The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday authorized third doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s coronavirus vaccines for some people with weakened immune systems, giving physicians more leeway to protect those who did not respond enough to an initial series of shots.
The authorization, in the form of updates to the existing emergency use authorizations for the two vaccines, applies to people who received solid organ transplants and others with similarly compromised immune systems, the F.D.A. said.
The agency’s decision came a day before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent advisory committee was set to consider and vote on whether to recommend the move. The committee is likely to give its approval, and the C.D.C. would follow with its own endorsement of the additional doses.
“The F.D.A. is especially cognizant that immunocompromised people are particularly at risk for severe disease,” Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting F.D.A. commissioner, said in a statement. “After a thorough review of the available data, the F.D.A. determined that this small, vulnerable group may benefit from a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna Vaccines.”
The authorization of the third doses kicks off what promises to be a busy next stretch for federal vaccine regulators — and a new phase of the nation’s inoculation drive. By the start of next month, the agency is expected to grant full approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine. That will most likely prompt a wave of vaccination mandates from companies and organizations that waited to require vaccination until the F.D.A. fully cleared a vaccine.
At the same time, government scientists and regulators are grappling with whether more Americans will need booster shots, a hotly debated move that many scientists argue is not yet supported by data. Other countries such as Israel and Germany have implemented booster policies.
“Other individuals who are fully vaccinated are adequately protected and do not need an additional dose of Covid-19 vaccine at this time,” Dr. Woodcock said in her statement Thursday, adding that the agency was “actively engaged in a science-based, rigorous process with our federal partners to consider whether an additional dose may be needed in the future.”
The United States is the latest country to begin offering third doses to those with weaker immune systems. France has offered additional vaccine doses to certain people with poor immune responses since April, and Germany and Hungary recently followed suit.
About 3 percent of Americans have weakened immune systems for a variety of reasons, from a history of cancer to the use of certain medications such as steroids.
The F.D.A.’s decision to limit the category of people with weakened immune systems who should receive the extra dose was expected. Many scientists argue that the immunocompromised population is too diverse to uniformly recommend additional shots of coronavirus vaccine. Some may be protected by the standard vaccine dosage, despite their conditions. Others may be poorly shielded by the vaccines, but unable to benefit from an additional shot.
Studies suggest that patients such as organ transplant recipients are in between — often showing little immune response to the standard vaccine regimen, but benefiting from a third shot. One recent randomized, placebo-controlled study by Canadian researchers found that a third dose of the Moderna vaccine improved the immune response of people in that group.
San Francisco leaders on Thursday unveiled some of the nation’s toughest restrictions on unvaccinated people, barring them from indoor dining, bars, nightclubs, gyms, large concerts, theaters and other events held inside. The new rules, which take effect on Aug. 20, would apply even to people who can show they have tested negative for the coronavirus.
“This is an important step towards our recovery,” Mayor London Breed said during a briefing announcing the new requirements. “We all have to do our part. We need to get vaccinated.”
The rules are similar to those announced by Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York earlier this month, except that San Francisco will require patrons to be fully vaccinated while New York requires only a minimum of one dose. The new requirements come amid a flurry of increasingly strict vaccine rules for public workers, private companies and colleges and as virus cases and hospitalizations have risen sharply across the country that are only expected to accelerate once the Food and Drug Administration grants full approval to the vaccine in the coming weeks.
San Francisco’s order does not apply to people dining outdoors, entering a restaurant to order take-out or to children under 12, who are not yet eligible for vaccines.
City officials indicated that they will give more leeway to employees of affected businesses than to patrons. Restaurant and bar workers have until Oct. 13 to prove that they are fully vaccinated, a move that the mayor said was designed to prevent people from losing their jobs.
The city is also giving a grace period toits 35,000 municipal employees, who are required to be vaccinated 10 weeks after the final F.D.A. approval. Health care workers and those who work in homeless shelters, jails and other congregate settings considered high risk have until Sept. 15 to be vaccinated.
California, which has fully vaccinated 65 percent of its adults, has fared better than states like Florida, Texas and Arkansas in terms of the new surge of virus cases, but cases in California are still about 10 times higher than they were in mid-June, according to a New York Times database.
Countries like France and Italy have announced vaccine or testing requirements for their populations to participate in certain activities, like indoor dining.
Many such vaccine requirements, such as the one in France and one announced by the city of Palm Springs last week, allow patrons and employees to provide a recent negative coronavirus test instead of proof of vaccination.
