But, as these new locations were opened, the supply of doses that had been directed to some hospitals seemed to decrease. Many hospitals have only recently started vaccinating their patients.
On Friday, New York City reported receiving 800,500 doses, of which 337,518 vaccines were administered. But about 100,000 of the doses received were sent to nursing homes, city officials said, and about 200,000 were set to be used as a second dose.
Therefore, the actual number of doses available to people being vaccinated for the first time is less.
And the city has been increasing its daily vaccination rate. From Monday to Thursday this week, the city administered about 120 thousand doses.
“The growing problem now is that there is not enough vaccine available to accompany the first consultations, let alone the second,” said de Blasio on Friday.
During the first month of implantation in New York, Mr. Cuomo limited eligibility in large part to healthcare professionals and nursing home residents, and imposed a tangle of regulations that caused vaccinations to proceed more slowly than expected. Many doses remained unused in freezers for weeks. Under pressure to speed things up, Cuomo relented, opening eligibility for large categories of public sector employees, essential workers and anyone over 65. Within days, the number of eligible New Yorkers more than doubled.
Vaccines for covid19>
Answers to your vaccine questions
While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put doctors and residents of long-term care facilities first. If you want to understand how this decision is being made, this article will help you.
Life will only return to normal when society as a whole obtains sufficient protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they will only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens at most in the first two months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to infection. An increasing number of coronavirus vaccines are showing robust protection against disease. But it is also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they are infected, because they have only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists still do not know whether vaccines also block coronavirus transmission. So for now, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid crowds indoors and so on. Once enough people are vaccinated, it will be very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we, as a society, achieve this goal, life may begin to approach something normal in the fall of 2021.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially be authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical tests that provided these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. This remains a possibility. We know that people naturally infected with the coronavirus can transmit it as long as they have no cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be studying this issue intensively as vaccines are launched. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to consider possible spreaders.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is given as an injection into the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection will not be different from the one you took before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines and none have reported serious health problems. But some of them experienced short-term discomfort, including flu-like pain and symptoms that usually last for a day. People may need to plan a day off from work or school after the second injection. Although these experiences are not pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system facing the vaccine and developing a potent response that will provide lasting immunity.
No. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to prepare the immune system. This molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell, allowing the molecule to slide inward. The cell uses mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any given time, each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce to make their own proteins. As soon as these proteins are produced, our cells fragment the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules that our cells make can survive just a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is designed to resist the cell’s enzymes a little more, so that cells can produce extra proteins from the virus and stimulate a stronger immune response. But mRNA can only last a few days at most, before it is destroyed.
There was not enough vaccine for most of them. Cuomo on Friday again blamed the federal government for its slow delivery of vaccines, adding that the Trump administration’s recommendation to expand eligibility has exacerbated frustrations and shortages.
“They increased eligibility,” said the governor. “They did not increase the offer.”
State officials also say they are not sure how many doses will be available week by week. Mark Poloncarz, the Democrat who serves as Erie County’s executive, which covers Buffalo, the state’s second-largest city, said on Thursday that the county received about 7,500 doses of the state last week and about 5,300 this week, including a batch from an area hospital.