New York City is expected to receive another 100,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday – a fraction of what is needed, officials said Sunday.
As of last week, Big Apple was managing 30,000 to 40,000 photos a day, running out of supplies to the point where even a single blip in a manufacturer’s supply chain forced the city to delay at least 23,000 future meetings.
“We should vaccinate 400,000 a week,” said City Councilor Mark Levine (D-Manhattan), chairman of the council’s Health Committee.
“The new delivery is expected in the city on Tuesday, but I don’t know if it has to wait for that delivery to be divided into locations, which could push [distribution] until Wednesday, “he told The Post on Sunday.
“Compared to the 2.5 million people in the five neighborhoods who are eligible [to currently be immunized] – and [as] we also vaccinate a significant number of people who do not live here – 100,000 a week is really a small amount. ”
The city said last week that it had to temporarily close 15 vaccination centers between Thursday and Sunday due to the supply of doses from Moderna.
Asked if all centers will reopen as planned this week, city officials told The Post on Sunday that it all depends on the flow of new doses.
The state expects to receive a total of 250,000 doses next week, some of which will go to the city.
The same can be said for the planned new mass immunization centers, such as Mets’ Citi Field, which was due to open this week and hand out up to 7,000 people a day, officials said.
As of Sunday, New York used 88 percent of its first dose of COVID-19 vaccine, administering 1,144,070 of its 1,304,050 shots, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office said in a statement.
The state has a stockpile of 564,600 doses for the second blow needed. Of this amount, 139,929 second doses were administered, or just under 25 percent. A person must wait at least 21 or 28 days between shots, depending on whether they first received Pfizer or Moderna.
The first person to receive a vaccine in the state – and in fact in the country – was a nurse in Queens in mid-December.
Cuomo said the state’s vaccination figures show “once again that the problem we face is a lack of supply from the federal government.”
“We have the operational capacity to make over 100,000 doses a day – we only need doses,” he said.
New York City has so far used 74% of the first doses, administering 532,132 of the 717,350 photos available, according to the city’s website. The city calculates its figures slightly differently from the state – including the doses allocated and administered in the federal-administered nursing home inoculation program.
As for the second dose, it administered just under 29%, or 86,740, of the 301,950, the city said.
“The city’s big problem is inconsistency and uncertainty about transportation,” Levine said.
“It simply came to our notice then. They scheduled more meetings than supplies, “he said, referring to the withdrawal of immunizations by a week.
Part of the problem was a delivery issue with manufacturer Moderna, the city said.
But the launch of the city and the state was far from smooth.
The federations accused New York of preventing the distribution, with too restrictive rules on who could receive the first vaccine.
As for the city, users have broken their buggy and overly complicated registration system, which involves a number of different websites for different clinics.
“Oh, my God,” Levine said when asked about what he called “the insanely complex system for getting a date.”
Overall, the country hit more than 25 million confirmed cases of coronavirus on Sunday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Meanwhile, the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported more than 21.8 million outbreaks across the country since Sunday.
With Post threads