New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
‘I feel like it’s a calling’
Greater New Haven volunteers among thousands driving state’s vaccination efforts
As Connecticut scales up to quickly vaccinate as many of the state’s 3.59 million residents against COVID-19 as it can, in an unprecedented mobilization creating hundreds of temporary vaccination clinics, local health and government officials need all the help they can get.
As that massive effort unfolds, front and center in the push are thousands of volunteers.
Volunteering through the
“The outpouring of support that we’ve gotten from the MRC is incredible. It’s refreshing. It’s uplifting.”
Michael Pascucilla, East Shore health director, on volunteers from the state’s Medical Reserve Corps
CT Responds website and database, located online at https://ctresponds.ct.gov, they are helping to staff clinics from Greenwich to New Haven to Stonington and towns in between, doing jobs ranging from the actual vaccinations to crowd control and helping senior citizens negotiate the state’s computer database to sign up — and shining light on a previously obscure state program called the Medical Reserve Corps.
There are 23 Medical Reserve Corps, or MRC, chapters in Connecticut, said Francesca Provenzano, chief of the Public Health Preparedness and Local Health Section of the state Department of Public Health.
They’ve existed for years, since long before the coronavirus was a thing. They include both medically trained and non-medical volunteers who are activated — not all at once — for public health or health care-related missions in the communities they serve.
Provenzano said that since the CT Responds website was launched, a total of 6,000 new volunteers have registered, with 4,000 ultimately “onboarded into our local chapters,” which doesn’t mean they will all be activated at once.
“What we’re seeing is a call to action,” Provenzano said.
There have been 244 separate activations of
MRC volunteers for various tasks since the start of the pandemic. MRC units previously were used to help with shelter operations and at state nursing homes, as well as to do contact tracing and assist local health departments with drive-through COVID-19 testing, she said.
It turned some heads when the East Shore District Health Department, which is creating clinics in East Haven, Branford, North Branford, Guilford and Madison, recently put out a call for volunteers — saying that the volunteers would have the opportunity to be vaccinated themselves.
The effort quickly drew more than 300 volunteers, according to East Shore Health Director Michael Pascucilla and Daisy Hernandez, an East Shore staffer who is one of the state’s five regional MRC coordinators.
Hernandez coordinates volunteer efforts for Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security Region 2, a 30-town area that includes most of New Haven County and parts of Fairfield and Middlesex counties, stretching from Milford and Shelton in the west to Old Saybrook in the east and as far north as Meriden.
But as it turns out, that’s not as unusual as it might seem.
The Capitol Region Medical Reserve Corps, which oversees MRC efforts in 41 towns and 17 health districts in the Hartford and Middletown areas, now has a roster of 2,000 volunteers, said Katherine McCormack, a former Hartford health director who is the regional MRC coordinator overseeing DEMHS Region 3.
“The outpouring of support that we’ve gotten from the MRC is incredible,” said Pascucilla. “It’s refreshing. It’s uplifting . ... And, yes, it also creates a bit of a problem.” He said he plans to activate those volunteers in stages, in part because they don’t have enough doses to vaccinate all of them.
“At some point, if they all volunteer, they’ll all get vaccinated,” Pascucilla said. “But if we vaccinated them all right now, we
wouldn’t be able to operate clinics next week.
“We’re going to have to pick a limited number of volunteers to (initially) staff the clinics,” then rotate more in as the effort expands and larger vaccine supplies become available, he said.
Pascucilla said he didn’t know whether East Shore would need all 300 volunteers, but if necessary, “we will share some with Quinnipiack Valley Health, Milford, West Haven, New Haven, Old Saybrook,” he said.
The offer to vaccinate volunteers is something that’s widespread in MRC efforts, area coordinators and health directors said.
“We did that because obviously we wanted to incentivize it,” said Pascucilla.
“Hospitals like Yale have a call out for job postings for temporary vaccinators,” offering $45 an hour, Pascucilla said. “We’re asking people to volunteer,” he said.
Many volunteers are deeply committed to helping others and the offer to vaccinate volunteers “is not just a back-door way to get vaccinations,” said Provenzano.
“We’re very lucky that our region has a commitment to volunteers,” said Kelley Meier, a health educator for the Stratford Health Department who is the regional MRC coordinator for DEMHS Region 1, which includes 14 municipalities through lower Fairfield County from Stratford and Bridgeport to Stamford and Greenwich. Meier also is the MRC unit coordinator for Stratford, Trumbull and Monroe.
Since March, when the CT Responds database was released, Meier said more than 300 new volunteers have turned out “for our unit alone.” That’s in addition “to a lot of the volunteers who were in the unit originally,” she said.
“They really have answered the clarion call,” said Stratford Health Director Andrea Boissevain, adding that those volunteers are being vaccinated as they are activated.
“We are vaccinating those who we know are going to be in our clinics,” Boissevain said.
Naugatuck Valley Health District Director Jessica Kristy, who is the coordinator for DEMHS Region 5, which includes northern New Haven and Fairfield counties and all of Litchfield County, including Waterbury, Danbury and Torrington, did not immediately return several calls for comment.
Norwalk Health Department Health Educator Theresa Argondevvi, who is coordinating that city’s volunteer program, which is independent of the state’s MRC program, said Norwalk has about 200 volunteers who are certified and trained, of which about 100 currently are active.
“Forty to 50 of them have actually worked our clinics” over the past month, she said. “Others are active around food insecurity,” with some doing both, Argondevvi said.
“The vast majority of these volunteers joined us before COVID,” she said. “They answered the call ... even before COVID was a thing. We’re really so grateful,” Argondevvi said.
“There’s no part of our clinic that doesn’t involve our volunteers,” she said. “Some of the vaccinators are volunteers” and the roster of volunteers also include “folks with clinical backgrounds monitoring people after they get vaccinated.”
