Across New York City, the coronavirus has continued its winter surge, with a daily average of nearly 4,000 cases and about 40 deaths for the last week. Yet the rollout of vaccinations that was meant to restore a semblance of normalcy has gotten off to a slow start.
More than 340,000 doses of the vaccine have been delivered to the city, but for now their distribution does not resemble the sort of mass mobilization many imagined. And public health experts say that there is urgent need to speed up the pace of vaccinations in New York, given the possibility that officials may soon detect the more contagious variant of the virus first identified in Britain and now known to be in three U.S. states and dozens of countries around the world.
In the first 17 days of the vaccination rollout, about 88,140 people across the city’s five boroughs received the first of two doses, the equivalent of only about 1 percent of the city’s population. Those vaccinated thus far have overwhelmingly been hospital employees, residents and workers at nursing homes, and the staff at certain health clinics. The city has yet to open any large vaccination sites.
On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city still aimed to administer doses to one million people by the end of January. He has suggested that the state is acting as a bottleneck by not authorizing the city to open up vaccinations to larger categories of people.
“If we’re given the authorization, we can move very quickly,” Mr. de Blasio said. “We need the state guidance in terms of the categories of people, and the more that expands, the faster we can go.”
Dr. Ronald Scott Braithwaite, a professor at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine who has been modeling New York City’s epidemic and is an adviser to the city, said his team’s analysis suggested that once 10 to 20 percent of the city was vaccinated, the number of new cases would begin to drop — so long as social distancing and mask wearing remained constant and the new variant did not find a foothold in New York. But achieving that goal is still a long way off.
“If the new variant replaces the existing variant and we don’t vaccinate quickly, the second wave will start cresting again and will crest really high, and that’s something to take really seriously,” Dr. Braithwaite said.
— Joseph Goldstein The New York Times