Mccoy reflects on a brutal year of COVID-19
County executive talks about losses, daily COVID updates
Albany County executive recounts the lows battling the pandemic at the local level.
County Executive Dan Mccoy on Friday took something of a trip down memory lane, recounting the lows of the past year on the anniversary that the novel coronavirus was first detected in two county residents — a woman in her 30s and a college student in his 20s — on March 12, 2020.
Two days later, on March 14, 2020, Mccoy declared a state of emergency and 48 hours after that schools in the county closed down.
Businesses were soon shuttered and lives upended.
Since then, many more county residents have contracted and succumbed to the virulent virus. “It’s been hard to lose 362 residents in Albany County — again my heart, my prayer goes out to the families,” Mccoy added
Friday before starting a slide show to illustrate how COVID-19 has impacted people’s lives.
Mccoy was joined at the briefing by county Health Department Commissioner Dr. Elizabeth Whalen.
Acknowledging he’s a politician who wants to get re-elected, Mccoy said that reality took a backseat to “just putting out the information in a way that people could understand it,” good and bad.
He lauded his department
heads and the county workforce, touted the immense value of teamwork and collaboration with community groups and various entities as pivotal to getting through a pandemic as well as the Army National Guard, which helped distribute food to those in quarantine or homebound.
“We had to think out of the box, and if I take anything out of this last year, it’s the technology we introduced to the workforce because it’s government, and let’s face it, government’s hard to change,” the Democrat said.
He noted that, with the guidance of information technology professionals, county departments have advanced “10 years into the future.”
Mccoy also detailed the various stages of reopening the economy, and the disproportionate rates of illness and death the virus has had on communities of color and the efforts the county made to bridge the health care equity gap by bringing access to testing,
treatment and vaccines to underserved communities.
He recalled how he and Whalen cringed after the 4th of July and every holiday, knowing that invariably there would be a spike in COVID-19 related hospitalizations and fatalities because “people let their guard down, people started to get COVID-19 fatigue, people didn’t like being locked up.”
The month of January was particularly cruel with the county recording its highest number of COVID-19 deaths at 89, Mccoy said.
But now, mass vaccination sites have opened, with one location recently vaccinating up to 450 people an hour.
“We’ve come a long way in this,” said Mccoy, adding candidly, “Did we make every right decision? No, I’m not afraid to tell you that we did not. Did we try? Yes, we’re human.”
He urged people to get inoculated against the coronavirus.
The county executive said that as of Friday, 26 percent of Albany County’s population has received its first dose of the two-dose vaccines currently available, second in the region only to Warren County, which has vaccinated 28.5 percent of its residents.
“Every shot we get in someone’s arm is a shot closer to opening up and getting back to world that we used to live in,” he added.
Whalen cautioned people that they are only “considered to have full immunity or full benefit of the vaccine “two weeks after getting that second dose.”
She noted that 51.5 percent of county residents 65 years and older had already received their first COVID-19 shot.
Whalen expressed what she described as cautious optimism that the county has “started to turn a corner” but mentioned that COVID-19 strains are a big question mark.
“This is something that has profoundly affected almost every resident in the Capital District in one way or another and it is something I think and hope we are emerging from slowly together,” Whalen said. “As our (vaccine) supply increases, we’ll be looking for increased ways to partner to get this out.”
The United States announced a resumption of aid to Yemen’s rebel-held north on riday to fight famine as the country’s nearly six-year-old war grinds on. U.N. officials warned that a blockade of fuel deliveries to a main port was heightening the humanitarian crisis.
The aid concern came as President Joe Biden’s envoy to Yemen expressed frustration at the Houthi rebels, saying they were focusing on fighting to capture more territory while a diplomatic push is underway to end the conflict.
“It appears that the Houthis are prioritizing a military campaign” to seize central Marib province, envoy Tim Lenderking said.
He spoke in an online event sponsored by the Atlantic Council think tank.
The developments deepen the challenges for the Biden administration as it goes out on a limb to try to end the Yemen war through diplomacy, reversing previous U.S. administrations’ support for an inconclusive Saudi-led military offensive that tried to roll back the Iranallied Houthi rebels. The rebels have shown no sign of relenting despite Biden’s diplomatic overtures, adding to tensions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
Lenderking said the Houthis have had a ceasefire proposal before them for a “number of days” and urged them to respond positively.
He gave no details about the plan.
Fighting and massive displacement of people, fuel shortages and rising food prices have 50,000 Yemenis caught up in famine and 5 million more a step away from it, the United Nations says.