Coronavirus UpdatesCovid News: Biden Calls For New Vaccination Push
WASHINGTON — With the pace of U.S. coronavirus vaccinations relatively flat, President Biden called on Tuesday for employers to set up clinics at work and to offer paid time off for workers as part of a renewed push to reach tens of millions of Americans who remain unvaccinated.
“Please get vaccinated now — it works, it’s free, it’s never been easier,” Mr. Biden said in brief remarks. “It’s never been more important. Do it now for yourself and the people you care about — for your neighborhood, for your country. It sounds corny, but it’s a patriotic thing to do.”
Just two days after he hosted a big White House Fourth of July celebration and declared “America is coming back together,” Mr. Biden is turning his attention to a public health conundrum: Despite his administration’s aggressive push, he has not met his self-imposed goal of having 70 percent of adults at least partially vaccinated by now, and officials have already tried many techniques.
In his remarks, Mr. Biden noted a different metric: By the end of the week, nearly 160 million Americans, not quite half the population, will be fully vaccinated. The worrisome Delta variant spreading quickly around the country remains a concern in areas with lower vaccination rates. Although there is not yet good data on how all of the vaccines hold up against Delta, several widely used shots, including those made by Pfizer-BioNTech, are still effective against the Delta variant after two doses, research suggests.
But providers were administering about 0.87 million doses per day on average, as of Tuesday, about a 74 percent decrease from the peak of 3.38 million reported on April 13.
And beyond the issues with the vaccination campaign, declines in the virus itself appear to have stalled nationally. After a sharp drop in virus cases, the average number of new daily cases across the country seems to have leveled off and remain close to the lowest point since testing became widely available. Mr. Biden underscored that overall progress in his remarks on Tuesday, but pockets of outbreaks remain. In some parts of Texas, Arkansas and Missouri, for instance, there has been a sharp rise in cases.
Mr. Biden used his remarks to outline five areas of concentration for his administration, all avenues it has already pursued: targeted, community by community, door to door outreach to get the remaining Americans vaccinated; a fresh push to get vaccines to primary care doctors; a boost in efforts to get vaccines to pediatricians and other providers who serve younger people so that adolescents ages 12 to 18 can get their shots; expanded mobile clinic efforts and the workplace changes.
“The bottom line is, my administration is doing everything we can to lead a whole-of-government response at the federal, state and local levels to defeat the pandemic,” he said. “We need everyone to do their part.”
As the Delta variant sweeps the world, researchers are tracking how well vaccines protect against it — and getting different answers.
In Britain, researchers reported in May that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had an effectiveness of 88 percent protecting against symptomatic disease from Delta. A June study from Scotland concluded that the vaccine was 79 percent effective against the variant. On Saturday, a team of researchers in Canada pegged its effectiveness at 87 percent.
And on Monday, Israel’s Ministry of Health announced that the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 64 percent against all coronavirus infections, down from about 95 percent in May, before the Delta variant began its climb to near-total dominance in Israel.
Although the range of these numbers may seem confusing, vaccine experts say it should be expected, because it’s hard for a single study to accurately pinpoint the effectiveness of a vaccine.
“We just have to take everything together as little pieces of a puzzle, and not put too much weight on any one number,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University.
In clinical trials, it’s (relatively) easy to measure how well vaccines work. Researchers randomly assign thousands of volunteers to get either a vaccine or a placebo. If the vaccinated group has a lower risk of getting sick, scientists can be confident that it’s the vaccine that protected them.
But once vaccines hit the real world, it becomes much harder to measure their effectiveness. Scientists can no longer control who receives a vaccine and who does not. If they compare a group of vaccinated people with a group of unvaccinated people, other differences between the groups could influence their risks of getting sick.
It’s possible, for example, that people who choose not to get vaccinated may be more likely to put themselves in situations where they could get exposed to the virus. On the other hand, older people may be more likely to be vaccinated but also have a harder time fending off an aggressive variant. Or an outbreak may hit part of a country where most people are vaccinated, leaving under-vaccinated regions unharmed.
