CENTRAL FALLS – A new substation for the Central Falls Police Department in the Forand Manor will allow officers the opportunity to leave the road and complete reports, meet residents
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The reasons for the outbreak are layered, says Michael Fine, the city’s health policy advisor: Central Falls is one of the poorest cities in the state; between 15 and 25 percent of its residents are undocumented immigrants; many of them work in factories and meat-packing plants that have been deemed essential during the various waves of business shutdowns. Now that Covid-19 vaccines are becoming available, the state has had to figure out how to get them to its most vulnerable residents. In Central Falls, it turned to the public housing authority.
In the last week of December, as The Providence Journal reported, Central Falls became the first city in Rhode Island to offer the vaccine publicly, and the Central Falls Housing Authority was the first organization to administer it.On the last Wednesday of the year, the housing authority offered the vaccine exclusively to its own residents and staff, and to people with housing choice vouchers. Relative to other vaccine rollouts around the country, according to Bridgett Duquette, the housing authority’s executive director, it was a big success. More than 90% of residents in one of the authority’s two buildings signed up to receive the vaccine initially. In the other building, 60% of residents signed up for the vaccine. But after Duquette, Fine, and Central Falls’s mayor and mayor-elect were publicly vaccinated on the site, another fifty residents registered to get vaccinated that day, Duquette says.