As our nation struggles to rein in COVID-19, it’s important to remember that other potentially dangerous diseases continue to pose a threat, with one important difference — we have vaccinations for those diseases.
At Forest Urgent Care, our team of health care experts is standing by to provide your family with the vaccinations they need to protect them against everything from the flu to measles.
Here’s a look at why it’s more important than ever to ensure that your family has the best protections in place to safeguard their health.
With fall and winter comes the inevitable flu season, and experts are warning against the possibility of a Twindemic — a clash between the flu (influenza) and COVID-19. It’s important to note that COVID-19 and influenza are two different viral infections and should be treated as such.
To give you an idea of the numbers behind the flu, each year in the United States, between 9 million and 49 million people get the flu, and 12,000-79,000 people die from the infection.
The wide range in these numbers is largely due to the severity of the flu strains in any given year.
With the number of COVID-19 deaths surpassing 200,000, our goal is to protect our New York communities by making the flu vaccine available to people of all ages, from 6 months on up.
Medical researchers around the world are working furiously toward a vaccine for COVID-19, and much progress has been made. In fact, a few vaccines are already in the testing phase.
When it comes to widespread availability, most experts agree that a vaccine will be ready by year’s end and should be distributed in early or mid-2021. We want to ensure you that we’re tracking this very closely, and we’ll make this vaccine available to you just as soon as we can.
The current pandemic has certainly shed a light on the importance of vaccinations in general. Unfortunately, when our nation shut down in early March, many routine vaccinations were put on hold.
In the New York City area alone, vaccine doses for children over the age of two dropped by 91% in 2020 between late March and early May. As well, vaccinations among people over the age of 65 in the US dropped 83%.
If you’ve put off your family’s vaccinations, we urge you to act quickly to protect yourselves against contagious and potentially dangerous diseases, from measles to shingles.
To schedule your family’s vaccinations, please contact one of our two New York offices in Forest Hills or Hunters Point, Long Island City. Or, you can simply walk in during our business hours to get you and your family up to date on the vaccinations you need to protect your health.
