Mayor Bill de Blasio's press briefing is underway as of a startlingly ontime 10:02am.
Hizzoner says the city is again on the verge of running out of first doses of coronavirus vaccine. "The supply is not growing the way we need it to."
De Blasio says the city is holding off on scheduling 30-35k appointments for first doses will be delayed because of winter storms playing havoc with deliveries
City Hall is again calling for additional vaccine shipments, which, again, constrained by national supply issues. Also worth pointing out that NYC's vaccine shipments have nearly doubled in recent weeks.
My recorder died halfway through Hizzoner's announcement on websites, but it sounds like at least some additional city sites are being consolidated into the DOH scheduling system set up for jab centers on high school campus. And, it sounds like some private providers will use too
So, closer to one stop-vaccine scheduling
On state memo seemingly saying that testing would no longer be mandatory for in-school learning, Blas says City Hall was "surprised" but they are talking with the state BOE and sez he is confident the testing mandate will stay.
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So, they're arguing lots of things that no one is arguing: 1) No one said the memo was the sole driver or the principal driver. They said it was a contributor and the data shows it might have increased the already high death toll by 1,000 people -- nypost.com/2021/02/18/cuo…
2) They're arguing that patients had nowhere else to go, even though they had largely empty temporary hospitals and the hospital ship that could have taken the transfers.
There were requests for such transfers that were ignored.
"There's a race for mayor in New York City and many people have been speaking to me about it," says Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as the clock moves from 'change-the-subject' o'clock to 'twist-the-knife-in-Bill-de-Blasio' o'clock
"NYCHA is an ongoing tragedy"
Also, remember that Gov. Cuomo promised NYCHA $550m, but:
- Barred $100m from going to structural uses
- Then took years to okay the allocation of the remaining $450m
Newspapers are good! No one screams at you. The important stuff goes in, the unimportant doesn't. They come in several sizes that allow you to choose from august layouts with passive-voiced headlines and more compact sizes with funny headlines!
"A lot of kids have been through nothing short of trauma," says Hizzoner about impact of COVID. To which, I say, you could probably say this about the whole city at this point.
"This is something that has not gotten the attention it deserves," says Hizzoner, about his NYC Care card, the rollout of which City Hall repeatedly botched.
SCOOP: The state's controversial March 25 order to nursing homes to accept hospital patients could have led to 1,000 additional deaths, a new analysis found -- nypost.com/2021/02/18/cuo…
"The report concludes that the March 25 directive 'was not the sole or primary cause of the heavy death toll in nursing homes.' But [it] 'clearly did make some difference and it made a bad situation worse,'" said @NYHammond -- nypost.com/2021/02/18/cuo…
Upstate nursing homes that accepted COVID patients transferred from hospitals saw 9.3 more deaths on average than nursing homes that didn't. There was no statistically significant difference downstate, the Empire Center data analysis found. -- nypost.com/2021/02/18/cuo…