DAN RENZETTI PHOTO
Getting vaccinated at Yale’s Lanman Center at 74 Ashmun St.
The Lanman Center. Yale’s West Campus. Hillhouse High School’s Floyd Little Fieldhouse.
Each of those sites will soon hold “high-throughput” Covid-19 vaccination clinics to be run or co-run by Yale New Haven Health, as the regional hospital system expands its Phase 1b inoculations for residents 75 and up.
YNHH Chief Clinical Officer Thomas Balcezak gave that update Wednesday afternoon during the hospital system’s latest virtual press briefing, held online via Zoom and Facebook Live.
For nearly 45 minutes straight, Balcezak fielded questions from the press about YNHH’s vaccination program now that the state is in Phase 1b of the governor’s mass vaccination plan.
See more below for information about new vaccination sites opening soon in New Haven and West Haven.
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YNHH Chief Clinical Officer Balcezak.
Balcezak said that the hospital system — which includes seven campuses from New Haven to Bridgeport to Greenwich to Westerly, Rhode Island — has administered Covid-19 vaccines to over 22,000 of YNHH’s medical staff and frontline employees since the start of Phase 1a at the end of last year. A little more than 3,000 of those medical staff and employees have gotten their second doses as well, meaning that they have “completed their course” of the two-dose treatment.
That 22,000 number represents roughly 65 to 70 percent of YNHH’s medical staff and employees who have received at least one vaccine dose so far, he said. “That’s pretty good. It’s not great. We want to get to 80 percent. That’s what gives us herd immunity, what Anthony Fauci calls community immunity.”
New City Sites Coming Soon
As for Phase 1b, which officially began on Monday and is open, to start, for all Connecticut residents ages 75 and up, Balcezak said that the hospital system has vaccinated “a few hundred” eligible seniors.
Balcezak said YNHH has scheduled 10,000 Phase 1b vaccination appointments so far, and it expects to have administered first doses to roughly 6,000 eligible residents ages 75 and up by Sunday.
Those Phase 1b vaccinations to date have taken place only at YNHH’s Northeast Medical Group buildings in North Haven, Orange, Trumbull, Fairfield, Greenwich, and Old Saybrook.
That limited-suburban access to vaccination sites should change later this week, Balcezak promised.
“Starting on Friday, we will be opening up two large high throughput sites. One on the West Campus of Yale in West Haven, the other here in New Haven at the Lanman Center on Ashmun Street.” (Click here and here to read about how Yale University has already started using the Lanman Center gym as a vaccination site.)
And then on Monday, he said, “we’ll be opening a very large site in conjunction with the City of New Haven at the Floyd Little Fieldhouse at Hillhouse High School” on Sherman Parkway.
When asked about the daily vaccination capacity at the prospective Floyd Little Fieldhouse site, Balcezak replied, “Each vaccinator can vaccinate one patient every five to 10 minutes. We’re going to be open 12 hours a day. We’re planning initially on four vaccinators, so that’s 500 a day.”
Balcezak praised the fieldhouse as being a “large site” with a “large parking lot. These large throughput sites lend themselves to scale.”
“I’m glad it’s indoors,” he continued about the fieldhouse site. “It’s hard to monitor people for their symptoms when they’re sitting in their car.”
YNHH Vice President, Public Affairs Vin Petrini described the prospective fieldhouse site as “truly a partnership with the City of New Haven,” and praised city Health Director Maritza Bond for working with the hospital system to help get the site ready.
Anyone 75 and over can book an appointment to get vaccinated by going to YNHH’s scheduling website here or by calling 1 – 833-ASK-YNHH (275‑9644). Click here for a previous article about other sites around the city where New Haveners ages 75 and up can schedule to get vaccinated.
Local seniors have spoken up this week about just how difficult it has been to make a Phase 1b vaccination appointment in the city of New Haven so far.
YNHH: We Need More Vaccine
YNHH photo
YNHH Ed Nurse Mackenzie Kelley receives her second dose from YNHH PACU nurse Kari Cason.
