NYC is on the brink of running out of COVID-19 vaccines amid low federal government supply | The State
To the complicated plot of vaccination process against COVID-19 in the big Apple a sentence from Mayor Bill de Blasio was joined this Friday: If the federal government does not send extra doses next week, the city will run out of supplies of new drugs!
There are in the five county inventories less than 186,000 units of the first dose of Pfizer and Moderna.
The municipal president revealed that health centers such as Mount Sinai Hospital and NYU Hospital They no longer accept appointments because they don’t have immunizations available.
“We have a fundamental problem here. We are speeding up the vaccination process, but we will not have enough vaccines by the end of next week. We need maximum pressure on Washington and Albany. And also on the manufacturers, so that they deliver hundreds of thousands of doses to us immediately ”, he highlighted.
The New York City Health authorities has already administered more than 337,500 doses to New Yorkers, including more than 42,000 second doses. 71.3% of the 175,000 vaccines that were planned to be distributed at the end of this weekend have already been inoculated.
Plans fall apart
Resupplying 100,000 doses in recent weeksBased on the numbers that the Mayor manages, it is “very insignificant”, taking into consideration that since last Monday all New Yorkers over 65 years of age have been incorporated into the vaccination strategy.
The drug shortage would disrupt the City’s goal of administering 1 million doses in all five boroughs by the end of January, delaying the prospect of quickly achieving herd immunity and fully reopening the economy safely.
Cuomo: We need more doses!
Despite the pitfalls in the vaccination process, the governor Andrew Cuomo is optimistic that New York will “win the war” against the coronavirus with “the vaccine as its greatest weapon”, although he remarked that during the last week the supply of doses to the state decreased from 300,000 to 250,000.
At present 7.1 million New Yorkers in Group 1A and 1B are eligible to be vaccinated. At the current rate of supplies from the federal Administration, that means it would take six months to immunize to health and education personnel, police, firefighters, rescuers and people over 65 years of age.
The issue is further complicated when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have also recommended incorporating into this phase the group of individuals with “Pre-existing diseases”.
“We are speaking with federal officials to clarify what underlying health conditions would qualify. Diabetics, the obese, smokers, those with coronary problems? That guide is still not clear to us. All roads lead to you we need more dosesCuomo claimed.
According to preliminary estimates by the State Department of Health, if everyone with pre-existing conditions were allowed to be vaccinated, that would translate into close to 12 million more people would qualify to be eligible for the stage 1B vaccine.
The curve flattens
Within the sea of complications to stop the second wave of the pandemic, the state president assured that in the last three days it was observed a slight decrease in the new infected compared to the worrying figures that began to emerge immediately after the New Year.
“As social activity started to flatten out, the rate of COVID-19 started to drop a bit. And that is good news. We would rather not have seen the increase, it would have been worse if we had not made so many warnings during the holidays, “he said.
It was also confirmed a new variant case of the coronavirus that was detected in the UK in a patient in Nassau County. So far there is 16 infected with this new strain throughout New York State.
This Thursday the average of positivity in the whole state showed a 6.14%, were confirmed 19,942 infected and 183 deceased.
One month after the vaccine in NY:
- eleven% of people who qualify to be immunized in the first phase in NY have received the drugs.
- 827,715 doses of the vaccine had been applied throughout New York state as of this Thursday.
- 731,285 of the first dose and 96,430 of the second dose.
- 2.1 million of people in group 1A (health sector workers) is the State’s vaccination goal.
- 3.2 million are eligible for group 1B in NY (education personnel, police, rescuers, firefighters and seniors).
- 1.8 million people 65 and older qualify for the dose.
- 32,566 deaths due to complications with COVID-19 since the pandemic began in NY.
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