NEW YORK (Reuters) – For Claudia Zain, a home care provider in New York City, getting the first injection of the coronavirus vaccine on Sunday felt like ‘a little piece of history’ that left her excited and hopeful for the future as the United States struggling to contain the raging pandemic.
“There are so many emotions in what is happening right now and I would like to be a source of inspiration for people who wonder: can I do this? Should I do this? ‘, ”Said Zain, 47, after getting a shot at the Brooklyn Army Terminal on a freezing Sunday afternoon. “You should do it because this is the way to move forward.”
The Brooklyn site is one of two mass vaccination sites opened in New York City on Sunday. The second is located at Bathgate Contract Postal Station in the Bronx district.
The mass sites were open for part of the day on Sundays before opening around the clock, seven days a week on Mondays as part of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s drive to set up 250 vaccination sites to meet the ambitious goal. of vaccination. 1 million New Yorkers by the end of the month.
Three other smaller locations also opened on Sunday in Brooklyn, the Bronx and in Queens.
In New York, as in much of the United States, efforts to get the two vaccines approved so far into the arms of Americans have been slower than hoped due to a slew of problems. They include strict rules dictating who should be vaccinated first, with some health workers at the front of the line declining the shots and a lack of planning or direction at the federal level.
Early Sunday, New York City had delivered 203,181 doses of the vaccines to its residents out of more than 524,000 doses administered, data from the city’s health department showed.
On Friday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who previously said all health workers should be vaccinated before the state moved to other categories, changed course and said people 75 and older could get the injection starting Monday.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said health and nursing home residents and staff should have priority over the limited supply of vaccines. The agency softened those guidelines on Friday, recommending states move to the next on the list – people over age 75 and so-called “essential” workers – to speed up lagging vaccination programs.
According to a Reuters report on public health data, the United States now has an average of 3,000 deaths and 245,000 new cases per day. Rising hospital admissions and overcrowded intensive care units are stretching health care systems to breaking point.
North Carolina and Virginia both set daily records for new business on Saturday. They are among 22 states that 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.
A highly transmissible variant of the novel coronavirus first discovered in the UK 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 sits on the board of Pfizer Inc, which makes one of the U.S.-authorized vaccines, warned of the need for a better system to produce new COVID-19 variants of detect and combat the US. UK and South Africa.
“We will have to update our vaccines and our antibody drugs and other therapies regularly to keep up with these new variants as they appear,” Gottlieb said in an interview with CBS ‘Face the Nation’ on Sunday.
Reporting by Andrew Kelly and Maria Caspani in New York, additional reporting by Lisa Shumaker in Chicago; Editing by Bill Berkrot