But coronavirus tests only reflect the moment in which they were taken, and it is possible for someone to get infected, and potentially spread the virus, in the time between testing negative and, say, eating in a restaurant.
Dr. Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, said that relying on tests could allow the Delta variant to spread.
San Francisco has been relatively successful in convincing its residents to become vaccinated. With 78 percent of its eligible population fully vaccinated, the city’s vaccine rates are well above the national rate of 50 percent and California’s 65 percent rate, according to The Times’s database. Among San Francisco residents 12 to 17 years old 96 percent are vaccinated according to city data.
The mayor, who since the beginning of the pandemic has put in place some of the strictest measures to counter the virus, unveiled the new restrictions on Thursday with bar and restaurant owners in attendance.
City officials are making the case that residents have few excuses not to get vaccinated. Last week the city launched a free service that sends a mobile vaccination team to anyone’s home or business provided there are a minimum of five people ready to be vaccinated. The team offers a choice of the Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer vaccines.
The nation’s largest teachers’ union on Thursday offered its support to policies that would require all teachers to get vaccinated against Covid or submit to regular testing.
It is the latest in a rapid series of shifts that could make widespread vaccine requirements for teachers more likely as the highly contagious Delta variant spreads in the United States.
“It is clear that the vaccination of those eligible is one of the most effective ways to keep schools safe,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said in a statement.
The announcement comes after Randi Weingarten, the powerful leader of the American Federation of Teachers, another major education union, signaled her strongest support yet for vaccine mandates on Sunday.
Ms. Pringle left open the possibility that teachers who are not vaccinated could receive regular testing instead, and added that local “employee input, including collective bargaining where applicable, is critical.”
Her union’s support for certain requirements is notable because it represents about three million members across the country, including in many rural and suburban districts where adults are less likely to be vaccinated. Overall, the union said, nearly 90 percent of its members report being fully vaccinated.
Still, any decision to require vaccination for teachers is likely to come at the local or state level. And even with their growing support, teachers’ unions have maintained that their local chapters should negotiate details.
“We believe that such vaccine requirements and accommodations are an appropriate, responsible, and necessary step,” Ms. Pringle said on Thursday. She added that “educators must have a voice in how vaccine requirements are implemented.”
California has ordered all teachers and staff members to provide proof of vaccination or face weekly testing, an order that applies to both public and private schools. Hawaii is requiring all state and county employees to be vaccinated or be tested, including public-school teachers. And Denver has said that city employees, including public school teachers, must be fully vaccinated by Sept. 30.
The Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday said it would require more than 25,000 health workers — including contractors and volunteers — to receive coronavirus vaccines, becoming the latest federal agency to implement such a mandate.
The H.H.S. requirement goes beyond President Biden’s announcement last month that civilian federal workers would either have to be vaccinated or submit to regular testing, social distancing, mask wearing and limits on official travel. The H.H.S. workers will not have the option of turning down the vaccine and getting tested regularly instead, though the department said it would follow the process for other vaccine requirements, which allow medical and religious exemptions.
Members of the Indian Health Service and the National Institutes of Health who work in federally run facilities and deal with patients, and the U.S. Public Health Service, a commissioned corps of medical officers led by the surgeon general, are subject to the requirement, the department said. Those health workers are already required to receive flu vaccines and other inoculations.
“We are looking at every way we can to increase vaccinations to keep more people safe,” Xavier Becerra, the health and human services secretary, said in a statement. “And requiring our H.H.S. health care workforce to get vaccinated will protect our federal workers, as well as the patients and people they serve.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs was the first federal agency to issue a vaccine mandate, saying last month that it would require 115,000 of its frontline health workers to be vaccinated. The Defense Department said earlier this week that it would seek to make coronavirus vaccinations mandatory for the country’s 1.3 million active-duty troops “no later” than the middle of next month.
The agency moves are part of the Biden administration’s growing push to enact and encourage vaccine requirements inside and outside of the government. On Wednesday, President Biden met with business executives and a university president who had enforced vaccination requirements, encouraging their efforts. He urged them to call on other leaders to do the same.
Mr. Biden said at the time that he was asking federal agencies to find ways for all federal contractors to be required to be vaccinated as a condition of their work. And he urged companies and local governments to adopt his rules.
