Add To Favorites
Everyone’s patriotic duty: Get vaccinated, especially if you’re working in a nursing home
The New York Daily News - 4/20/2021
Yesterday was Patriots’ Day. You remember from grade school: Paul Revere and Lexington and Concord, Minutemen against Redcoats on April 19, 1775. It’s usually marked in Boston with a morning Red Sox game at Fenway and the finish of the city’s marathon.
The game went on, but the footrace has been postponed until fall due to COVID. What was also different about this year’s Patriots’ Day, which Emerson memorialized as “The shot heard round the world,” was that the nation born from that revolution now has millions of shots, COVID vaccine shots, open to everyone older than 16, meeting the urgent goal set by President Biden. With each jab, we get closer to independence.
Despite hundreds of deaths per day from the enemy, this war is being won, not by farmers with flintlocks, but with needles and bare arms. In New York, Mayor de Blasio announced the highest-ever single-day COVID vaccination total, 106,527. There are now walk-in sites in every borough for anyone age 50 and up, including several that run round the clock, part of the network of more than 600 citywide.
Nationally, 3 to 4 million shots are administered daily at 60,000 locations. More than 130 million Americans have gotten vaccinated. That’s more than half of all adults, and it includes 80% of seniors.
Early problems of short supply and shifting and confusing eligibility rules are gone. People don’t have to scramble to get appointments or even wait. It’s all working as intended: The city’s infection rate is dropping and is now finally below the target of 5% for the first time in many months. And scientists report that the vax cut COVID infections cut by 90% in real life. Of 84 million vaccinated people, there were only 6,000 infections, with 30% having no symptoms.
With the vaccine proven effective and safe, New York is right to pressure nursing homes to get their employees vaccinated. It’s not tyranny, but freedom: Freedom from disease that will help save the lives of vulnerable seniors.
___
(c)2021 New York Daily News
Visit New York Daily News at www.nydailynews.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.