NEW YORK (1010 WINS) – New York City will receive 30% more doses of Moderna's coronavirus vaccine starting next week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday, calling it "really good news."
"That means about 17,000 more doses each week for us," de Blasio said at his daily briefing. "That means 17,000 more shots of hope, 17,000 more New Yorkers who are safer and are feeling that confidence and that sense of peace that comes with getting vaccinated."
The mayor said "we're going to need a lot more than that" going forward but that he's also "really happy" to get the 17,000 additional doses each week amid supply issues.
Since vaccinations began, there have been 673,405 doses administered in the city, de Blasio said, noting that was more people than the entire population of Detroit.
The mayor urged the state and federal governments to do more to get shots into people's arms, including using second doses as first doses because some second doses are going unused for weeks.
"We now have proven that we can vaccinate 500,000," de Blasio said. "We can give 500,000 doses a week if we had the supply."
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden said the federal government was working to buy an additional 100 million doses each of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines—enough to protect 300 million Americans by the end of the summer.
And Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that the state would be receiving a 16% increase in COVID vaccines from the federal government beginning next week for at least three weeks.
New York currently receives about 250,000 vaccines from the federal government each week. A 16% increase would mean the state would receive just under 300,000 per week.
At his briefing, de Blasio said another 279 people had been admitted to city hospitals with suspected COVID. He said the city's hospitalization rate per 100,000 on a seven-day average is 5.15%.
The number of new cases on a seven-day average is 4,621, while the positivity rate on a seven-day average is 8.08%.
