites becoming operational.

The impending increase in vaccination options, announced on a day when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said fully vaccinated people can gather indoors without masks, was welcomed by Nassau County Executive Laura Curran, who said 23.5% of county residents have gotten at least one COVID-19 shot so far.

Two of the three approved vaccine formulations require two shots to be effective.

“New CDC guidance released today confirms that getting vaccinated is the single best tool we have to return to some kind of normal,” Curran said in a statement. “My message to Nassau residents is simple: When you are eligible and have the opportunity, I urge you to take your shot.”

The governor made the announcement at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, revisiting a place that was turned into a mass emergency hospital last year, when New York was spinning from an epidemic that had seized the city and state and brought much of society to a bewildering standstill.

Cuomo, fending off perhaps the worst crisis of his political career amid allegations of sexual harassment and covering up the number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, instead focused Monday on how the massive convention hall turned vaccination site, had been a “sea” of army cots to treat victims of the deadly virus as hospitals became overwhelmed in the spring of 2020.

He described the fear he saw on the faces of the National Guardsmen and Army personnel who staffed the center in the early days when scientists knew little about the virus.

Converting the center into a massive emergency hospital was something “no convention center on the planet has ever done,” Cuomo said.

He recalled how he spoke to the National Guardsmen.

“They’re in this place that looked like it was a scene from a science fiction movie. It looked like it was after the apocalypse,” he said. “And the National Guard were frightened. You could see it in their eyes.

“But they showed up. And that’s what was so powerful to me. In this frightening scene — jeeps, army trucks, body bags — they showed up … They had the courage to show up.”

‘A painful year’

Cuomo touted the state’s progress since the peak of the pandemic and urged state residents, particularly in minority communities, to take advantage of the availability of vaccine and the multiple sites that are now operational. A dozen Black clergy members stood behind him, and he pointed to them as supporters of the vaccines. One received a shot during the event, which was…