NY state nears nursing home vaccine goal, but pace frustrates some.

ALBANY, N.Y. » New York is close to reaching a vital early goal of its coronavirus vaccine campaign: getting a first dose to every nursing home resident, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday. But the effort to protect those residents has unfolded more slowly than some administrators and relatives hoped.

Some 96 percent of the state’s nursing home residents have received at least an initial dose, and vaccination teams are due to reach the rest by Sunday, said Cuomo, a Democrat.

The federally run program to vaccinate nursing home residents and staff launched Dec. 21. As recently as Jan. 4, only 288 of the 611 facilities that signed up for the federal program had seen residents get their first visit from vaccination teams sent by private pharmacies, including CVS and Walgreens.

Jeannie Wells hoped her 92-year-old mother would get the shot quickly at her facility in Rochester, and they would have a path toward seeing each other in person again for the first time since November.

Instead, it was Thursday by the time pharmacists made their first visit to the home, said Wells, a nurse and a member of a local advocacy group called the Elder Justice Committee of Metro Justice. It will be weeks before her mother gets her second dose of the vaccine, and weeks more before its protection fully kicks in.

“I would think that they should have been able to hit the ground running,” she said, adding that it was painful to lose precious time for potentially visiting her mother, whose memory is fading.

“There is no way for anyone to understand that when you’re losing a parent mentally to begin with, to lose that — to have those days taken away — there’s no way you can ever make up for that,” she said.

Stephen Hanse, president of statewide associations of nursing homes and assisted living facilities, said some New York nursing homes initially struggled to get a first shot scheduled with a partner pharmacy.

The state’s nursing homes have reported 1,300 COVID-19 deaths since the end of November.

Meanwhile, many assisted living homes, which tend to elders who require only a low level of medical care, are still waiting for their first vaccine clinic.