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Weeks after the vaccination was made available to frontline healthcare employees, just 66 percent of hospital workers in the mid-Hudson Valley region have taken the COVID-19 vaccine, which has been a hot commodity since becoming more widely available earlier this month.
Here’s which of New York’s 10 regions have vaccinated the most hospital employees:
- Central New York: 82 percent;
- North Country: 78 percent;
- Finger Lakes: 72 percent;
- Mohawk Valley: 70 percent;
- Capital Region: 70 percent;
- Southern Tier: 69 percent;
- New York City: 67 percent;
- Mid-Hudson: 66 percent;
- Western New York: 62 percent;
- Long Island: 61 percent.
Statewide, 67 percent of New York hospital workers have received at least the first dose of the vaccine, up from 65 percent earlier in the week and from 62 percent last week.
“We’re still only at 67 percent of our hospital workers vaccinated,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said during a COVID-19 briefing on Friday, Jan. 22. “This is a problem. We need to hit at least 70 percent of the entire population to hit herd immunity.
“The hospital workers are the people that if they get sick, the hospital capacity will collapse,” he continued. “And if the hospital capacity collapses we have to close the economy again.”
Cuomo noted that while more hospital workers are getting vaccinated, there is still a wide discrepancy between the regions as New York awaits new allocations of the vaccine from the federal government.
“We’re working very hard on this message, and we’re working very hard to get the hospitals to get their staffs vaccinated,” he said. “We’re seeing a broad disparity, some are at 100 percent, others are at 50 percent.
“So we’re ticking up, but we have to do more and we have to do it faster.”
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