Published March 16. 2021 12:53PM | Updated March 16. 2021 10:11PM
New London Safety concerns associated with the coronavirus pandemic have led organizers to cancel this year’s Sailfest, the city’s largest annual festival.
It’s the second year in a row that the four-decade-old event has been canceled. Sailfest went virtual last year.
Barbara J. Neff, executive director of the Downtown New London Associations and owner of Neff Productions said plans are underway, in coordination with the City of New London, for a series of smaller summer events.
Announcements on those events are forthcoming. Visit www.downtownnewlondonassociation.com for a complete list of events and times.
Both of southeastern Connecticut’s hospitals admitted their first COVID-19 patient on March 18, 2020 an event their doctors, nurses and staffs knew was inevitable.
They didn t know much else about the coronavirus disease, which is not to say they were unprepared.
“One of the big challenges was our lack of knowledge about the virus and how it behaved,” Dr. Deidre Gifford, acting commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Health, said Friday, reflecting on the statewide response to COVID-19. “We were learning about the disease as the pandemic played out. Guidance was evolving in real time.”
At the outset, she said, there were no therapeutics, no vaccines. A lot of cases had to be managed before widespread testing was available. Personal protective equipment, or PPE, was in short supply.
Groton The site leader at the Pfizer Inc. labs here says about 200 colleagues locally have been so focused on developing a vaccine to battle COVID-19, it s only now sinking in that they were part of a historic effort over the past year that likely saved millions of lives. I think we re only now starting to reflect, said John Burkhardt, a senior vice president at Pfizer who runs the company s largest research and development center in Groton, in a phone interview March 5. When you re going through this, you get this laser-like focus on delivery.
Albert Bourla, chairman and chief executive officer of Pfizer, in a note to company employees that coincided with the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, praised the effort of everyone involved in delivering the world s first vaccine to protect against a disease that has claimed the lives of more than 2 million worldwide and over 500,000 in the United States.
As The Day s military/defense reporter, I work to explain complex issues in a way the everyday citizen can understand. On any given day, I can be found poring over defense budgets, writing a feature on a local veteran or documenting the impact of deployments on those left behind. I even spent two nights aboard a submarine.
Julia Bergman
As The Day s military/defense reporter, I work to explain complex issues in a way the everyday citizen can understand. On any given day, I can be found poring over defense budgets, writing a feature on a local veteran or documenting the impact of deployments on those left behind. I even spent two nights aboard a submarine.
Like everyone else, cartoonists around the world have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. They have turned their pens to all things coronavirus the politicization of public health, faltering economies due to lockdowns and layoffs, the emergence of vaccines and all the hope they bring, among other things.
For the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring the global pandemic, the Society of News Design has sought editorial cartoons from around the globe. The organization received more than 400 submitted cartoons from 112 cartoonists representing 43 countries and 68 publications.
The Day was among them, submitting two SunDay Cartoons produced by our own editorial page editor, Paul Choiniere, and cartoonist, Jacinta Meyers. Both pieces were selected for inclusion in the global showcase, which will be available soon at the organization s website, www.snd.org.