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NEW YORK: The governors of New York and Florida sought to accelerate the slower-than-expected rollout of coronavirus vaccines by warning hospitals on Monday (January 4) that they would reduce future allocations to those who do not administer vaccines with the fast enough.
In New York, hospitals must administer vaccines within a week of receiving them or face a fine and the loss of future supplies, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, hours before announcing the first known instance in the state of a newest coronavirus variant. infectious disease that was first detected in Brittany.
“I don’t want the vaccine in a refrigerator or freezer, I want it on someone’s arm,” the governor said. “If you are not performing this function, it raises questions about the operational efficiency of the hospital.”
Among the lowest performers was the New York City Health + Hospitals system, the city’s main public hospital network, which had dispensed just 31% of Cuomo’s assigned doses, compared with 99% for some private hospitals. of the state. The statewide average was 46 percent.
A spokeswoman for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio criticized the governor’s policy.
“Threatening to ‘revoke’ the ‘privilege’ of H + H vaccination is punitive and unnecessary,” wrote Avery Cohen, the spokeswoman, on Twitter.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said New York and Florida were being “too bureaucratic” in penalizing hospitals that, in addition to giving vaccines, were busy treating a growing number of patients with COVID-19.
“Instead of fining the hospitals, why not give them more resources to do this, more money, more staff,” he said in a telephone interview, “instead of penalizing them and not realizing that they, not the people of Albany or Tallahassee, are they? Are they the ones who really take care of the patients? “
Cuomo’s subsequent announcement that the new, more contagious variant known as B.1.1.7 had been found in New York gave new urgency to the state’s efforts to speed up vaccinations.
The variant, which has also been reported in Florida, Colorado and California, was detected in a man in his 60s living in a town north of Albany who had not traveled recently, suggesting that community spread is taking place .
‘YOU HAVE TO DO BETTER’
The U.S. federal government has distributed more than 15 million doses of vaccines to states and territories across the country, but only about 4.5 million have been administered so far, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. the US Disease Prevention (CDC) Released Monday.
The US government has fallen far short of its target of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020. Officials said they expect implementation to recover significantly this month.
READ: Major US Airlines Support ‘Global’ COVID-19 Testing Requirements: Letter
Surgeon General Jerome Adams told CBS News that there are 15 to 20 million doses of vaccines available.
“We have to be hopeful about that, recognizing that we have to do better and we are going to continue to do better,” Adams said. “And I promise you that you will see that in the next two weeks the numbers increase substantially.”
The United States had reported a total of 20.5 million COVID-19 cases and 351,480 deaths as of midnight Sunday. On a seven-day moving average, it reports 2,636 coronavirus deaths per day.
In Florida, where officials have put seniors ahead of many essential workers to receive the vaccine, Governor Ron DeSantis announced a policy under which the state would assign doses to the hospitals that dispense them more quickly.
“Hospitals that are not doing a good job of getting the vaccine will have their allocations transferred to the hospitals that are doing a good job of getting the vaccine,” DeSantis said in a briefing.
“We do not want the vaccine to go inactive in some hospital system,” he added, although he did not say they would face fines.
Florida will also deploy an additional 1,000 nurses to administer vaccines and keep state-run vaccination sites open seven days a week, he said.
“ARMOR FOR THE BODY”
New York has dispensed about 175,000 doses of the 896,000 it has received since mid-December, according to CDC data. Florida has dispensed 265,000 of the 1.14 million doses it received.
In New York City, the mayor said hurdles were holding back his goal of 1 million residents receiving the first of two doses of the vaccine by the end of January. Just over 110,000 residents have received their first dose so far, according to city data.
De Blasio urged the state to expand early eligible groups beyond healthcare workers and nursing home residents.
Monday also marked the first day that some Americans were due to receive their second vaccine, three weeks after receiving the first dose. Among them was Maritza Beniquez, a healthcare worker in Newark, New Jersey.
“Now I have armor,” he said after receiving the dose in a video shared on Facebook by state officials.
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