NewmarketToday welcomes your letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). This is a copy of a letter sent to Newmarket Mayor John Taylor, Aurora Mayor Tom Mrakas, Richmond Hill Regional Councillor Joe DiPaola, Richmond Hill MPP Daisy Wai, Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill MPP Michael Parsa, York-Simcoe MPP Caroline Mulroney, and Richmond Hill MP Majid Jowhari.
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To the people in charge: firstly, I hope you are all well and keeping safe.
With great respect and in hopes of prompt action, I send you all this letter detailing my concerns.
In these unsettling stressful times with COVID and variant numbers being a constant part of our daily lives, we have many reasons to be worried about what is happening with the vaccines rollout. All levels of government agree to give priority COVID vaccinations to long-term care and seniors homes, along with frontline workers and others on the revised schedule as part of phase one.
My concerns are about those seniors who work so hard and with great expense to remain in their own homes and are not in those facilities. Instead, they hire help for many aspects of daily living, they have PSWs to help with personal care, they struggle with lack of social media knowledge, they are lonely without their family and friends and with social distancing, their mental health is fast deteriorating.
Now they find themselves left out of the PRIORITY phase 1 of the vaccine rollout! What is going to happen to them? They need their vaccines, too. Let them know who will contact them when its their turn. Who should they call to get information?
I propose that you lobby the federal and provincial and municipal leaders to include vulnerable seniors who live in other settings (their own home, with their family, within group homes) to be an important part of the phase one rollout. They can not wait to be part of phase two, they can't wait to get sicker, they can't stay inside much longer — they have to get vaccinated immediately!
Please contact the local LHIN, geriatric doctors, cancer centres, cardiologists and York Region hospitals to get these people on the list. It is urgent that we collectively push the government to make this critical change and notify the senior public. You can make this happen.
I am the primary caregiver to a fragile 90-year-old and three-time cancer survivor now undergoing chemo again, and her 93-year-old husband who has heart issues yet is still determined to cook for his wife. They have been married almost 70 years and they live in their own condo in Richmond Hill. They want to get their vaccine asap. I can take them wherever they need to go for that vaccine.
Please call me to let me know where and when I can take them to get their vaccine and any updates on this serious matter.
Best regards, with gratitude,
Gisella Imbrogno
Richmond Hill
