Good morning. It's Tuesday, and today we'll look at how some nursing homes are struggling with administering booster shots. We'll hear from the woman who served as the city's first female chief medical examiner: Her career began with one mass casualty event — Sept. 11 — and ended during another — the pandemic. |
 | | Yuki Iwamura/Reuters |
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Nursing homes have been among the deadliest places to live during the pandemic. They house some of the most vulnerable: older adults, including many with underlying health conditions. Close quarters make it easier for the virus to spread. And with the recent surge in Covid cases once again making New York an epicenter of the pandemic, nursing homes are facing renewed scrutiny, this time over their ability to administer booster shots. |
About 56 percent of residents in nursing homes and assisted living facilities across New York City have received a booster shot, which is above the national rate of about 50 percent, according to the most recent data from the New York State Department of Health. But at dozens of facilities, less than half of the residents have received a booster. At about 20 nursing homes, less than a quarter of residents have received a booster shot. |
The challenge in nursing homes comes as New York continues to grapple with the best way to fight the pandemic. On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio implemented a sweeping vaccine mandate for private businesses. Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the state was planning to open more than a dozen new testing sites and send millions of tests to school districts. |
The challenge in nursing homes |
The state, officials in the nursing home industry and medical experts point to different reasons for the struggle to administer boosters. |
Some residents are ineligible because they recently received second vaccine doses or monoclonal antibodies. Hochul said last week that some family members are resistant, and some residents are unable to provide consent because of cognitive decline. |
Health experts also say that New York was slow to push boosters before the Omicron variant arrived. For example, the city did not extend its $100 incentive for getting vaccinated to include boosters until last week. |
Nursing homes are trying to persuade more residents to get a booster by sending out texts to residents' families telling them to call if they want their relatives to get the booster. That strategy led to about two dozen residents at a nursing home in Crown Heights getting boosted last week, the facility's assistant director of nursing said. |
The city has said it would send vaccination teams to some nursing homes that need additional help. The state health commissioner, Dr. Mary Bassett, said on Monday that the state was working "in a very granular way" with county health departments to look at specific nursing homes that are lagging and figure out ways to get people boosted. |
It's mostly cloudy today in New York City with temps in the mid-40s. There's a good chance of rain at night while temps settle in the low 40s. |
In effect until Friday (New Year's Eve). |
A career bookended by tragedy |
 | | Anna Watts for The New York Times |
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The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner typically focuses on tasks like identifying DNA from crime scenes, investigating sudden or suspicious deaths and conducting autopsies on people who died of apparent drug overdoses to rule out foul play. |
But in the case of Dr. Barbara Sampson, who resigned as chief medical examiner on Nov. 30, two mass casualty events interrupted those regular rhythms, bookending her 23-year career at the office. |
Three years after she was hired as a fellow in forensic pathology — working under Dr. Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner from 1989 to 2013 — New York was devastated by the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The city began the nation's largest homicide investigation in its history and made a commitment to identify all 2,996 people who died at the World Trade Center. |
Twenty years later, only about 60 percent of the bodies have been identified. The medical examiner's office is using DNA technology to try to identify remains from ground zero — a time-consuming process that cemented long relationships with some of the families. |
"I remember telling one couple that we had identified their son, and they just broke down in tears," she said in an interview. "They were from Europe and they were already in their 70s, and they thought that they would never have that closure." |
She succeeded Hirsch when he retired, becoming the city's first woman in the role. Six years later, the coronavirus arrived. Some 35,000 city residents have died of Covid-19 since March 2020, more than 20,000 of them within the first few months of the pandemic. Her office called it the largest mass casualty event in the history of New York City. |
Sampson likened the experience to being hit by a wave without any idea when it would crest. |
"We saw what was happening in Europe, and in Asia as well," she recalled of the early months of 2020, "but most vivid in my mind are the pictures from Italy, where they were just overwhelmed so quickly. And, you know, there were literally bodies in the street. And our reaction, for my team here, was: 'That cannot happen in New York.' We have to use our expertise here to make sure this doesn't happen." |
Her office deployed trailers to hospitals to help them hold the dead, but the trailers soon filled to capacity. Funeral homes and cemeteries could not deal with the volume. Finally, with the help of the National Guard and federal disaster response teams, her office opened a huge long-term storage facility at a warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront, which at one point held 3,000 bodies. It closed in September. |
Looking back, Sampson, who became a professor of pathology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said she felt the medical examiner's office had succeeded in its biggest effort to date. |
"We avoided the horrors that I had seen on TV at the very beginning of the pandemic," she said. "And I think we slowly but surely were able to give families closure at the time that they needed it. For some families, it was just a few weeks, for some many, many months. I measure our success in those criteria; that all the families that I have spoken to, and heard about, are grateful for all the work that we did." |
I stepped out of an East Side funeral home into the bright June sunshine. I examined the white plastic bucket containing my mother's ashes, and then I raised my arm to hail a cab. |
One pulled up, but something made me wave it on. I stuffed the bucket into my backpack, loaded the pack onto my back and started walking. |
For the next hour or so, I took my mother on a tour of some of the monuments of our New York lives. |
Past the old Drake Hotel, where we would duck in to grab a handful of mini-Swiss chocolate bars from the cavernous bowl in the lobby. |
Past Saks Fifth Avenue, where we would squeeze into the tightly packed elevators operated by "elevator men" calling out the floors in deep baritones. |
Past the MoMA sculpture garden, which my mother's first New York apartment overlooked. |
Past the Pierre Hotel, where my mother had conned the receptionist into giving her a room when she ran away from home as a teenager. |
Past the long gone Auto Pub in the General Motors Building, where my parents threw the best birthday party of my life. |
Past the old Rumpelmayer's on Central Park South, where my mother would take me for vanilla ice cream sodas on special days. |
Into Central Park and onto the park drive, which my mother hectored many a taxi driver into taking to "save time." |
And, finally, home to the empty apartment on the Upper West Side. |
Thanks, Mom, for sharing these things with me. How pleased I was that day to return the favor. |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — M.Z. |
Jaevon Williams and Olivia Parker contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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