Coronavirus News: Live Updates – The New York Times

A crashed phone network in Houston. People waiting overnight in long lines in Florida. Older Tennesseans leaning on their walkers outside in the cold alongside a highway.

As distribution of Covid-19 vaccines begins to open up to wider segments of the United States population, there have been scenes of chaos across the country.

The initial vaccine deliveries were mostly for frontline medical workers and nursing home staff members and residents. But there was less of a clear consensus on how to distribute the second round of doses, and public health and elected officials had warned the process would become messier.

Those warnings appear to have been borne out, leaving the U.S. inoculation campaign behind schedule and raising fears about how quickly the country will be able to tame the epidemic.

In Puerto Rico, a shipment of vaccines did not arrive until the workers who would have administered them had left for the Christmas holiday. In California, where coronavirus cases are surging and hospitals are overstretched, doctors are worried about whether there will be enough staff members to both administer vaccines and tend to Covid-19 patients.

Many vaccination sites have operated smoothly since the first U.S. inoculation on Dec. 14, but as availability of vaccines broadened, logistical complications arose at some sites and yielded unnerving images.

In Tullahoma, Tenn., older people lined a sidewalk on Saturday as they waited to enter the Coffee County Health Department’s Tullahoma clinic, about 70 miles northwest of Chattanooga. Most of the people in line were wearing heavy coats or huddled under blankets.

A video of the scene posted to Facebook showed seniors leaning on walkers and canes and sitting on footstools and lawn chairs as they waited for the building to open. Vickie Rayfield Ham, who posted the video, wrote that she thought the distribution center would be a drive-through.

“Some of the elderly were having to walk down the road with their walkers to get to the end of the line, and people were flying by,” she told WTVC, a local television news station.

In a Facebook post that went up shortly before 10 a.m. local time, a couple of hours after Ms. Ham’s video, the city of Tullahoma said that all available doses had been administered for the day and that information about next week’s vaccination schedule would be released on Monday.

The opening day for Houston’s first free public Covid-19 vaccination clinic unleashed so much demand that the city health department’s phone system crashed, causing officials to scramble to move to on-site registration.

Vaccinations began in Houston soon after the first doses of the Pfizer vaccine started arriving at its hospitals on Dec. 14. On Saturday, the city opened a clinic at the Bayou City Event Center providing the Moderna vaccine to high-risk members of the public, saying it could accommodate 750 appointments a day.

Mayor Sylvester Turner said that the health department had received more than 250,000 calls.

“The system was literally overwhelmed,” he said during a news briefing on Saturday.

The clinic’s phone system was back up by the afternoon and as of 2 p.m. local time about 450 people had received a Covid-19 vaccine, Mr. Turner said.

Vaccine rollout sites in Florida continued to be overwhelmed in some places, with people waiting for hours overnight in hopes of getting the shot. The state had expanded its offering of vaccines to older members of the general public — in some cases, on a first-come, first-served basis.

Florida became one of the first states to open up vaccination to anyone older than 65, after Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order on Dec. 23.

Mina Bobel, 74, and her husband, Dave Bobel, lined up at 2 a.m. outside the Lakes Regional Library in Fort Myers, Fla., on Wednesday in hopes of getting vaccinated. They came prepared with snacks and water, and even took turns sleeping in the back of their S.U.V. There were about 300 people ahead of them in line, Ms. Bobel said, and most of them had come well equipped, too — with coats and blankets to keep warm.

“For us, it was an adventure,” Ms. Bobel said, adding that she was “giddy” when finally, around 10 a.m., she stepped up to get her first dose. “We feel really lucky.”

When she left, Ms. Bobel said, the line was even longer than when she arrived.

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