New York City put 9,000 employees on unpaid leave on Monday, including almost one in four firefighters, for refusing to comply with its Covid-19 mandate, highlighting the pushback against such directives among municipal employees across the US.

The departures have not yet caused disruptions to emergency response times or city services including trash collection, mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday morning, despite some reports of missed trash pick-ups and closed firehouses over the weekend.

He said 84 per cent of New York police department employees and 77 per cent of employees of the city fire department were vaccinated as of Monday. Another 12,000 of New York City’s approximately 400,000 employees are not working while they wait for their exemption applications to be processed, according to de Blasio.