NEW YORK (Reuters) – For Claudia Zain, a home care nurse in New York, receiving her coronavirus vaccine on Sunday felt like “a small part of history” that left her excited and hopeful for the future. The United States is fighting to counter the furious pandemic.
“There are so many emotions wrapped up in what is happening now and I would like to be an inspiration to people who are wondering, ‘Can I do this? Should I do that? “Said Zain, 47, after he was shot at the Brooklyn Army terminal on a cold Sunday afternoon. “You should do it because this is the way to go.”
The Brooklyn site is one of two mass vaccination sites that opened in New York on Sunday. The second is located at Contract Bathgate Post Office in the Bronx.
The meal sites were opened part of the day on Sunday before starting operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week on Monday, as part of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s effort to set up 250 locations. vaccination to meet the ambitious goal of inoculating 1 million New Yorkers by the end of the month.
Three other smaller sites opened Sunday in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens.
In New York, as in much of the United States, efforts to obtain the two vaccines that have so far been authorized in the arms of Americans have moved slower than expected due to a series of problems. These included strict rules that control who should be inoculated first, with some health workers at the bottom of the line dropping photos and a lack of planning or direction at the federal level.
Early in the morning, New York City had administered 203,181 doses of vaccine to its residents out of the more than 524,000 doses that were administered, according to data from the city’s health department.
On Friday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who previously said all health care workers should be inoculated before the state could move to other categories, changed course, saying people 75 and older would be inoculated. he could be shot from Monday.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said health care workers and nursing home residents and staff should have priority for the limited supply of vaccines. The agency downplayed those recommendations on Friday, urging states to move to those on the list – people over the age of 75 and so-called “essential” workers – to speed up delayed vaccination programs.
The United States is now averaging 3,000 deaths and 245,000 new cases a day, according to a Reuters assessment of public health data. Growing hospitals and overflowing intensive care units are expanding health systems to the point of rupture.
North Carolina and Virginia set one-day records for new cases on Saturday. They are among 22 states that have set records for daily infections this month, and health experts warn that new variants of the virus could lead to an even greater increase in infections.
An extremely transmissible variant of the new coronavirus first detected in the United Kingdom in December has now been found in at least nine US states.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, who is on the board of Pfizer Inc., which produces one of the U.S.’s authorized vaccines, has warned of the need for a better system for detecting and combating new ones. COVID-19 variants from the United Kingdom and South Africa.
“We will need to regularly update our vaccines, antibodies and other therapeutics to keep up with these new variants as they arise,” Gottlieb said in an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.
Andrew Kelly and Maria Caspani’s report in New York, Lisa Shumaker’s additional report in Chicago; Editing by Bill Berkrot