How Shelter Islanders stepped up to fight COVID
This is the second in a series about how Shelter Islanders coped with the COVID-19 pandemic that five years ago intruded on all aspects of people’s lives and a look at where we are today.
“It was the privilege of my life,” Islander Brett Surerus said about how he and Alex Graham organized to feed hospital workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
His inspiration was his wife Kelly,who was on the East End front lines battling the pandemic and saving lives. Five years ago this month, Ms. Surerus would get the first boat before dawn at South Ferry to go to her job as an intensive care unit nurse at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital.
Then it would be nonstop, hour after hour, until it was time to make it back to the Island and her family. Asked then if she was concerned about her own health and that of her family — husband Brett, Piper, 5 in 2020, and Jackson, 6 — she responded without emotion, speaking instead about the practical procedures her profession demands during the pandemic.
“I take all my clothes and put them in a bag before I leave the hospital,” Ms. Surerus said, putting on fresh ones. “When I get home there’s a door that leads directly into the bedroom and the shoes stay outside.” The clothes she’s worn home also go into a bag. The children know they “can’t be with me right away,” she said. After a shower, she “bleaches the bathroom.”
By then it’s 9 p.m.
At the hospital “it’s all hands on deck,” Ms. Surerus said, speaking about the work she and her colleagues were performing during the health crisis. “They say that a pandemic is more a marathon than a sprint,” Ms. Surerus said, meaning it will affect communities for months. “But we’re all sprinting.”
All told, as of April 2023, over 1.1 million deaths were reported in the U.S. due to COVID.
According to the World Health Organization, “There have been over seven million recorded fatalities due to COVID-19, from the beginning of the pandemic until the end of 2023, according to official data, but the actual death toll from the disease may be closer to 21 million.”
“This was something I could do,” Mr. Surerus said recently, describing how he reached out to Ms. Graham to help develop a means of providing some 8,000 meals for hospital employees and health care professionals, raising close to $100,000 to pay for those meals from local restaurants that were struggling to survive.
Mr. Surerus and Ms. Graham spent about 24 hours drafting a plan for what became the Shelter Island Action Alliance.
Many others stepped up to help beyond caring for themselves and their own families, he said.
The first business he contacted was Stars Café, knowing that co-owners Pepe Martinez and Lydia Martinez Majdišová had never refused when approached to support an Island cause. Once again they stepped up and many other restaurant operators joined in.
Contributors were told to make their donations directly to the restaurateurs of their choice who would optimize the money to create as many meals as possible for staff at Stony Brook Southampton and Stony Brook Eastern Long Island hospitals.
Very quickly, Mr. Surerus and Ms. Graham recognized they couldn’t solicit money on behalf of a brand new organization and certainly couldn’t provide contributors with the ability to deduct their donations from their taxes. But applying to be a 501(c)3 tax exempt status would be a slow process.
Mr. Surerus got in touch with Don D’Amato at the Shelter Island Lions Club. Mr. D’Amato, in turn linked in Lions Club President Darrin Binder and the Lions COVID Committee Chairwoman Mary-Faith Westervelt. Ms. Westervelt and her committee were already seeking additional ways to support the community through the pandemic.
The Lions had the necessary status as a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization for their many charitable efforts and stepped up to support the fledgling Alliance.
The Lions COVID Committee was already recommending to the membership ways in which Lions could help the community through the pandemic. And supporting the Alliance was just one more way of helping Islanders make it through the crisis.
“The Lions provided an incredible support system,” Ms. Graham said.
RALLYING TO HELP FAMILIES
At Christmas 2020, the Alliance ran a Holiday Home Decorating Contest with entrants paying a fee that went to help buy gifts from local stores, giving a boost to several businesses and a touch of normalcy to so many struggling families. School Nurse Mary Kanarvogel, who spearheaded the program of ensuring children had holiday gifts regardless of family finances, helped to identify those who might have been forgotten.
What motivated Mr. Surerus, besides his caring for his wife and her colleagues, was his long friendship with Nick Morehead, who was ill with cancer, to which he would succumb in May 2021. Despite his illness, Mr. Morehead was still delivering meals to the hospitals. When Mr. Morehead died, Mr. Surerus pledged to follow Mr. Morehead’s example of selflessly giving to the community.
Should there ever be another crisis like the pandemic posed, he said he would hope people would reach beyond their own families to others — friends and neighbors in need.
But that’s what makes Shelter Island such a special place, Mr. Surerus said about responses residents demonstrate toward one another. It’s not easy living on the Island, he said, but the nature of its people, he added, is what makes life here so special.
SENIORS
At the best of times, there are some in the senior community who are isolated, lonely and vulnerable. That situation was exacerbated by the pandemic. Neighbors and friends who previously visited and supported them were isolating themselves to avoid the deadly pandemic.
Fortunately, there were two people in the dark early days of the emergency — Senior Center Manager Laurie Fanelli and Town Social Worker Lucille Buergers — who brought many years of hospital and community clinical experience and crisis responses to dealing with patients suffering from tuberculosis, AIDS, meningitis, polio, syphilis and post 9/11 responses.
They also knew the two Islanders who had died during the pandemic, Kevin Brooks, 74, who succumbed to the illness while hospitalized, and Forrest Compton, 94, who also died in the hospital.
“We followed them symptomatically until their demise,” Ms. Fanelli said.
She and Ms. Buergers networked constantly with Eastern Long Island Hospital nurses. She praised the National Institutes of Health as the best resource for information on the pandemic and said good information also came from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“They guided us in establishing protocols for seniors who were homebound and living under strict respiratory isolation,” Ms. Fanelli said.
Quarantine restrictions added to stress for seniors, especially for those living alone, she added.
“Individuals were facing fear of infection, reinfection, frustration, helplessness and uncertainty about their futures,” Ms. Fanelli said. “Historically, a longer period of quarantine and isolation is associated with worse mental health,” particularly post-traumatic stress disorder, she said.
As mental health workers, Ms. Fanelli and Ms. Buergers took on the mental health crisis, enlisting others on the Island — a psychiatrist, two additional social workers and a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner — to share in the effort. Volunteers on the Island joined in, contributing their time to make telephone reassurance calls.
Others became matches for seniors with whom they shared interests to walk and talk as a means of lessening the loneliness. Others delivered meals, shopped for food and functioned as drivers so COVID-negative individuals could keep appointments. The Shelter Island Police Department helped in the vetting of volunteers.
Another time-consuming but eventually rewarding project, Ms. Fanelli said, was getting medical supplies, masks, sanitizers, nitrile (disposable) gloves and similar items, likely because of a nationwide run on these vital materials.
“The community response was amazing, but that’s Shelter Island,” Ms. Fanelli said.
