Path Forward From COVID: 'Do What Your Great-Grandparents Did'

EAST HAVEN, CT — The health department, providing services for Branford, North Branford and East Haven, has given it its all: from extensive outreach, to free clinics across all five towns, plus freebies used as incentives for folks to get tested for COVID-19, and to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

Yet, there’s still a population in a number of communities that have refused to have themselves, and their eligible children, vaccinated.

Now, it’s hoped that this message will do the trick: “Do it for your community, your team, your family, your friends.”

“The only way to get back to normal life and move forward as a community, a state, a country, a world is by achieving herd immunity and the only way is through the vaccine,” East Shore District Health Department director Michael Pascucilla said. “We are asking people today to do what their grandparents and great-grandparents did — their part for their community. This is not new. They had the call to action to get vaccinated against diseases like polio, the measles, mumps, chicken pox ...it’s as simple as that. It’s not a new concept.”

Patch spoke with Pascucilla and ESDHD health educator Barbara Naclerio about the latest COVID-19 case numbers in the towns it serves, and the concern about not achieving herd immunity as some decline to be vaccinated.

“We need to look at the sum of all peer-reviewed, credible research done internationally. The COVID-19 vaccine is safe and reduces morbidity and mortality.

One of the areas of the greatest concern both Pascucilla and Naclerio have is the low vaccination rate of young people aged 12 to 17 in North Branford and East Haven.

Connection between some too-low vaccine rates, sports and schools

Case rate averages and percentage of positive cases is higher in North Branford and East Haven than Branford. And while those numbers are higher, vaccination rates in both towns are lower than in Branford.

For example, as of Sept. 15, just 58 percent of all East Haven residents have been fully vaccinated.

By comparison, in Branford, 70 percent of all residents eligible have been fully vaccinated.
In both East Haven and North Branford, the demographic that is eligible for vaccines but is among the lowest rate in the town's is the 12 to 17 age group at around 49 percent. And in East Haven, less than 50 percent of the 20 to 29 are vaccinated. The latter is a real concern for the health department.

Naclerio said the health department is addressing this by holding regular, and accessible, vaccine clinics in partnership with Griffin Health, adding that the number of vaccinations at recent East Haven clinics were a good sign. Held the last two weeks of September, she said the clinics “are working,” and that from the 14th to the 19th, 69 vaccines were administered.

A “really good number,” she said.

But the low vaccine rates for the 12 to 17 age group may be in part responsible for the “spread in sports,” Naclerio said. She noted that a two-day weekend vaccination clinic held at the ice hockey pavilion in the town drew very few; just six persons were vaccinated.

“We are seeing a spread in sports,” she said, adding that with the North Branford 12 to 17-year-olds’ rates “lower than the state average,” health officials are concerned.

"There’s a big hockey community there and since we had large hockey outbreaks last year, we made the vaccine available," she said. "We advertised and encouraged, but it didn’t convince people.”

ESDHD COVID-19 Presentation... by Ellyn Santiago

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One thing Naclerio pointed out was that with cases and the contract tracking followup leading to mandatory quarantines sidelining kids, that may be an incentive for parents to have their teens vaccinated.

Then again, maybe not.

She noted that if there’s a case on a team, the team needs to quarantine, as was seen often in 2020. And that, she said, “makes parents angry.” What Naclerio hopes is that folks will then get their teens vaccinated. She shared a disturbing anecdote about a contact tracing effort where a family was called to speak to an individual and that person “could not come to the phone” as they were “on a respirator in an ICU.”

“I wish I could explain this to the public who continue to decline the vaccine,” she said.

Both Naclerio and Pascucilla said that the health department’s biggest ally to date has been East Haven, North Branford, Branford, Guilford and Madison school districts. Pascucilla said in particular, East Haven schools has done a good job noting that “officials are always available, they keep to the rules, and do class check-ins."

Pascucilla said that seeing businesses mandating vaccines for employees is a “step in the right direction,” but schools do not have that ability. "Schools cannot say you must be vaccinated.”

“Still, superintendents and administrators are amazing,” in all three ESDHD towns and in Madison and Guilford, he said. “They are sending the message that, ‘We’re doing our part with our town partners,’ but without parents and the community fully doing their part, there’s no path forward without their help.”

Convincing the unconvinced

“It's a really difficult task to convince people,” Naclerio said. “Then they hear that 30 percent are breakthrough so they’re saying, ‘why bother getting vaccinated?’ But the fact is that vaccinated people are much less likely to get serious illness, and if they do get sick, it’s for a shorter period of time, and they are far less likely to end up hospitalized or die from COVID-19. And, historically, all vaccines have seen some breakthrough cases.”

She said that it’s been a struggle to “talk to people and allay their fears and to have them hear correct information from (health department staff) when they get advice from a misinformed healthcare worker or their landlord on what they need to do to keep them safe. At the end of every day, you’re drained.”

When asked how communities achieve herd immunity against coronavirus with many refusing to be vaccinated, Pascucilla said at this time it’s not doable.

“Everything depends on people stepping up and doing their part,” he said. ”I don’t have crystal ball, and I’m hoping that (winter) won’t be a repeat of what we’ve seen, but that depends on people stepping up to get vaccinated and that when approved and available, that 5 to 11-years-olds are also vaccinated and when third shots and all boosters are also available, people get those.”

Health workers’ pandemic burnout

Meanwhile, the staff and medical corps volunteers at the health department are suffering from burnout. Indeed, two longtime health department staff members, head nurse and sanitarian, retired just last week after combined decades of service.

In a health department report to the state, it was noted that the “toll that the pandemic took on the staff of ESDHD cannot be emphasized strongly enough.”

“They endured long hours through the week and weekends, attended thousands of meetings ...to navigate the emotions and situations that challenge logic," it reads in part, adding that there have been “few days where there wasn’t some crisis, small or large, to attend to.”

To make matters even more difficult, the report reads, as the health department was doing homebound vaccinations and holding clinics in churches, elderly and low-income housing, schools and community centers, so too began its “journey into trying to convince the public to get vaccinated” even as many residents were “hesitant and balked at the thought of getting vaccinated.”

“All we are asking is that people recognize that vaccines keep us safe from disease and they are nothing new. Since our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents’ days, vaccines have saved lives,” Pascucilla said. “If people won’t do it for themselves, then they should do it for their families and their community. It’s our only path forward.”