The administration’s emphasis on vaccine requirements comes at a fraught moment in the nation’s vaccination campaign, with tens of millions of adults still holding out on receiving a shot as the more contagious Delta variant of the virus has caused hospitals around the country to be stretched to their limits. About 71.3 percent of adults have received at least one dose, and vaccination rates have begun climbing again, to over 700,000 new doses administered every day.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court allowed Indiana University on Thursday to require students to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Eight students had sued the university, saying the requirement violated their constitutional rights to “bodily integrity, autonomy and medical choice.” But they conceded that exemptions to the requirement — for religious, ethical and medical reasons — “virtually guaranteed” that anyone who sought an exemption would be granted one.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who oversees the federal appeals court in question, turned down the students’ request for emergency relief without comment, which is the court’s custom in ruling on emergency applications. She acted on her own, without referring the application to the full court, and she did not ask the university for a response. Both of those moves were indications that the application was not on solid legal footing.
The students were represented by James Bopp Jr., a prominent conservative lawyer who has been involved in many significant lawsuits, including the Citizens United campaign finance case. He argued that the university’s vaccine requirement was putting his clients at risk.
“The known and unknown risks associated with Covid vaccines, particularly in those under 30, outweigh the risks to that population from the disease itself,” Mr. Bopp told the justices. “Protection of others does not relieve our society from the central canon of medical ethics requiring voluntary and informed consent.”
The ruling capped a string of setbacks for the students in the case, which was the first to reach the Supreme Court concerning the coronavirus in the context of an educational institution. The court has previously ruled on many emergency applications arising from the government’s response to the virus in other settings, including houses of worship and prisons.
A trial judge had refused to block the university’s requirement, writing that the Constitution “permits Indiana University to pursue a reasonable and due process of vaccination in the legitimate interest of public health for its students, faculty and staff.”
A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, declined to issue an injunction while the students’ appeal moved forward.
“Each university may decide what is necessary to keep other students safe in a congregate setting,” Judge Frank H. Easterbrook wrote for the appeals court. “Health exams and vaccinations against other diseases (measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, varicella, meningitis, influenza and more) are common requirements of higher education. Vaccination protects not only the vaccinated persons but also those who come in contact with them, and at a university close contact is inevitable.”
Judge Easterbrook, who was appointed to the appeals court by President Ronald Reagan, relied on a 1905 Supreme Court decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which ruled that states may require all members of the public to be vaccinated against smallpox or pay a fine.
The smallpox vaccination requirement allowed no exceptions, Judge Easterbrook wrote, while Indiana University’s requirement made accommodations for students with religious and other objections. (Exempted students must wear masks and take frequent coronavirus tests, requirements that Judge Easterbrook said “are not constitutionally problematic.”)
The university was entitled to set conditions for attendance, he wrote, just as it can require the payment of tuition and instruct students “to read what a professor assigns.”
“People who do not want to be vaccinated may go elsewhere,” Judge Easterbrook wrote, noting that many universities do not require vaccinations. “Plaintiffs have ample educational opportunities.”
Judges Michael Y. Scudder Jr. and Thomas L. Kirsch II, both appointed by President Donald J. Trump, joined Judge Easterbrook’s opinion.
Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia on Thursday announced a public health order requiring a universal mask mandate for all indoor school settings in kindergarten through 12th grade, becoming one of the latest governors to weigh in on the contentious fight over face coverings in schools.
The order comes as schools around the United States have started returning to the classroom with a patchwork of approaches to masking and as the highly contagious Delta version of the coronavirus continues to spread rapidly around the country, leading to a rise in new infections and what the Centers for Disease and Control director called a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Virginia’s new policy, which went into effect immediately, echoes a state law signed in January that requires schools to follow guidelines issued by the C.D.C. Yet despite the law and the C.D.C.’s update to include broader masking guidelines, at least two school districts had voted as recently as this week to make masks optional.
The announcement from Gov. Northam marks a shift from last month, when Virginia’s Department of Health and Department of Education released back-to-school guidance that merely advised masking in schools in all indoor settings, including for those in middle and high schools who were not fully vaccinated, but stopped short of issuing a mandate, instead leaving the decision up to the districts. But that guidance was released before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention escalated its mask recommendations on July 27, a spokesperson for the governor said.
Initially, the C.D.C. issued guidance for the new academic year in July including the suggestion that masks be worn in schools by all unvaccinated students, teachers or staff members. But within weeks, as cases surged and Delta spread rapidly across the country, the agency expanded its mask recommendations to all indoor school settings regardless of vaccination status.
Virginia’s public health order issued Thursday was intended to strengthen the January law and signal to schools they are required to follow it.
