At the rate this is going, the city’s eight million residents will have their double dosage by mid-2022
For anyone in New York City seeking the COVID vaccine, they’re up against a giant math problem.
For months we’ve been told that we just have to wait until the vaccine is here and then life will be able to start resuming. The government had months to prepare for this moment, but — surprise — they bungled it. It’s “incredibly frustrating,” says Councilman Mark Levine, a Harlem Democrat who chairs the health committee, and whose Twitter has been a fount of clear direction since the beginning of the pandemic. “The city did not respond with enough urgency,” he says, “and we lost precious weeks.”
The biggest problem is the lack of supply. The state divided the population into stages of priority, with the first consisting of a million first responders such as doctors, nurses and nursing home workers, and the second being two million police officers, firefighters, teachers, and those over 65. They’re up to stage two now, meaning three million people are ready for a shot in the arm, but the federal government is not giving more than 100,000 doses a week to the city. And that doesn’t account for the 28 percent of first responders who, according to Levine, live outside city limits. “It’s unfair the way they calculate how much each jurisdiction receives,” he says.
Of the 800,500 vaccines delivered so far, New York City has distributed about half. At the rate this is going, the city’s eight million residents will have their double dosage by mid-2022.
Create a free account to keep reading.