One way to rule out these alternative explanations is to compare each vaccinated person in a study with a counterpart who did not get the vaccine. Researchers often go to great lengths to find an unvaccinated match, looking for people who are of a similar age and health. They can even match people within the same neighborhood.
“It takes a huge effort,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Health.
For its new study, Israel’s Ministry of Health did not go to such great lengths to rule out other factors. “I am afraid that the current Israeli MoH analysis cannot be used to safely assess it, one way or another,” Uri Shalit, a senior lecturer at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, wrote on Twitter.
Israel’s numbers could also be different because of who is getting tested. Much of the country is vaccinated. During local bursts of new infections, the government requires testing for anyone — symptoms or not — who came into contact with a person diagnosed with Covid-19. In other countries, it’s more common for people to get tested because they’re already feeling sick. This could mean that Israel is spotting more asymptomatic cases in vaccinated people than other places are, bringing their reported effectiveness rate down.
Fortunately, all the studies so far agree that most Covid-19 vaccines are very effective at keeping people out of the hospital and have generally protected against the Delta variant. Israel’s Ministry of Health estimated that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is about 93 percent effective in preventing serious illness and hospitalization.
“Their overall implications are consistent: that protection against severe disease remains very high,” said Naor Bar-Zeev, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Because effectiveness studies are so tricky, it will take more work to determine how big a threat Delta poses to vaccines. Dr. Lipsitch said that studies from more countries would be required.
“If there are five studies with one outcome and one study with another, I think one can conclude that the five are probably more likely to be correct than the one,” Dr. Lipsitch said.
Tracking the Coronavirus ›
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMore than 125 children and adults who attended a religious camp in Texas last month have tested positive for the coronavirus, camp officials said this week in a statement that warned that “hundreds more were exposed” at the camp “and hundreds of others were likely exposed when infected people returned home.”
“From the beginning of the pandemic, we have sought to love our neighbors by practicing strict safety protocols,” Bruce Wesley, senior pastor for Clear Creek Community Church, wrote on the church’s website. “We are surprised and saddened by this turn of events. Our hearts break for those infected with the virus.”
The church is in League City, about 30 miles southeast of Houston. As of early May, masks were “optional in all areas,” according to the church’s camp website. Telephone and email messages sent to the camp on Tuesday evening were not immediately returned.
More than 400 people participated in the student ministry camp, according to the statement. The camp also said it had consulted with the Galveston County Health District and canceled services for now, but would resume activities on Sunday.
In a statement on Tuesday, Galveston health officials said the Delta variant of the virus had been detected in three test samples linked to “a church camp.” Dr. Philip Keiser, interim head of the Galveston County Local Health Authority, said, “In this outbreak, at least as of now, it appears most of the people who have tested positive are old enough to be vaccinated.” The camp served children in grades six through 12, it said.
News of the outbreak in Texas comes during the return of the traditional summer camp season, when day and sleep-away camps are about to welcome children who just completed a school year dramatically altered by Covid-19 health restrictions, and many children are looking for relief from the soaring summer temperatures.
In Illinois, 85 teenagers and adults tested positive for the virus after attending a camp that did not check the vaccination records of participants or require masks indoors, the Illinois Department of Public Health said last month. At least 25 workers at a Christian summer camp in Oklahoma tested positive for the virus in June, Public Radio Tulsa reported.
Officials across the country have rolled back face-covering and social distancing rules that were put in place more than a year ago, even as new variants of the virus have quickly spread in areas with low vaccination rates. In Galveston, 44 percent of residents have been vaccinated, slightly above the statewide vaccination rate of 41 percent.
In guidance for people attending or operating youth camps, the Centers for Disease Control said in late May that “everyone” aged 12 or older should get vaccinated and that camps “should be supportive of campers or staff who choose to wear a mask.”
GLOBAL ROUNDUP
Fiji, which got through the first year of the pandemic almost untouched, is now battling one of the fastest-growing Covid-19 outbreaks in the world.
The number of new coronavirus cases reported daily in the Pacific island nation of 900,000 people has soared into the hundreds over the past month, after never exceeding single digits before late May. Officials said the outbreak appeared to have begun after a case of the highly contagious Delta variant escaped the country’s isolation facilities.
