NEW YORK (Reuters) – For Claudia Zain, a home health care provider in New York City, receiving the first shot of the coronavirus vaccine on Sunday felt like “a small part of the story” that left her excited. and hopeful for the future The United States is struggling to contain the furious pandemic.
“There are so many emotions wrapped up in what’s happening right now and I’d like to be an inspiration to people who are wondering,‘ Can I do this? Should I do that? “Said Zain, 47, after being shot at the Brooklyn Army terminal on Sunday afternoon.” You should do it because that’s the way to go. “
The Brooklyn site is one of two mass vaccination sites that opened Sunday in New York City. The second is at Bathgate Contract Post Office in the Bronx.
The mass sites were open part of the day on Sunday before starting to operate 24 hours a day, Monday seven days a week, as part of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s push to establish 250 vaccination sites to achieve the ambitious goal of inoculating 1 million New Yorkers by the end of the month.
Three other smaller locations also opened Sunday in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens.
In New York, like much of the United States, efforts to get the two vaccines that had hitherto been authorized in the arms of Americans have moved more slowly than expected due to a number of problems. . They included strict rules that controlled who should be inoculated first, with some health workers at the helm of the line reducing shots and a lack of planning or direction at the federal level.
As of early Sunday, New York City had administered 203,181 doses of the vaccine to its residents of more than 524,000 doses that have been administered, according to data from the city’s health department.
On Friday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who previously said all health care workers should be inoculated before the state moved to other categories, changed course, saying people 75 or older more could receive the shot from Monday.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said health care workers and residents and nursing home staff should have priority for the limited supply of vaccines. The agency softened that orientation on Friday and recommended states move to the next on the list (people over 75 and so-called “essential” workers) to speed up delayed vaccination programs.
The United States now averages 3,000 deaths and 245,000 new cases a day, according to a Reuters public health data count. Growing hospitalizations and overflowing intensive care units are extending health systems to the breaking point.
North Carolina and Virginia set day records in new cases on Saturday. They are among 22 states that have set daily infection records this month and health experts warn that new variants of the virus could lead to an even greater increase in infections.
A highly transmissible variant of the new coronavirus first detected in the United Kingdom in December has now been found in at least nine states in the United States.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who serves on the board of Pfizer Inc., which manufactures one of the authorized vaccines in the U.S., warned of the need for a system better to detect and combat new COVID-19 variants in the UK and South Africa.
“We will need to update our vaccines, antibody medications and other therapeutic products regularly to keep up with these new variants as they appear,” Gottlieb said in an interview with CBS ‘Face the Nation’ on Sunday.
Reports by Andrew Kelly and Maria Caspani in New York, additional reports by Lisa Shumaker in Chicago; Edited by Bill Berkrot