The Bronx’s largest housing cooperative -- sometimes called the country’s biggest naturally occurring retirement community -- will host a dedicated COVID-19 clinic site this week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Tuesday.

The vaccination site at Co-Op City, which has about 36,000 residents in 15,372 units, will start operating Thursday, de Blasio said at a press briefing. Next week, the site at the auditorium at 177 Dreiser Loop will operate Mondays through Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Questions to City Hall about the number of available doses were not immediately answered.

“The Bronx has been very hard hit by the COVID crisis. Hospitals in the Bronx were amongst the hardest hit in the entire city,” de Blasio said. “Communities felt deep, deep losses from the coronavirus in the Bronx. The Bronx is too often overlooked. We can't let that happen. So, we're going to bring the vaccine to the people of the Bronx, to the people of Co-Op City.”

The Bronx is the least vaccinated borough in New York City, with about 241,000 shots given so far. That’s about half the number given in Manhattan, even though the two have similar-sized populations. About 8% of Co-Op city’s residents have been fully vaccinated so far according to the city’s data, but an estimated 8,000 residents over the age of 65 live in the neighborhood.

The Co-Op City site joins Yankee Stadium as one of the large-scale vaccination sites in the Bronx, which leads the city in COVID-19 positivity rates.

The new site will also serve residents in Wakefield and Edenwald, according to U.S. Representative Jamaal Bowman, who represents parts of the Bronx. He thanked de Blasio for responding quickly to his request for a vaccination site in the north Bronx. “While the numbers across the city and across the state have gone down, the numbers remain high -- way too high -- in this area of the Bronx,” Bowman said at the press briefing.

Last week, Bowman and Senator Chuck Schumer wrote a letter to President Joe Biden requesting additional assistance for the north Bronx since the Yankee Stadium site could take up to two hours to reach via subway and bus transfers.

“One out of every thirteen residents in the Co-op City/Edenwald/Wakefield area had been diagnosed with COVID-19 over the last year, and a staggering 411 people living there have lost their lives to this deadly virus,” the letter said. “The daily case rate remains higher than that of New York City at large, and the death rate of 505 people per 100,000 is among the highest in the nation. In these neighborhoods, 90 percent of residents are people of color, and one in four residents are elderly. The impact of COVID-19 here highlights the disproportionate harm that the virus has had on communities of color and the elderly, and emphasizes the importance of swift action in this region to overcome this virus.”

The city reported a 6.09% seven-day average positivity rate on Tuesday.

The Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine shipments will start arriving this week, though Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi said initial supply will be “quite limited.”

“It will be about 70,000 doses that are available for us over the first two-week period in March,” Chokshi said at Tuesday's press briefing. “It will remain quite limited, we understand, through the middle of March before picking up significantly we hope by the end of the month.”

De Blasio urged residents to take any vaccine they are offered, and said he himself will receive the Johnson & Johnson vaccine: “I plan on getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. I want to show people it's the right choice, and I for one look forward to only getting one shot rather than two,” de Blasio said.

“It doesn't matter whether you get Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer or Moderna, the results are absolutely clear -- once you get vaccinated and you wait a few weeks for your body to build up that system, there are basically close to zero hospitalizations and absolutely zero deaths,” added Dr. Jay Varma, the mayor’s senior public health advisor. “So what we need to do about this virus is stop it from making people seriously ill, stop it from overriding our health system, stop it from killing people, and all three vaccines do that equally.”