“We all share the same goal of keeping our schools open and keeping our students safe,” Gov. Northam said in a statement. “This Public Health Order makes it very clear that masks are required in all indoor K-12 settings, and Virginia expects all schools to comply.”
Hanover County Public Schools and Chesapeake Public Schools, the two districts that had voted to make masks optional, have since reversed their rules following Thursday’s public health order.
The topic of school closures and reopenings has been contentious, but mask mandates for schools have broad appeal among parents of school-age children, according to a study released on Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Still, masking has become a particular flash point, and schools around the country are implementing policies, including several states where mask mandates in schools have been banned.
Things have been particularly prickly in Texas, where local districts are turning to the courts in seeking to require masking, including in schools — a move that is in direct defiance of Governor Greg Abbotts’s executive order banning such mandates.
On Thursday, a judge in Harris County, which includes the city of Houston and is the state’s most populous county, signed an order that masks be worn in public schools, non-religious private schools or licensed child care centers, regardless of vaccination status. The order, issued by local public health authorities, also obliges schools to notify parents of children who were in close contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus while on school grounds or at school functions.
The news comes as six school districts are suing Gov. Abbott for his ban on mask mandates, arguing that he does not have the authority to restrict localities from requiring masks.
With approval for additional Covid-19 vaccine shots for immunocompromised people “imminent,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said on Thursday that federal health authorities were “likely” to call for third shots as boosters for a broader swath of the population at some point, though there was no immediate need to do so.
In an interview on the CBS program “This Morning,” Dr. Fauci noted that federal health authorities were tracking various cohorts of vaccinated people and had seen some early signs that the shots may need shoring up. That is often the case with vaccines.
“We are already starting to see indications in some sectors about a diminution over time” in vaccines’ durability, Dr. Fauci said. Dr. Fauci made the same points in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday.
Federal regulators are expected to authorize as soon as Thursday additional shots for people with weakened immune systems. In an interview last week, Dr. Fauci made the point that, for people with weakened immune systems, “giving them an additional shot is almost not considered a booster, it’s considered part of what their original regimen should have been,” since they need more vaccine to be protected.
In contrast, boosters would be used in the broader population to counter any diminution of the vaccines’ protective power.
There are no immediate plans to authorize boosters, Dr. Fauci said, but federal authorities are actively monitoring different groups for signs of waning protection.
“We are following cohorts of individuals, elderly, younger individuals, people in nursing homes, to determine if in fact the level of protection is starting to attenuate,” Dr. Fauci said. “And when it does get to a certain level we will be prepared to give boosters” — preferably, he added, with the same vaccine received earlier.
Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, echoed Dr. Fauci’s comments at a briefing of the White House Covid-19 Response team on Thursday, saying that “at this time only certain immune-compromised individuals may need an additional dose.”
But, she continued, “The science and resulting data in this pandemic are moving extremely rapidly. The U.S. government in turn is moving swiftly to analyze the science and make the recommendations most appropriate to protect Americans.”
The debate over booster shots has grown more urgent as the extremely contagious Delta variant runs rampant in the country, especially in populations with lower rates of vaccination.
Over the past week, an average of roughly 124,200 coronavirus cases has been reported each day in the United States, an increase of 86 percent from two weeks ago. Average daily hospitalizations are up to more than 68,800, an 82 percent increase over the last two weeks. The number of new deaths reported is up by 75 percent, to an average of 552 deaths per day.
Countries like Britain, France, Germany and Israel have already announced plans to provide third vaccine doses to certain groups.
Global health authorities have called booster shots a questionable use of the insufficient supply of vaccines while much of the world has not been inoculated, including front line health workers and other high-risk people.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, called last week for a moratorium on boosters until the end of September, so that all countries would ideally have enough doses to vaccinate at least 10 percent of their populations.
“I understand the concern of all governments to protect their people from the Delta variant,” Dr. Tedros said. “But we cannot — and we should not — accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it, while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected.”
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said later that day that the United States had enough vaccine to provide third doses to people if it is decided that they are needed, while still donating large vaccine supplies to other countries.
Over the past week, an average of roughly 125,800 coronavirus cases has been reported each day in the United States, an increase of 76 percent from two weeks ago.
The number of new deaths reported is up by 92 percent, to an average of 616 deaths per day for the past week.
Three states — Florida, Mississippi and Oregon — have reported more coronavirus cases in the past week than in any other seven-day period.
