The U.S. Postal Service was in the pandemic and put in the spotlight by the 2020 election, and is now competing for its share of the vaccine.
© Joshua Bright for The New York Times
Post workers have to go through a rag blanket policies to determine if they can get a chance.
The postal service has endured turbulent months amid a significant increase in online shopping, understaffing, government issues and an explosion of ballot papers during a controversial election. Thousands of postal workers contracted the coronavirus, killing more than 150 people. Yet less than half of the states across the country – at least 22 – have begun firing on postal workers, at least in some provinces, even though it is rapidly expanding access to more groups of people, according to a survey by the New York Times.
Post workers are among essential categories of essential workers that a committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that states prioritize early. In a letter to Biden’s government in January, Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, noted that “many states did not follow this recommendation and chose to place postal workers further in the sequence of those with early access to the vaccine. ”
Post workers may not have to wait too long to be vaccinated. President Biden on Thursday pledged to bring cohesion to national implementation, by ordering countries to be eligible for each adult by May 1, and announcing a series of initiatives to increase the rate of vaccinations.
Post workers have to go through a rag blanket policies to determine if they can get a chance. In Virginia, they can get the vaccine with private mail providers. And Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has announced that postal workers in his state can get the vaccine from Monday. However, they are not yet eligible in Maine, Texas and Washington.
In a live video last month, Mr. Dimondstein the lack of collective government response on behalf of the postal service.
“It’s chaos,” he said. “You have to find your own way.”
In the past month alone, vaccinations in the U.S. have increased by more than 50 percent to an average of about 2.5 million shots per day from Saturday, at an average of about 1.6 million shots per day on Feb. 13, according to a New York Times database. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Saturday that approximately 68.9 million people have received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine, including approximately 36.9 million people who have been fully vaccinated.
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