New York state’s mandate for healthcare workers was one of the first and strictest mandates enforced to date — it included no option for unvaccinated workers to opt-out with regular testing.

Some had predicted it would cause at least one hospital to pause elective procedures and force state governor Kathy Hochul to consider calling in the National Guard. In the end, 92 per cent of both hospital and nursing home staff were vaccinated before the deadline and no major interruptions to patient care were reported, according to the governor’s office.

The United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s powerful teachers’ union, warned that a similar mandate enforced on Monday for 150,000 staffers at city schools including school safety officers and cafeteria workers could spur unsafe conditions in public schools. It later conceded that it had not. That mandate prompted 43,000 vaccinations in about a month, according to City Hall…

Recent enforcements show that most workers choose to get vaccinated. Employers that introduced mandates saw the share of vaccinated workers climb as much as 20 percentage points to hover around 90 per cent, according to a White House report. As many as 28m Americans have been vaccinated since President Joe Biden announced a separate mandate for federal employees in late July, but many of those vaccinations could also have been driven by the Delta spike.