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Friday, September 25, 2020
Vol. 80, No. 39
BACK TO SCHOOL
Northwell chief briefs Chamber on Covid response, future plans BY RIKKI MASSAND
For the first time in six months, students of the Plainview - Old Bethpage School District returned to schools on September 8th. Above, students at Parkway Elementary School arrive for their first day.
Village police get funds for license place reader
Nassau County Legislator Joshua Lafazan (Woodbury) has secured passage of a $18,927 Community Revitalization Program (CRP) grant for the Incorporated Village of Muttontown. The Village will utilize those funds to purchase a vehicle-installed license plate reader system, which will allow Muttontown Police Department offi-
cers on patrol to scan license plates and identify potentially stolen cars, wanted persons, suspended licenses and registrations and assist with Amber Alerts and other law enforcement functions. County funding for the project, which was approved by the full Nassau County Legislature on Monday, September 21, will
be provided through an intermunicipal agreement with the Village. “Equipping the Muttontown Police Department with this cutting-edge law enforcement tool will enhance their efforts to keep crime low and preserve the community’s outstanding quality of life,” Legislator Lafazan said.
The Jericho Syosset News Journal is published every Friday by Litmor Publishing Corp. Periodical Postage paid at Hicksville, N.Y. 11801Telephone 931-0012 - USPS 3467-68 Postmaster: Send Address Change to: The Syosset Jericho News Journal, 821 Franklin Ave., Suite 208, Garden City, N.Y. 11530 • Meg Norris Publisher
On Thursday, September 17, the Syosset Woodbury Chamber Of Commerce welcomed Michael Fener, Executive Director of Syosset and Plainview Hospitals to its monthly meeting. Mr. Fener, an 18 year veteran of the Northwell hospital system, informed his audience that Syosset Hospital is currently “Covid-contained” with symptomatic patients being transferred to other area hospitals. As of the Chamber’s meeting date (September 17) there was one Covid-19 patient at Northwell Health’s Plainview Hospital and none at Syosset Hospital. Not including its behavioral health patient community and surgery in-patients, Syosset Hospital takes in up to 40 patients. Plainview Hospital has grown from an average of about 100 patients over the last few years to an average of 160 patients during the pandemic’s brunt earlier this year. “We typically have about 10 patients in our critical care unit and about six at Syosset...At the height of the pandemic Plainview Hospital had 40 patients in critical care and Syosset Hospital had over 20, which is many times more than we typically see. How we handled the surge is that we opened our emergency planning books, which we thought we would never need, and Gov. Cuomo stopping all elective surgeries in March made the space accommodation a bit easier. Our emergency plans worked, though I hope we’d never have to use them again,” Fener told the Chamber members. As the spike in COVID-19 cases dwindled, the double room patients at Syosset and Plainview Hospitals were able to go back to single rooms. “We started planning for ‘if this happens again, what could be done differently, and what did we learn that we’d do better the next time?” he said. Northwell Health administrators learned that though it had enough beds to house critical care patients, having those beds in the recovery room was not optimal. “You can’t fit a regular hospital bed in there and it isn’t comfortable being on a stretcher. What we’ve done is we increased ICU capacity and gotten additional monitors to make some regular beds into potential ICU beds if we need them. And we’re working on getting a second CT scan for the emergency room at Plainview Hospital, as well as increasing our oxygen capacities at both buildings…. we were getting daily, if not more than once per day, deliveries of oxygen as one of the organs COVID-19 attacks are the lungs. We’re users of oxygen therapy and we never had a shortage of oxygen but we went See page 14
Local soldier in Best Warrior competition PAGE 8 Fall festivals, hayrides and corn mazes PAGE 17