As of Wednesday, the country was averaging 383 new cases a day, or 43 for every 100,000 people, according to a New York Times database. The 636 new cases reported on Wednesday set a record. Thirty-seven of the 39 Covid deaths reported in Fiji throughout the pandemic have occurred since the latest outbreak began.
The surge is swamping the country’s ability to cope. Fiji’s largest hospital is now exclusively treating Covid patients, and its mortuary is filled to capacity, the health ministry said on Monday. More than 1,000 Covid patients have been sent home from medical facilities to isolate themselves because the facilities had no space. The government is working to turn a sports arena outside Suva, the capital, into a makeshift clinic.
Repeated breaches of local health restrictions have given the virus entry points. More than 1,000 people have been arrested over breaches of a national curfew, and 48 people were arrested in a 24-hour period this week over breaches of mask requirements, according to the police. The government has declined to impose a lockdown to contain the outbreak.
About 31 percent of Fijians have had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, but fewer than 5 percent are fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database. Partial vaccination provides poor protection against the Delta variant.
Fiji, which is using the AstraZeneca vaccine, is depending on Australia and New Zealand to supply it with doses, but New Zealand’s medical regulatory body has not yet authorized the AstraZeneca vaccine, complicating the rollout. Instead, New Zealand has provided the country with 40 million New Zealand dollars, or $28 million, worth of aid and support.
“We have provided support in the form of P.P.E. and of course the commitment we’ve made around AstraZeneca vaccines, which is what Fiji are using for their rollout,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.
James Fong, Fiji’s health secretary, said that some in the country were putting off seeking treatment for Covid symptoms, sometimes with deadly results.
“We are also sadly seeing people with severe disease die at home, or on the way to hospital, before our medical teams have a chance to administer what could potentially be lifesaving treatment,” Mr. Fong said.
In other news from around the world:
The United States, as part of its commitment to send vaccines to countries in need, will ship one million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to Bolivia, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Wednesday. Another one million doses will be sent to Paraguay, she said. On Tuesday, Ms. Psaki announced that 1.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine would be shipped to Guatemala and two million doses of Moderna to Vietnam. On Friday, she said that 1.5 million doses of Moderna would be sent to El Salvador.
Spain on Wednesday reported some of its highest levels of new infections since February, and the government announced that it would distribute five million antigen test kits to regional administrations in a bid to identify cases among younger people, who are often asymptomatic. Carolina Darias, the health minister, said that nightlife was helping spread the virus, but warned against “demonizing” anybody. “We have to establish synergies with younger people,” she said.
A two-week lockdown in Sydney, Australia’s largest city, and its surrounding areas has been extended for another week, The Associated Press reported, Of the 27 people newly found to be infected with the Delta variant in the latest 24-hour period, only 13 had been in isolation while infectious, officials said. Only 9 percent of Australian adults are fully vaccinated, heightening fears that the Delta variant could quickly spread.
The number of coronavirus cases in Germany ticked up again on Wednesday after more than two months of steady decline, Reuters reported, citing official data. The Robert Koch Institute, a federal health agency, said that the Delta variant was involved in 59 percent of the country’s cases by the end of June. However, the country’s daily death toll has dropped by 42 percent over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database. Sixty-one percent of Germany’s population is not fully vaccinated.
Raphael Minder contributed reporting.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTAs their populations swell nearly to prepandemic levels, U.S. immigration detention centers are reporting major surges in coronavirus infections among detainees.
Public health officials, noting that few detainees are vaccinated against the virus, warn that the increasingly crowded facilities can be fertile ground for outbreaks.
The number of migrants being held in the detention centers has nearly doubled in recent months as border apprehensions have risen, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. More than 26,000 people were in detention last week, compared with about 14,000 in April.
More than 7,500 new coronavirus cases have been reported in the centers over that same period, accounting for more than 40 percent of all cases reported in ICE facilities since the pandemic began, according to a New York Times analysis of ICE data.
