New York City is expected to receive another “paltry” 100,000 new doses of the COVID-19 vaccine Tuesday – a fraction of what is needed, officials said Sunday.
As of last week, the Big Apple was managing 30,000 to 40,000 shots a day, pushing inventory so far that even a single blip in a manufacturer’s supply chain forced the city to delay at least 23,000 upcoming appointments.
“We should be vaccinating 400,000 a week,” said City Councilor Mark Levine (D-Manhattan), chairman of the board’s health committee.
“The new shipment is due in town on Tuesday, but I don’t know if they should wait for that shipment to be shipped to locations, which [distribution] see you Wednesday, ” he told The Post on Sunday.
“Compared to the 2.5 million people in the five city districts who are eligible [to currently be immunized] – and [as] we also vaccinate a significant number of people who don’t live here – 100,000 a week is really a meager amount. ”
The city said last week it had to temporarily close 15 vaccine hubs between Thursday and Sunday due to the supply of Moderna doses.
Asked if all centers would reopen this week as planned, 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 in the coming week, some of which will go to the city.
The same can be said for new planned mass immunization centers such as the Mets’ Citi Field stadium, which would open this week and hand out shots to up to 7,000 people a day, officials said.
As of Sunday, New York has used 88 percent of its supply of first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, delivering 1,144,070 of the 1,304,050 shots, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office said in a statement.
The state has a stockpile of 564,600 doses for the required second shot. Of that amount, 139,929 were administered second doses, or just under 25 percent. A person must wait at least 21 or 28 days between shots, depending on whether they receive Pfizer’s or Modernas first.
The first person in the state – and in fact the country – to receive a vaccine was a nurse from 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 do over 100,000 doses a day – we just need the doses,” he said.
New York City has used 74 percent of its supply of first doses so far, according to the city’s website, 532,132 of the 717,350 shots available. The city calculates its numbers slightly differently than the state – including the doses assigned to and administered in the federally-led nursing home vaccination program.
As for the second doses, it administered just under 29 percent, or 86,740, of its supply of 301,950, the city said.
“The big problem for the city is the inconsistency and lack of certainty” about shipments, Levine said.
‘We stumbled last week. They planned more appointments than supplies, ” he said, referring to cutting immunizations by one week.
Part of the problem was a delivery problem with manufacturer Moderna, the city said.
But the city and state rollout has been far from smooth.
The FBI has impeded distribution in accused New York with overly restrictive rules about who can get the vaccine first.
As for the city, users have ripped up the buggy and over-complicated registration system, which includes a myriad of different websites for different clinics.
“Oh my god,” said Levine when asked what he called the “maddeningly complex system of getting an appointment.”
According to Johns Hopkins University, the country as a whole affected more than 25 million confirmed coronavirus cases on Sunday.
Meanwhile, federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported more than 21.8 million shots nationwide as of Sunday.
With pole wires