As is the case in many communities, “If they are going to be working at the clinic ... they qualify under (state vaccination Phase)
1a” to be immediately vaccinated.
“It’s been inspiring,” Middletown Mayor Ben Florsheim said of the work of vaccinators, who are members of the city’s MRC. “They’re the reason we’re able to say all the time that we’ve got the distribution process more or less figured out. We could be doing a couple hundred shots a day, seven days a week if we had the supply,” he said.
Another health district that has made a big use of volunteers is the Pomperaug District Department of Health, which serves Southbury, Woodbury and Oxford.
“We have an enormous amount of volunteers supporting us in our effort,” said Pomperaug Health Director Neal Lustig.
“Many of them were our volunteers in the flu campaigns that we’ve been running for a decade or more — and we’ve got another 100” who recently have volunteered, he said.
“They’re coming in every day,” Lustig said. “We have so many, we don’t even know how to weed them out. We had a lot of volunteers anyway.”
With the help of those volunteers, in its fifth week of operating COVID vaccination clinics, Pomperaug operated clinics almost every day, including two “monstrous” clinics at Pomperaug High School,
through which it vaccinated 763 people in two days, Lustig said.
On Monday, it will put into service its new “Mobile Vaccination Unit,” which will use 4-6 people and four computers as part of an effort to vaccinate 50 people in two hours. It will begin its work Monday at the Greens Condominiums in Oxford and then move Tuesday to the the Woodbury Senior Center, Lustig said.
The people
So who are these people who are volunteering — and why do they do it?
Many of them are your neighbors, or people you might otherwise know.
Leon Collins of Branford, a former TV news reporter for WTNH and WFSB who now is a licensed public adjuster — and a volunteer for the East Shore District effort — saw it as an opportunity to do some good.
“Number one, considering how lacking the response has been from the government and how much misunderstanding there is about what we need to do about coronavirus, I wanted to do whatever I could do to help,” Collins said.
“I have a 96-year-old mother who lives with us,” Collins said. He struggled to get his mother an appointment to be vaccinated — and when he first got one for her, it would have involved traveling to Shelton at 6:30 a.m. Although he was later able to change that after a clinic was set up in Branford, when he first started trying to, “I couldn’t figure it out,” he said.
“I saw in the call that they wanted people to work with seniors,” Collins said. “I think there’s a lot of people out there who just need help navigating the website.”
And, yes, he also saw the offer to get vaccinated sooner as an added incentive.
“I am 57 years old and I’ve got some health issues where I’m concerned,” he said. “But the number one thing was the desire to help.”
Beth Siegelbaum has been volunteering at the vaccine clinic at the Norwalk Senior Center, doing either registration or traffic flow. She also got vaccinated a little earlier as a result.
“I’m sort of a perennial volunteer. I’ve always volunteered for things my whole life,” Siegelbaum said. “My husband and I joined the Emergency Response Team. When they asked if anyone wanted to volunteer, we both jumped
at it.
“... I’ve got to say I would have done it anyway,” she said. But the opportunity to get vaccinated a little sooner “certainly was a nice perk,” she said. “I do feel a little bit safer now.”
Debby Sylvestro of Fairfield retired three years ago from a job working as a nurse practitioner in a school-based health clinic in Stratford in order to care for her now-late husband. She volunteers three days per week in Stratford’s vaccination clinic, located at the Stratford Health Department on Birdseye Road.
“It’s been an amazing experience” said Sylvestro, 69. “I feel for the first time (since her husband died) like I’m finally being productive. I’m contributing toward history ... and all I get in return is the gratitude of the people.”
Why volunteer?
“This is history . ... This is what I’m meant to be doing,” Sylvestro said. “I feel like it’s a calling.”
Sylvestro also got vaccinated sooner than she might have otherwise as a result of volunteering. “I just want to feel protected,” she said. “The first day that I volunteered, two people didn’t show up and I got vaccinated, on Jan. 13.”
But “I would have done it anyway,” she said of volunteering. But “this put me ahead of the game.”
Wayne Theriault of Milford, a former Stratford teacher, and his wife, Linda, also volunteer for the Stratford MRC. They also are perennial volunteers.
“We started out last winter,” said Wayne Theriault. “There was a COVID testing site here in Stratford” and both volunteered to help out there. Now Wayne Theriault, 72, volunteers three days a week and his 66-year-old wife does about two days a week.
Both got vaccinated sooner as a result, but that wasn’t a factor in their
decision to volunteer, he said.
“We’re volunteering,” he said. “It was a nice benefit.”
For Linda Theriault, “It’s just very heartwarming to know that you’re doing something for an even older population than what we are.
“Without the volunteers to help in multiple positions, the rate of vaccination would be much lower than it is right now — and it’s very heartwarming,” she said. “Some people are so appreciative and grateful that we’re willing to give up our time.”
Hernandez, from the
East Shore District Health Department, said that in assessing how it will use volunteers, “depending on their skill set, we try to find a deployment to match them.“Currently, “We have about 20 volunteers assisting us at our clinics, but that number is definitely going to rise in the next couple of weeks as we expand.”
The plan is eventually to have clinics operated by the health department staff in addition to the one in each town that currently are beginning.
Hernandez called the opportunity to get earlier vaccines “a huge factor” in attracting volunteers. “Many of the volunteers who called me said that that was something that they wanted to do before they volunteered,” she said. “That was one of the reasons why we got such a huge response.”
Now, “we’re going to slowly expand our pool of volunteers” and will vaccinate them as they are activated. “We’re looking for people who are proficient with computers. We’re also looking for translators,” she said. “We just want to be as prepared as possible to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of our residents.”