New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned that the city will run out of coronavirus vaccines by the end of the week.
“At the [vaccination] rate we are going, we will begin to run out on Thursday, two days from now,” he cautioned. “We will have literally nothing left to give by Friday.”
De Blasio noted that the city has the physical capacity to inoculate 300,000 people this week if officials had a sufficient number of doses.
“The problem is right now we don’t,” he said.
De Blasio said he is “very hopeful” President-elect Joe Biden, who will take office on Wednesday, can “fix a lot of this.”
The mayor, who previously praised Biden’s “powerful pledge” to vaccinate 100 million U.S. citizens during his first 100 days in office, said that a New Yorker is vaccinated every three seconds, a rate that cannot be maintained without an additional shipment.
“Last week, we set a public goal of 175,000 vaccinations. We surpassed that goal this last weekend on Sunday, ending out the week with about 220,000 vaccinations in New York City. The pace of vaccinations is going faster and faster,” he reported. “Right now, we have a small supply coming today, 53,000 doses, leaving us with only 116,000 for the week ahead.”
De Blasio noted that the city has considerable physical space set aside to serve as vaccination centers after sporting arenas Citi Field and Yankee Stadium, the homes of the New York Mets and Yankees baseball teams, respectively, donated their stadiums to the city’s vaccination push.
“This is going to help so many people to get vaccinated,” de Blasio said about the Citi Field vaccination site on Jan. 12. “We welcome all New Yorkers. We even welcome Yankees fans; there’s no discrimination.”
New York continues to see widespread transmission of the coronavirus. According to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker, the state has recorded more than 1.26 million diagnoses of COVID-19 and 41,350 deaths attributed to the disease.