Prisons and jails in America were hotbeds for the virus last year, with nearly one in three inmates at federal and state facilities testing positive. The virus infected and killed prisoners at a faster rate than it did in nearby populations because of crowding and other factors that made ideal conditions for Covid to spread.
As of May, according to ICE’s latest available data, only about 20 percent of detainees passing through the centers had received at least one dose of vaccine while in custody.
Dr. Carlos Franco-Paredes, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who has inspected immigration detention centers during the pandemic, said that several factors were to blame for the surge, including transfers of detainees between facilities, insufficient testing and lax Covid-19 safety measures.
For example, he said, during a recent inspection at a center in Aurora, Colo., he saw many staff members who were not wearing face coverings properly, adding: “There is minimal to no accountability regarding their protocols.”
Paige Hughes, an ICE spokeswoman, said that all new detainees were tested for the coronavirus and are held in quarantine for 14 days on arrival.
“On-site medical professionals are credited with reducing the risk of further spreading the disease by immediately testing, identifying and isolating the exposed detainees to mitigate the spread of infection,” she said.
Even so, public health officials point out that detainees are transported to the facilities by bus before they are tested and may be exposed during the trip. Similar lapses by prison systems over the past year have led to mass infections and deaths.
ICE officials said the agency’s policy was to leave decisions about vaccinating detainees to state and local officials. Some of the worst outbreaks at ICE facilities, including one at the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Miss., have been in states where vaccination rates are far below the national average, according to a Times database.
As concerns grow over the spread of the more transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus, Sharon Dolovich, a law professor and director of the Covid Behind Bars Data Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that detainees would remain vulnerable to outbreaks until officials made vaccinations at these sites a higher priority.
“You have people coming in and out of the facility, into communities where incomplete vaccination allows these variants to flourish, and then you bring them inside the facilities, and that variant will spread,” Dr. Dolovich said. “What you’re describing is the combination of insufficient vaccination plus the evolution of the virus, and that is really scary.”
Israel and South Korea have agreed to swap hundreds of thousands of doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the coming months to meet their countries’ needs, Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said in a statement released Tuesday morning.
Under the deal, Israel will send about 700,000 expiring doses of the vaccine this month to South Korea, where cases of the virus are rising. South Korea will send the same amount to Israel in September and October, the statement said, describing the agreement as the first of its kind for the exchange of vaccines between Israel and another country.
Israel has had among the fastest vaccination programs in the world, fully inoculating 57 percent of its population so far, according to data from The New York Times. The deal with South Korea allows Israel to unload doses it doesn’t need immediately. It also will bolster Israel’s supply of vaccines for later in the year as officials grow increasingly concerned about the global spread of the Delta variant.
Mr. Bennett described it as “a win-win deal” that would “ensure that the State of Israel has a proper stock of vaccines.” He also thanked the chief executive of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, for helping to facilitate the deal.
The announcement came after the collapse of a deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in June. The authority had rejected more than one million doses of the vaccine on the grounds that they were too close to their expiration date. At the time, Ibrahim Melhem, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, said that the region would instead wait for a direct delivery of four million vaccine doses from Pfizer-BioNTech later in the year.
South Korea, which has fully vaccinated only 10 percent of its people, is trying to speed up its campaign. Average daily infections there have risen 42 percent over the past two weeks, according to New York Times data.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSigns of economic distress have begun appearing in neighborhoods across Kuala Lumpur and other Malaysian cities: white flags outside people’s houses, indicating that they need food or other assistance.
The flags — sometimes little more than T-shirts or strips of cloth — are a cry for help from mostly low-income families who are financially affected by the another long coronavirus lockdown. The campaign, shared on social media as #benderaputih (“white flag”), is a way for families to appeal for food, work or other essentials as many businesses remain closed and joblessness rises.
Thousands of people have stepped in, including artists and celebrities. A rapper who goes by Altimet pledged to his nearly 400,000 followers on Instagram last week that, every Friday, he would donate food and supplies to houses marked with a white flag.
Renyi Chin, a restaurant owner in Kuala Lumpur, the capital, said he had donated $1,000 worth of food and supplies to families in the past week.