Balcezak and YNHH CEO Marna Borgrstrom emphasized time and again over the course of the press conference that the key limiting factor for YNHH’s vaccination program is supply from the state.
“We have the staff,” Balcezak said. “We have the tech. We have the pharmacists and nurses. What we need is the vaccine.”
He said that YNHH receives roughly 5,000 new first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine from the state Department of Public Health every week. That’s about half of the 10,000 new first doses it requests every week.
Last week saw a particularly high shipment of 14,000 doses, Balcezak added, though half of those are reserved as second doses for people who have already received their first shots.
Balcezak said that the number of vaccination appointments available on the YNHH scheduling website at any given time is limited by the number of doses the hospital system has on hand or expect to have on hand.
“We are going to need somewhere around tenfold the number of doses that we’re currently receiving” in order to ramp up the mass vaccination program to the level it should be at in order to achieve community-wide immunity anytime soon, he said.
Balcezak said that this supply chain problem starts not with the state, but with the federal government.
The state health department is “getting no certainty about the number of doses that are getting per week.”
369 Covid-19 Inpatients Systemwide
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Borgstrom (pictured) added that YNHH currently has 369 Covid-positive inpatients systemwide, with 77 of those patients in intensive care units (ICUs) and 44 on ventilators.
She said the high of this winter’s second wave came a few weeks before Christmas, when YNHH had 461 Covid-positive inpatients systemwide. At the height of the first wave last spring, the system had over 800 Covid-positive inpatients.
“We have seen that go down a little bit and flatten out,” she said.
Nevertheless, she said, “we have a surge of inpatients across our system, particularly at Yale New Haven Hospital. Almost all of the adult services are over 95 percent occupancy.”
Balcezak said that that surge is made up in part by Covid-positive inpatients, and also by patients who deferred treatment for other non-Covid-related medical conditions earlier on in the pandemic.
Yale New Haven Health Announces Vaccination Sites
See below for an email press release sent out by YNHH Wednesday afternoon about new vaccination sites opening in New Haven, West Haven, and across the state.
Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS) today announced the opening dates for its COVID vaccination sites across the state. All vaccinations are by appointment only and can be made now on the YNHHS website: www.ynhhs.org/covidvaccine.
More appointments are being added as vaccine is made available to ensure that there is sufficient supply for all scheduled patients.
The following Health System vaccination sites are scheduled to open on Thursday, Jan. 21:
• Northeast Medical Group (NEMG), 4A Devine Street, North Haven
• NEMG, 112 Quarry Road, Trumbull
• NEMG, 501 Kings Highway East, #204, Fairfield
• NEMG, 500 West Putnam Avenue, Greenwich
• NEMG, 633 Middlesex Avenue, Old Saybrook
• NEMG, 194 Howard Street, New London
The following Health System vaccination sites operating in partnership with Yale University will open on Friday, Jan. 22:
• Yale West Campus, 100 West Campus Drive, Bldg. 410, Orange
• The Lanman Center at Yale University, 74 Ashmun St., Lot 78, New Haven
The following Health System vaccination sites will open on Monday, Jan. 25:
• Floyd Little Field House, 480 Sherman Parkway, New Haven
• Parsons Center, 70 West River Street, Milford
• The Brunswick School, 1252 King Street, Samson Field House, Greenwich
The following Health System vaccination site will open on Wednesday, Jan. 27:
• Mitchell College, De Biasi Drive, New London
Yale New Haven Health patients who reside outside of Connecticut are eligible to receive the COVID vaccine in Connecticut if they qualify for vaccination under Connecticut’s guidelines. Those patients who receive their care in Connecticut can schedule an appointment at a community vaccination site here: www.ynhhs.org/covidvaccine
In the state of Connecticut, phase 1B officially began this week with the vaccinations of residents 75 and older who are not living in nursing homes. For more information on the phased rollout schedule, please visit www.ynhhs.org or the state’s website here: https://portal.ct.gov/Coronavirus/COVID-19-Vaccination — -Phases.
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full presser.