The number of New York City residents hospitalized with possible COVID-19 has surpassed the city’s threshold again, with 242 hospital patients admitted with COVID-19 symptoms, according to city data.
Meanwhile, the city’s COVID-19 positivity rate over the last seven days continues to climb, now reaching 7.93 percent positivity — a 0.34 percent increase over yesterday’s numbers. The number of confirmed new cases of the virus has also soared to 2,498 on top of 771 probable cases.
The increases come as the United States breaks its own record for coronavirus-related deaths in a single day, with 3,725 people dying from the virus on Tuesday, according to the data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Since shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine first arrived in the state earlier this month, more than 78,530 doses of both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines have been administered across the five boroughs.
So far, a total of 140,000 New York State frontline workers and nursing home residents have received the first shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. Both vaccines require that the recipient receive two doses over the course of roughly three weeks. Moderna and Pfizer say the vaccines have about a 95 percent efficacy rate in decreasing symptomatic COVID-19 infections.
Only a handful of severe allergic reactions to the vaccine have been reported, but many vaccine recipients have reported suffering side effects including fever, headache, and fatigue after receiving the shot. At the moment, the state is in the first phase of its vaccine distribution plan, which means only health care workers with a high risks of contracting the virus, nursing home residents and staff, and some other essential workers may receive their first dose of the vaccine.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Phase 2 of the plan could come late next month. The vaccine will most likely not become publicly available until mid-2021.
This story first appeared on AMNY.com.