“This is our fourth lockdown, and many have lost their jobs and means for food,” Mr. Chin said. Many of those afflicted by the latest restrictions are single mothers, older Malaysians and daily wage workers, he added.
As coronavirus cases continue to rise in Malaysia, with average daily infections up 19 percent in the last two weeks, according to New York Times data, the government on Saturday announced a tightening of restrictions in several regions, including Kuala Lumpur and most of Selangor state. The country had 6,539 daily cases last week, and just 8 percent of its population is fully vaccinated, according to Times data.
Malaysia’s repeated lockdowns have lowered demand for labor, with the number of registered jobs dropping by 130,000 in just the first quarter of the year, according to government data from the Department of Statistics Malaysia. Suicides have risen during the first five months of this year, and the health ministry said that the pandemic is partly to blame.
Many in Malaysia say the government has failed to manage the economic impact of the pandemic. Outside some houses, black flags have appeared in a separate campaign calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin.
“We’re in our fourth lockdown and yet the cases are rising,” Mr. Chin said. “Something isn’t right.”
Members of the governing party have dismissed the campaign, with one lawmaker, Nik Abduh Nik Aziz, asking people to pray instead of waving flags. “Don’t admit defeat when being tested by teaching the people to raise a white flag,” he said in a Facebook post last week.
Zuraida Kamaruddin, the minister for housing and local government, voiced support for the campaign in a tweet, writing: “There is no need to beg and no need to be embarrassed. Just raise the flag.”
Officials in Greece, a heavily tourism-dependent country that reopened to foreign visitors in May, announced stricter rules for the country’s bars and clubs on Tuesday, prompted by a sudden sharp increase in new Covid-19 infections. The surge in cases is fueling fears of a fourth wave of the pandemic at the height of the tourism season.
The Greek national public health organization, known as Eody, reported 1,797 new cases on Tuesday, more than double the current seven-day average, which has been climbing steadily in recent weeks. Officials attribute the spike to increased activity at bars and nightclubs, which have been operating outdoors since May with capacity limits and other safety measures.
The new rules for those venues, which take effect Thursday, say that bars and clubs can only serve customers who are seated. Businesses that fail to comply can be fined up to 10,000 euros and be ordered to close.
The aim of the new rules is to deter people from crowding tightly together in nightspots, and thus to “curb the transmission of the virus among the younger ages, so we can all have a summer that is safer and more free,” said Nikos Hardalias, the country’s deputy minister for civil protection. Mr. Hardalias noted that the average age of newly infected people has fallen to 27.
“Nothing is over,” he said. “We must vaccinate ourselves and protect our elders.”
Mr. Hardalias said that the more infectious Delta variant of the virus played a role in the spike, but did not indicate what proportion of the new cases were linked to the variant. “As in other countries, it’s only a matter of time until it becomes the predominant strain,” he said.
Greek authorities had been lifting restrictions over the past few weeks, after the waning of a spike in coronavirus cases in April. Death reports have fallen considerably and remain fairly low.
Around 37 percent of Greece’s 10.7 million people have been fully vaccinated so far. Medical experts have warned of further increases in infections unless authorities speed up vaccination efforts, particularly among young adults.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTGlobal Roundup
Portugal’s tourism industry received a boost late Monday when Germany said that it would lift a travel ban that had been recently introduced to help stop the spread of the Delta variant.
The Robert Koch Institute — Germany’s national disease control center — announced that Portugal, as well as Britain, Russia, India and Nepal, would be removed from a list of countries rated as being at the highest risk for travel. The change will take effect on Wednesday.
The Portuguese government had strongly criticized Germany’s earlier ban because it was the only nation on the list from the European Union. The bloc has been trying to align travel rules among its 27 member nations to help revive travel and tourism.
Just last week, Portugal reimposed curfews in several cities as the Delta variant surged through the country, another blow to some of its popular summer tourist destinations. The country has fully vaccinated about 37 percent of its total population, below the 47 percent in the United States, according to New York Times data.