Roughly 68,800 patients per day, on average, have been in the hospital with coronavirus during the past week, an increase of 82 percent from two weeks ago.
Finally, the number of vaccine doses administered per day is also up in recent weeks, from an average of about 615,000 on July 29 to an average of 699,000 on Aug. 12.
All over Australia, hope is struggling to gain momentum as an outbreak of the hyper-contagious Delta variant has thrown almost half the population into lockdown.
Many say they feel betrayed by the government’s sputtering vaccine rollout. Only 23 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, placing Australia 35th out of 38 developed countries.
“We had this incredible window that nobody else in the world had, with nearly a year of minimal Covid transmission, and we were told the whole time that ‘it’s not a race,’” said Maddie Palmer, 39, a radio and events producer in Sydney. “It was a race — and they screwed it up.”
Some have taken matters into their own hands. Quinn On realized on Monday that a busy pharmacy he owns in Western Sydney would soon run out of doses. He raced to pick up shots from one of his other stores, while his wife pleaded with local officials for extra supplies.
Their mom-and-pop business has become a vaccination hub in a city where Covid-19 case numbers refuse to decline despite a seven-week lockdown. They had already hired extra pharmacists. They set up a tent on the sidewalk to safely register arrivals. And on Monday, with all their scrambling, they secured a few hundred shots to inoculate a long line of people by day’s end.
“It’s costing us money to do this, but I’m doing this for the community,” said Mr. On, 51, who came to Australia from Vietnam as a refugee when he was 8. “I’m just hoping it will work.”
Facing overcrowded hospitals and an unrelenting surge of Delta variant cases around the country, the Biden administration on Thursday renewed its call for health providers to use monoclonal antibody treatments, which can help Covid-19 patients who are at risk of getting very sick.
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a White House adviser on racial equity in health, said at a news conference that federal “surge teams” deployed to hard-hit states were working to increase uptake of and confidence in the antibody drugs. They have already been administered to more than 600,000 people in the United States during the pandemic, she said, preventing hospitalizations and helping save lives. President Donald J. Trump received one such treatment when he was diagnosed with Covid-19 last year, before it had been authorized for emergency use.
In states where vaccination has stalled and cases have soared, the treatments have become a key component of the federal strategy to reduce the toll of the worst outbreaks, underscoring how many Americans remain at risk.
Distribution of doses, which are ordered by medical providers, increased fivefold from June to July. About 75 percent of the ordering is from regions of the country with low vaccination rates, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
The administration “continues to stand ready to assist states and territories and jurisdictions across the country to get more people connected” to the treatments, Dr. Nunez-Smith said on Thursday, though she emphasized that vaccination was still the best option for preventing Covid-19.
Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, said the Biden administration has deployed more than 500 federal workers to help state health departments and hospitals combat the Delta variant, including emergency medical workers in Louisiana and Mississippi and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention teams in Tennessee, Illinois and Missouri.
Dr. Nunez-Smith said the administration had conducted virtual trainings on how to administer the drugs for doctors and health system officials in Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. In Arizona, federal teams are offering the treatments at two sites, where none of the Covid-19 patients who had received them had subsequently been hospitalized.
The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked part of an eviction moratorium in New York State that had been imposed in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Other challenges to eviction moratoriums, including one recently imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may reach the court soon. That federal moratorium is on precarious legal ground in light of a ruling from the justices in June.
The court’s order was unsigned and stressed that it applied only to a part of a state law that bars the eviction of tenants who file a form saying they have suffered economic setbacks as result of the pandemic. “This scheme violates the court’s longstanding teaching that ordinarily ‘no man can be a judge in his own case’ consistent with the Due Process Clause,” the majority wrote.
The order left other parts of the law intact, including a provision that instructed housing judges not to evict tenants who have been found to have suffered financial hardship.
It is what many universities fear. After months of gearing up for a fall semester that seemed like normal, with in-person classes and packed football games, the University of Texas at San Antonio announced Wednesday that almost all courses will be held online for the first three weeks.
The university’s president, Taylor Eighmy, notified the campus of 30,000 students of the shift, blaming a surge in Delta variant cases in San Antonio.
Fully remote classes are something leaders of universities across the country hope to avoid this fall, after three semesters of pandemic disruption on their campuses.
Yet, even as infections rise, public universities in Texas are denied the most potent tools to stop the spread — they cannot force students or staff to get vaccines or even wear masks. Gov. Gregg Abbott of Texas renewed his ban on vaccine and mask mandates in late July. As many as 20 Republican-led states forbid vaccine mandates in some form.
