(CNN)Eleven months after the earliest recorded case of coronavirus in the United States, medical workers are preparing to give the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, with deliveries set to arrive at administration sites from around 8 a.m. ET Monday.
Thousands of vials of the vaccine were collected for distribution across the country Sunday after it passed its last regulatory hurdle.
“We expect 145 sites across all the states to receive vaccine on Monday, another 425 sites on Tuesday, and the final 66 sites on Wednesday, which will complete the initial delivery of the Pfizer orders for vaccine,” Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, said Saturday.
It’s up to states to allocate their share of vaccines, but the CDC has recommended that frontline health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities get the vaccine first. Officials warn it could be months before the vaccine becomes available to many Americans as the virus continues to surge, breaking grim state and national records.
More than 30,000 Americans died due to Covid-19 in the first 13 days of December, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. It put the country’s death toll since the beginning of the pandemic at nearly 300,000 as of Sunday night, with more than 16.2 million reported cases.
And hospitalizations have remained above 100,000 for 12 consecutive days, breaking records for eight days in a row Sunday, the Covid Tracking Project reported.
The president of UPS Healthcare, Wes Wheeler, told CNN on Sunday evening that all of the flights carrying the vaccine had taken off from the Louisville, Kentucky, airport and nearly all of the ground deliveries had departed.
The off-load will begin at 8 a.m. ET Monday, meaning the vaccines will be delivered shortly thereafter, around 8:10 or 8:15 a.m., according to Wheeler.
One of the biggest challenges the carrier faces is maintaining the temperature needed for the vaccine, he said.
“The minus-100-degree requirement with dry ice, making sure it moves, making sure the temperature is maintained, making sure the dry ice that follows the shipment after the vaccine arrives, that’s important also,” he said. “Making sure that we coordinate the kits that are going out ahead of the vaccine so the administration sites have everything they need to do the dosing as soon as tomorrow morning.”
Wheeler told CNN’s Ana Cabrera that the command center for UPS is watching every shipment and tracking all of the packages. He said they can see every time a package arrives at one of the UPS sites around the country.
