“We want to see more Black and brown members of the community coming into our PODs,” Albany County Health Commissioner Elizabeth Whalen said of points of dispensing

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will set up four more community-based vaccination sites in New York State, one of them in Albany at the Washington Avenue Armory at 195 Washington Ave. Each site will vaccinate about 1,000 New Yorkers a day beginning the first week of March with appointments reserved for residents of the communities in which the sites are located.

Much of the week’s focus turned to the cascading criticism of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing home death counts.

Over 1.6 million New Yorkers were screened online on Valentine’s Day, which is 13 percent of all screenings since January. The average wait for scheduling an appointment was 13 minutes and 36 seconds.

Andrew Cuomo began his lengthy response at Monday’s press conference by saying, “Emergency powers have nothing to do with nursing homes.” On the balance of power, Cuomo said that the State Legislature could reverse any of his actions with a vote of 50 percent in the Assembly and the Senate. “They have never reversed a single action,” he said.

On Monday, the National Governors Association, which is chaired by Andrew Cuomo, sent a letter to President Joe Biden, asking for better coordination between and more clarity on state and federal COVID-19 vaccina

The South African strain of COVID-19, known as B.1.351, was first confirmed in the United States on Jan. 28 in South Carolina. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage that tracks three variant strains, as of Monday evening, there were a total of 17 cases of B.1.351 across eight states.

More than half of the grants are going to minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, and veteran-owned businesses, said Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy.

Given the continued decline in hospitalization and infection rates throughout New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo on Sunday signed an executive order extending closing times from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. for bars, restaurants, gyms and fitness centers, casinos, and billiards halls, as well as other establishments licensed by the State Liquor Authority.

Eleven more cases of the B.1.1.7 variant of COVID-19 — the highly transmissible variant first identified in the United Kingdom — have been identified in New York State, bringing the state’s total to 70.