While their public institutions are hamstrung, more than 500 other public and private colleges around the country have instituted vaccine requirements.
“The goal of university presidents is to get shots in arms,” said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, an industry group. “But in deep red states, mandating a vaccination is likely to draw hard and fast battle lines.”
That task is particularly difficult in Texas and Florida, where mask mandates are also banned and the virus is surging.
College leaders have been forced to find workarounds. They are delivering carefully parsed statements encouraging the use of vaccines and masks, while also dangling prizes and even making subtle threats aimed at persuading students to be vaccinated.
The University of Texas at Austin, which has urged students to get vaccines, announced that students living in its residence halls must show proof of a negative coronavirus test before getting keys to their rooms. Arriving on campus with no place to live could be a strong incentive to be vaccinated.
The Delta variant is driving a new wave of cases nationwide, pushing the daily total to the highest level since February, as the virus spreads among the unvaccinated. In Texas, the number of new cases has more than doubled in the past two week. Hospitals are swamped, and there is a new, troubling uptick of young patients: some 240 across the state.
“We are now entering a new phase where our volumes are increasing much more exponentially here, just like on the adult side,” said Dr. Norman Christopher, the chief medical officer at the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio. “And that’s compared to almost nobody just a few months ago.”
Dr. Abhishek Patel, who works in the hospital’s pediatric I.C.U., walked in and out of a room where a 6-month-old and a 2-month-old battled severe Covid infections, breathing with the aid of supplemental oxygen. This week alone, he said, two teenagers, who had other underlying health problems, died with the virus.
“We were not seeing this last year,” Dr. Patel said.
The rising number of cases among children kept Jennifer Gantt, 45, from bringing her 6-year-old son, Christopher, who suffers from a rare brain condition, to the hospital even after he began experiencing severe seizures. A nurse inserted a swab to test him for the virus as the boy twisted in bed.
“I hesitated bringing him here, because of the Covid situation,” said Ms. Gantt. The emergency room was full of children coughing behind their masks and worried parents in tears. “I didn’t want to risk him getting infected. But eventually I knew I had to bring him here.”
Less than an hour later, she received news that not every parent gets to hear at the children’s hospital. Christopher had tested negative.
Cities in South Texas, the busiest crossing point along the border with Mexico, are at a harrowing place where two international crises intersect: an escalating surge of migrants and the rise of the Delta variant of the virus.
Amid a ferocious resurgence of infections in many parts of the country, some conservative politicians, including the governors of Texas and Florida, have blamed the Biden administration’s failure to halt the influx of migrants for the soaring case numbers.
In fact, that is extremely unlikely, public health officials and elected leaders say, noting that the region was facing rising case numbers, even before the recent increase in border crossings.
“We can’t attribute the rise in Covid numbers to migrants,” Mayor Javier Villalobos of McAllen, Texas, said in an interview. He said city and county officials issued a disaster declaration on Aug. 2 and moved to set up a quarantine center after it became apparent that the surge in border crossings posed a health risk to local residents.
Of the 96,808 migrants who have passed through McAllen this year and been checked for the coronavirus, 8,559 had tested positive as of Tuesday.
Yet the prevalence of the virus among migrants thus far has been no greater than among the U.S. population overall, according to medical experts, and the highest positivity rates in the country are not in communities along the border. Rather, they are in areas with low vaccination rates and no mask mandates.
The positivity rate among migrants serviced by Catholic Charities in McAllen reached 14.8 percent in early August, after hovering between 5 and 8 percent from late March to early July, but it has not surpassed the rate among local residents.
In Hidalgo County, the migrant positivity rate was about 16 percent last week compared with 17.59 percent for residents, who have had little, if any, interaction with the migrants.
“Is this a pandemic of the migrants? No, it’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Dr. Iván Meléndez, the health authority in Hidalgo County, said last week during a news conference.
Young Black New Yorkers are especially reluctant to get vaccinated, even as the Delta variant is rapidly spreading among their ranks. City data shows that only 27 percent of Black New Yorkers ages 18 to 44 years are fully vaccinated, compared with 48 percent of Latino residents and 52 percent of white residents in that age group.
This vaccination gap is emerging as the latest stark racial disparity in an epidemic full of them. Epidemiologists say they expect the current third wave, driven largely by the highly contagious Delta variant, will hit Black New Yorkers especially hard.
