NEW YORK (Reuters) – For Claudia Zain, a New York City home health assistant, getting her first injection of the coronavirus vaccine on Sunday was like being “a little part of the story” that left her excited and hopeful for the future as the United States struggles to contain the terrible pandemic.
“There are so many emotions involved in what is happening now and I would like to be an inspiration to people who are asking themselves, ‘Can I do this? Should I do this? ‘”Said Zain, 47, after receiving the photo at Brooklyn Army Terminal on a cold Sunday afternoon. “You must do this because this is the way to move on.”
The Brooklyn website is one of two mass vaccination sites opened in New York City on Sunday. The second is located at the Bathgate Contract Postal Station in the Bronx neighborhood.
The massive sites were open part of the day on Sunday, before starting to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week on Monday, as part of the effort by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to create 250 vaccination sites to meet the ambitious vaccination target of 1 million New Yorkers by the end of the month.
Three other smaller sites also opened on Sunday in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens.
In New York, as in much of the United States, efforts to place the two vaccines that have so far been authorized in the arms of Americans have been slower than expected due to a number of problems. They included strict rules that control who should be vaccinated first, with some health professionals at the front of the line refusing vaccines and a lack of planning or guidance at the federal level.
Early Sunday, New York City administered 203,181 doses of vaccines to its residents of more than 524,000 doses that were administered, data from the city’s health department showed.
On Friday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who previously said that all health workers should be vaccinated before the state moved on to other categories, changed the course, saying people 75 and older could receive injection starting on Monday.
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that healthcare professionals and residents and nursing staff should prioritize limited vaccine supplies. The agency softened that orientation on Friday, recommending that states move to the next ones on the list – people over 75 and so-called “essential” workers – to speed up delayed vaccination programs.
The United States now has an average of 3,000 deaths and 245,000 new cases per day, according to a count of public health data from Reuters. The increase in hospitalizations and the overcrowding of intensive care units are taking health systems to the breaking point.
North Carolina and Virginia set new day records for new cases on Saturday. They are among the 22 states that set daily infection records 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 new coronavirus first detected 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 authorized vaccines in the U.S., warned of the need for a better system to detect and combat new variants of COVID -19 from the UK and South Africa.
“We are going to have to update our vaccines, antibodies and other therapies regularly to keep up with these new variants as they arise,” 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; Bill Berkrot edition