In other developments across the world:
The authorities in the Spanish region of Catalonia on Tuesday announced the renewed closure of night clubs and other indoor entertainment spaces, a U-turn decided in response to a strong uptick in coronavirus cases. The restrictions will come into force Friday, but will not prevent outdoor music festivals and similar summer events from going ahead. The regional government of Catalonia — whose capital, Barcelona, is the tourism hub of Spain — also said that it would ask the central government to reintroduce the compulsory wearing of a face mask outdoors, which stopped being mandatory as recently as June 26. The rate of new cases has risen almost eightfold over the past two weeks in Catalonia.
Japan said it would send millions of doses of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine to other parts of Asia this week, including 1.13 million doses for Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims as its territory. Beijing, whose own vaccine offers to Taiwan have been rebuffed, had criticized the island’s officials for accepting a donation of 1.24 million doses from Japan last month. Premier Su Tseng-chang of Taiwan thanked Japan for the donations in a Facebook post on Tuesday, saying “True friends always lend a helping hand when they need each other the most.” Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam will also receive about one million doses each this week, said Toshimitsu Motegi, the Japanese foreign minister. Last week, Japan delivered about one million free vaccine doses each to Malaysia and Indonesia, both of which are experiencing a surge in virus cases.
The Grand Prix and MotoGP, two of the biggest sporting events in Australia, will be canceled for the second year in a row after being planned for the fall. Martin Pakula, sports minister for Victoria state, said in a statement, “It’s very disappointing that these much-loved events can’t proceed but this is the reality of the pandemic — but until we get much higher vaccination rates we cannot return to more normal settings.” A cut to the number of international visitors allowed into Australia and continued quarantine requirements also contributed to the decision. Victoria has recorded no locally transmitted coronavirus cases for the past six days, but its neighboring state, New South Wales, is struggling to contain an outbreak in which the Delta variant has infected over 300 people.
Emergent BioSolutions has had to throw out 75 million Covid vaccine doses because of potential contamination, and production at its Baltimore factory has been halted for more than two months as the company tries to convince regulators that it has fixed serious quality problems.
As the federal government works with the biotech firm in an effort to restart production, some investors are asking for their money back and seeking an overhaul of the company’s corporate governance.
With its stock price cut in half, Emergent faces several shareholder lawsuits accusing it of securities fraud. A pension fund filed a complaint last Tuesday claiming that some executives and board members — including several former federal officials — had engaged in insider trading by unloading more than $20 million worth of stock over the past 15 months.
The executives and board members sold the stock “while in possession of material, nonpublic information that artificially inflated the price” and “profited from their misconduct and were unjustly enriched through their exploitation of material and adverse inside information,” the Illinois-based Lincolnshire Police Pension Fund asserted.
The litigation adds to the troubles of the politically connected company, which is also the target of a widening congressional investigation into its vaccine production problems and the favorable deals it has secured with the government.
An Emergent spokesman said all of the lawsuits were “without merit” but declined to discuss them in detail.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWith the more contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus spreading around the world, including in the United States, Carl Zimmer, who is a science writer and the author of the “Matter” column for The New York Times, spoke to Michael Barbaro on Tuesday’s episode of The Daily.
Although there is not yet good data on how all of the vaccines hold up against Delta, several widely used shots, including those made by Pfizer-BioNTech, are still effective against the Delta variant after two doses, research suggests. Only 47 percent of the United States is fully vaccinated, according to federal data.
We’ll jump to the part where Mr. Barbaro sought clarity about the differing mask guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
Here is an excerpt from the conversation:
CARL ZIMMER: Well, they’re making different recommendations looking at the same data, and you have to bear in mind that the W.H.O. is giving advice for the whole world, which is a lot less vaccinated overall than the United States. And even in the United States, the C.D.C. is still saying that you have to wear a mask even if you’re vaccinated in health care settings, on public transportation, and they also recommend that if you’re in a very crowded unventilated place that you wear a mask.