“This is a major public health failure,” said Dr. Dustin Duncan, an epidemiologist and Columbia University professor.
In interviews, dozens of Black New Yorkers across the city — an aspiring dancer in Brownsville, a young mother of five in Far Rockaway, a teacher in Canarsie, a Black Lives Matter activist in the Bronx, and many others — gave a long list of reasons for not getting vaccinated, many rooted in a fear that during these uncertain times they could not trust the government with their health.
The fact that the virus hit Black neighborhoods disproportionately during the first wave made many extra wary of getting vaccinated: They feel that they have survived the worst and that the health authorities had failed to help them then.
But ultimately, many also said they would get vaccinated if forced to do so.
“If it’s going to be mandatory to work, I’ll have no choice,” said Kaleshia Sostre, a 27-year-old from Red Hook, Brooklyn, who teaches parenting classes to young mothers.
In Canarsie, Brooklyn, a 21-year-old college student, Justin Mercado, said Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent announcement that dining in a restaurant would require proof of vaccination got his attention. He is now likely to get vaccinated.
“I want to go on a date sometime and enjoy life as much as I can before this strain shuts us back down,” Mr. Mercado said.
There have been many confrontations over workplace safety since the pandemic began. One of the strangest has just been resolved: the case of the dog diapers.
Workers at a McDonald’s restaurant in Oakland, Calif., said their employer provided them with masks made from the diapers in lieu of bona fide masks at the start of the pandemic last year. They were also given masks made from coffee filters, they said.
After complaining, the employees said, they were given proper disposable masks but were told to wash and reuse them until they frayed. The allegations were included in a subsequent lawsuit, which contended that the franchise owner’s inattention to safety had resulted in a Covid-19 outbreak among workers and their families.
Now the workers and the franchise owner are announcing a settlement in which the restaurant has agreed to enforce a variety of safety measures, including social distancing, contact tracing and paid sick leave policies. The settlement also calls for a management-worker committee to meet monthly to discuss compliance with the mandated measures and whether new ones are needed. Lawyers for both sides said they could not comment on whether the settlement included a financial component.
“The committee was one of those things that was extremely important,” Angely Rodriguez Lambert, a former worker at the McDonald’s who was one of the plaintiffs, said through an interpreter. “We were being treated like dogs — giving us dog diapers to use as masks. We are not dogs.”
Michael Smith, who owns and operates the store, denied all the accusations in his legal filings, and the settlement does not involve an admission of wrongdoing.
The Department of Veterans Affairs will require nearly every worker, volunteer and contractor within its vast health care system to be vaccinated against the coronavirus over the next eight weeks, in stark contrast to the Pentagon which has resisted immediate mandates for the country’s 1.3 million active-duty troops.
Last month, the department began requiring shots for 115,000 of its frontline health care workers, making it the first federal agency to mandate that employees, including doctors, dentists, registered nurses, be inoculated. Those who refuse face penalties including possible removal.
The expansion, which will impact about 245,000 new workers, was announced on Thursday by Denis McDonough, the secretary of veterans affairs, as the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus continues to rapidly spread throughout the nation, threatening hundreds of thousands of veterans seeking care. Both mandates together will cover 360,000 workers and contractors.
“This pandemic is not over and V.A. must do everything in our power to protect Veterans from Covid-19,” Mr. McDonough said in a statement. “With this expanded mandate, we can once again make and keep that fundamental promise.”
Under the expanded mandate, a vast array of workers, including psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nursing assistants, physical therapists, engineers, housekeepers and most others who come into contact with patients will need to be vaccinated. Officials are also considering expanding such a requirement to visitors.
The mandate would not expand to workers outside the medical system, such as administrative workers in Washington and beyond, though Mr. McDonough recently said he would consider making them compulsory for the highest ranking officials to set an example.
As of last week, roughly 63 percent of the 351,000 Veterans Health Administration employees were fully vaccinated. The administration is the largest integrated health care system in the United States, with 1,293 health care facilities.
The Pentagon announced earlier this week that it would make vaccinations mandatory for troops “no later” than the middle of next month rather than require them immediately, bowing to concerns expressed by White House officials about putting a mandate in place for troops before the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval for the vaccine, expected in the next few weeks. President Biden under federal law can order troops to take vaccines not yet approved by the F.D.A.
Scores of hospitals and health care systems have compelled their employees to get vaccines, and recent court decisions have upheld employers’ rights to require vaccinations.
