New York and Florida warn hospitals that if they do not rush the vaccination they will lose the supply

Por Carl O’Donnell y Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK, Jan 4 (Reuters) – The governors of New York and Florida tried to accelerate the slower-than-expected rollout of coronavirus vaccines by warning hospitals Monday that they would cut future allocations to those who do not dispense them with the fast enough.

In New York, hospitals must administer vaccines within a week of receiving them or they will face a fine and loss of future supplies, Governor Andrew Cuomo said, hours before announcing the first known case in the state of a new, more infectious coronavirus variant, the one first detected in Great Britain.

“I don’t want the vaccine in a refrigerator or freezer, I want it on someone’s arm,” said the governor. “If they are not performing this function, it raises questions about the operational efficiency of the hospital.”

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 documented in the states of Florida, Colorado and California, was detected in a man in his 60s who lived in a city north of Albany and had not recently traveled, suggesting that it is occurring a community spread.

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 Control. Disease Prevention (CDC) of the United States published Monday.

The US government has fallen far short of its goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020. Officials said they expect the deployment to recover significantly this month.

The United States has reported a total of 20.5 million COVID-19 cases and 351,480 deaths as of midnight Sunday. In an average of seven days, 2,636 deaths are reported daily from the virus.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen, Carl O’Donnell, Rebecca Spaulding and Peter Szekely in New York; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg, Anurag Maan, Doina Chiacu, Brad Brooks and Susan Heavey; Edited in Spanish by Javier López de Lérida)

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