But they’ve been emphasizing, well, these vaccines protect you against Delta, and it is the case that if you’re vaccinated fully, you have good protection against Delta. That’s clear. But with this huge number of people who are still unvaccinated or under vaccinated, public health officials have a tough choice to make. What do they recommend that people do?
MICHAEL BARBARO: Well, I’m not sure if this is a fair question, Carl, but I’m going to ask it anyway, which one of these big public health agencies seems right or maybe righter? Wear masks in this moment to fend off Delta and its potential risks or no, if you’re fully vaccinated, you don’t need to.
CARL ZIMMER: What team am I on? Look, I’m a journalist. I’m not an epidemiologist, OK? So I myself will just keep an eye on rates. In Connecticut, we have very low rates right now, which is great. But if those start to shoot up, if it seems to be Delta is driving it, I might rethink that personally, both to protect myself and to protect others, but I’ll have to play it by ear.
MICHAEL BARBARO: So Carl, if I’m reading between the lines correctly, you are going to allow yourself to perhaps keep walking into a store or a restaurant without a mask following the current guidance in the U.S., but if things change and Delta starts to take off in the community where you live in Connecticut, you might change your behavior, you might become more vigilant. You might be putting that mask back on.
CARL ZIMMER: Well, what I do is based on the most important thing, which is that I am fully vaccinated. And so when anybody is thinking about, “what should I be doing in terms of Delta,” that’s the first thing they should think about. Am I vaccinated? If not, when am I going to get vaccinated?
It should be as soon as possible. Now, putting on a mask when you go indoors someplace, that’s not a big deal. I mean, that’s a pretty straightforward thing to do. We’re not talking about closing down schools and so on.
And so if the state of Connecticut decides that they need to just tell everybody just to put on a mask because it’s too hard to make an honor system work, that’s fine with me. That’s totally fine with me. If that means that fewer people are ending up in the hospital and dying, I’m happy to do my part.
MICHAEL BARBARO: And do you expect, whether it’s Connecticut or New York, or the C.D.C. itself, that kind of guidance might be forthcoming sometime soon based on the transmissibility of Delta?
CARL ZIMMER: I mean, making predictions about this pandemic has been a losing game in a lot of ways. If you’ve been vaccinated, then Delta is not a big risk. But for everybody else, this variant is really dangerous, and so there are going to have to be public health measures that take into account that we have this mixture, where less than half of all Americans are fully vaccinated and really defended against this variant.
And there are some parts of the country, where less than a third are fully vaccinated, and those places are at even greater risk.
MICHAEL BARBARO: So the reality of the coming months, because of Delta, is that those who have gotten vaccinated, tens of millions of Americans, may need to make sacrifices in some regions of the country on behalf of those who have not gone vaccinated?
CARL ZIMMER: It’s a possibility, yes. But that’s what it means to be in a society that values public health. Public health means that we are looking out for each other.
As the speed of vaccinations has slowed around the United States, reported coronavirus cases are on the rise in several states, including Nevada, where nearly 40 percent of the adult population has not gotten a shot.
Nevada had the third-highest count of new coronavirus cases per capita of any state as of Wednesday, with 14 per 100,000 people, trailing only Missouri (where 45 percent of the population has had at least one shot) and Arkansas (where 42 percent have gotten at least one shot).
But Nevada had the highest increase in average number of hospitalizations, which had risen nearly 62 percent over the previous two weeks, to 441.
Dr. Fermin Leguen, the district health officer for Nevada’s southern district, which includes Clark County, said that about 95 percent of Covid patients hospitalized in the past three months had not been vaccinated.
Both Nevada and Missouri have asked for help from federal “surge response teams” that the White House announced last week to help states with largely unvaccinated populations cope with the highly transmissible Delta variant of the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 73 percent of the coronavirus infections in Missouri involve the Delta variant, as do about 40 percent of the cases in Nevada.
The C.D.C. now estimates that Delta has become the dominant variant across the United States. Only full vaccination affords significant protection against it.
Fifty-three percent of the country’s population has not been fully vaccinated, including many children under 12 who are not eligible. And persuading unvaccinated people to get inoculated is a critical challenge for the government.