Siti Sarah Raisuddin was a 36-year-old pop star, a mother of three children and in the last trimester of pregnancy with her fourth, when she contracted Covid-19 in July along with the rest of her family in Malaysia.
She documented her family’s struggles to her millions of followers on Instagram, as her symptoms worsened from mild to life-threatening. Doctors put her into an induced coma on Friday to extract the baby, who survived, according to The New Straits Times.
Ms. Raisuddin died three days later.
The death of Ms. Raisuddin — who performed as Siti Sarah — came as Malaysia is struggling with its worst wave yet of coronavirus infections, despite nationwide restrictions in place since June. The country recorded 20,780 cases on Wednesday, just short of its peak of 20,889 reached last week, and added 211 deaths. It has the highest number of reported cases per capita in Southeast Asia, where a number of other countries are also facing their worst outbreaks of the pandemic, driven mostly by the more contagious Delta variant of the virus.
Despite the strain on hospitals as case and death numbers remain high, the Malaysian government is relaxing restrictions in eight states for those who are fully vaccinated, allowing privileges like dining in at restaurants and tourism to other states. The restrictions in Kuala Lumpur, the capital and largest city, will not be eased.
Just 29 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database.
Ms. Raisuddin’s death shocked many of her fans, with thousands of people leaving comments on her Instagram posts and the king and queen offering condolences on Facebook. In a video posted last week, she hugged her children while wearing an oxygen mask. On Aug. 1, she asked for prayers for her family.
Her husband, Shahmira Muhamad, and the three children went into isolation and later tested negative, but Ms. Raisuddin was rushed to the hospital last week because of low oxygen levels, according to The New Straits Times.
“She fought hard to save our baby,” her husband said, according to the newspaper.
They named the newborn boy Ayash Affan — her choice, he said.
Perhaps no census has been as fraught as the one that led to the data released on Thursday, a count pummeled by the pandemic and hobbled by a White House that sought to use it as a tool to permanently shift the balance of national political power.
Theoretically, those crises could have opened big holes in the data the Census Bureau gathered last year, as some people shied from being counted and others refused to tell the government everything it wanted to know. How big those holes are, and how they were plugged, won’t be known until the bureau publishes the results of its own quality check later this year.
But one longtime expert preaches caution. “Early returns on every census cause people to jump to conclusions that may not be supported on further research,” Steve Jost, a census consultant and former bureau official, said in an interview.
In this case, Mr. Jost said, the numbers could even show that a census many expected to be wildly inaccurate was actually pretty close to the mark.
There was plenty to worry about. The national count unfolded amid a contentious effort by the Trump administration to exclude from the census count millions of people living in the county without authorization, despite a constitutional mandate to count everyone.
Not until July 2020 did it reveal why: President Donald J. Trump wanted to exclude them from population totals used to divvy up seats in the House of Representatives, creating an older, whiter and presumably more Republican base for reapportionment.
That effort failed, but one early indicator suggests the anti-immigrant crusade may have scared some ethnic groups: The share of households that declined to answer at least one of the nine questions on the 2020 census form was exponentially higher than in the last census in 2010. And questions about race and ethnicity were the ones most likely to be skipped.
On the other hand, the early results show a much larger move to the cities than many expected, and a substantial jump in the Hispanic population — all suggesting that maybe ethnic and racial groups were not as deterred as was thought likely.
Experts also fretted after the coronavirus shut down the nation in April 2020, just as the nationwide tally was getting underway. The crucial final phase of the census, in which door-knockers tracked down the millions who had not voluntarily filled out a form, was delayed to autumn — peak hurricane season, when storms battered much of the South. Frightened residents refused to open doors to census-takers; census-takers proved harder to recruit and quit more often for fear of getting sick. In a final, frantic push, the bureau literally airlifted its best door-knockers into its hardest-to-count regions, a logistical move reminiscent of an army campaign.
That led many experts to worry that the bureau would miss counting so many households that it would have to fill in data on huge swaths of some areas by making statistical educated guesses about who lived there. But in fact, those guesses, called count imputations, are actually lower than in 2010, because the bureau sifted through federal records to identify who was in those missed households.
In theory, that could lead to a more accurate census than anyone expected — if the records were accurate. That won’t be clear until the bureau issues its report card. In the meantime, one expert suggests that people simply be thankful that, in a year of historic social and political upheaval, a decent count happened at all.
“The mere fact that we’re getting the data and beginning to get back on track is a big accomplishment,” said Margo J. Anderson, a historian and census expert at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Source : Nytimes
