New York City will pay $100 to everybody who gets their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine at a city-run immunisation centre starting this Friday, according to reports citing statements made by Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“I think when someone says here’s $100 for you, that’s going to make a big impact,” the New York Times quoted de Blasio as saying.
“The key is vaccination. We can talk about so many other issues with COVID, but if we’re not talking about vaccination then we’re not talking about the solution,” de Blasio said during a news briefing.
“You want a recovery? You need vaccination. Whatever it is, you want to enjoy life to the fullest? You need vaccination,” he said.
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The news comes only days after the mayor announced that all city employees will be required to be vaccinated or subjected to severe weekly testing measures.
It also comes amid a spike in cases in the city, owing to the delta variant’s eruption. The rolling average of new daily cases was 32% higher on Friday than the week before.
De Blasio also announced that more than 9.9 million doses of vaccine have been administered in the new York city so far. Sixty-six per cent of adults have been fully vaccinated and 71 per cent have received at least one dose, according to the New York City health department, The Hill reported.
The coronavirus delta strain, on the other hand, is complicating things. Certain areas of New York appear to be on the verge of becoming a Covid-19 hotspot once more, and CDC recommendations suggests that authorities impose mandatory masking for both vaccinated and unvaccinated residents.
The new guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which arrived on Tuesday, recommend both vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans wear masks in those areas which have registered more than 50 new cases per 100,000 residents over the week prior, or where more than 8% of Covid-19 tests came back positive over the same period.
According to the publication, all five of New York’s boroughs check the boxes under these criteria. While Brooklyn and Manhattan each had 78.1 and 70.4 positive cases per 100,000 residents, Staten Island had 109 positive cases per 100,000 residents last week.
New York mayor de Blasio calls this “complicated information”.
“So our health team is reviewing, and we’ll have more to say on it in the next few days,” he was quoted as saying.