President Biden this week renewed his call to the nation to get vaccinated — pressing employers to give employees paid time off to get inoculated and to offer vaccines at work — after the country failed to meet his goal of at least partly vaccinating 70 percent of American adults by July 4.
For most of the country, the virus has receded. The seven-day average of new reported cases has held steady at about 12,000 a day, the lowest totals since testing became widely available. That is a drastic drop from the worst days of the pandemic last winter, when new cases sometimes averaged more than 250,000 a day, according to a New York Times database.
The surge in Nevada has also not come near winter’s levels, but the Times database shows that the seven-day average of cases there is about double what it was a month ago when Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, relaxed most of the state’s coronavirus restrictions.
Most of the state’s surge in cases is in Clark County, home to Las Vegas and most of the state’s population. The city rejoiced when tourists were allowed return to the casinos, theaters and other entertainments on the strip without limitations after more than a year of economic stagnation.
In a statement last week, Mr. Sisolak connected the state’s rise in cases to the emergence of the Delta variant and the low rate of vaccination in Clark County, where only 39 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.
But Brian Labus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, linked the rise to the relaxation of restrictions.
“It’s not necessarily reopening the strip to tourists — it’s that our entire community is open 100 percent,” Dr. Labus said. “It’s not just the resort hotels. It’s every restaurant, store and business in southern Nevada.”
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSchool may still seem blissfully far off for American students in the midst of summer. But for many who are eligible, time may be running out for a back-to-school necessity: getting fully vaccinated against the coronavirus before classes resume.
Many of the country’s more than 13,000 districts, especially in the South and Southwest, plan to start the 2021-22 school year well before Labor Day. Completing a course of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine, the only vaccine now federally authorized for 12- to 17-year-olds, takes at least five weeks for the two shots to be administered and full protection to be reached. In many of those early-starting districts, students would need to get their first dose in the next few days to be fully immune in time.
In the Hamilton County School District in Tennessee, the first day of school is scheduled for Aug. 12. Counting back from then, students would have to get their first shot no later than Thursday to be fully protected by opening day.
Cody Patterson, a spokesman for the district, which encompasses Chattanooga and serves 45,000 students, said recently that while vaccinations are not mandatory for the new school year, the district was making clear to parents “that we believe vaccination is a key strategy to keeping school open.”
Mr. Patterson said that individual schools in the district would probably accommodate students case by case if they are worried about finishing their vaccinations.
Schools across the country closed and switched to online instruction when the pandemic took hold last year. But as the pandemic wore on, research showed that elementary and secondary schools were not major drivers of infection.
Colleges are another matter, with a number of outbreaks seen on campuses. Many colleges (along with some private secondary schools) are requiring vaccinations for students to attend in person this fall. It’s harder for public middle and high schools to do that, for legal and other reasons, and a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers said recently the union was not aware of any U.S. school district that is mandating vaccinations.
It has only been since May that any vaccine was available for 12- to 15-year-olds in the United States. In many states, teenagers need parental consent to be vaccinated. No vaccine has yet been authorized for children under 12.
Michael Poore, the superintendent of the Little Rock School District in Arkansas, said recently that the district had contacted parents, worked with local health authorities and done extensive outreach on local and social media to persuade students and their parents to get a vaccine.
The district also ran vaccination events at its 11 middle and high schools, he said, but only 300 to 400 of the district’s roughly 11,000 eligible students got shots at the events.
School in Little Rock starts on Aug. 16, so to be fully protected by then, students would have to get their first dose by Monday.
“We’re really going to push the vaccines in August,” Mr. Poore said, “because if you haven’t had the shot and you’re in close proximity to someone who has the virus, you’re going to have to be quarantined.”
It is already too late for not-yet-vaccinated students to get fully protected before school starts in some places, like the Chandler Unified School District in Arizona, which reopens July 21.
Kimberly Guevara, a district spokeswoman, said recently the district had informed parents when the vaccine was authorized for teenagers and told them how to get a shot, but “we’re not going to force vaccinations on students.”
Ms. Guevara said she and the eligible members of her family got vaccinated as soon as they could.