Daily Covid Briefing
Aug. 14, 2021Updated
Aug. 14, 2021, 5:13 p.m. ET
Aug. 14, 2021, 5:13 p.m. ET
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, whose statewide ban on mask mandates has drawn federal criticism — and in some Covid-stricken areas, fury — is taking his battle against one of the country’s most basic pandemic precautions to the state’s highest court.
Late on Friday, after Mr. Abbott’s ban suffered at least three legal setbacks, the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said he was asking the State Supreme Court to consider Mr. Abbott’s policies. “The rule of law will decide,” he wrote in a tweet.
We have taken this mask mandate to the Texas Supreme Court. The rule of law will decide. -AGPaxton
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) August 14, 2021
The escalating battle comes as schools around the country prepare to open for the fall semester, with tens of millions of children under 12 ineligible for vaccination and as hospitalizations of young people have been increasing amid the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant.
Partisan tensions have been rising over whether students, teachers and school staff members should be required to wear masks. Some Republicans have cast mask rules as an infringement on parental rights, while many Democrats hold that they are a matter of public health.
Mr. Abbott has faced a series of legal challenges and defiant local mask mandates since he signed an executive order in July barring mandates for both masks and vaccinations.
The order came two days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its guidance to urge much more widespread masking, acting on new data that showed fully vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant — a situation the agency considers comparatively rare — could spread the virus as easily as unvaccinated people.
The setbacks for Mr. Abbott on Friday were in areas with Democratic leaders, rampant coronavirus cases and rising hospitalizations. Vaccinations in Texas lag many other states, and deaths are also rising, though far more slowly than in prior waves, given that the majority of the oldest and most vulnerable residents are now fully vaccinated.
A state district judge gave Harris County and several school districts across the state temporary permission to put in effect safety measures, including mask mandates.
In San Antonio, the state’s 4th Court of Appeals denied Mr. Abbott’s challenge to an earlier ruling upholding a school mask mandate for Bexar County. Average new daily cases are up 72 percent from two weeks ago there, and hospitalizations are up 142 percent.
Shortly after the San Antonio court issued its ruling, the 5th Court of Appeals in Dallas denied Mr. Abbott’s challenge to a county official’s mask mandate for public schools, universities and businesses. Average daily cases in Dallas County have risen 65 percent over the past two weeks, and hospitalizations have nearly doubled.
The official who issued that order, Clay Jenkins, praised the ruling. “We should all be together; Team Human v Virus,” he wrote on Twitter. “I’ll keep following the doctor’s advise and work with anyone to beat #COVID19.”
Today, the Court of Appeals ruled against @GovAbbott request for an emergency stay of Judge Tonya Parker’s order earlier this week. We should all be together;Team Human v Virus. I’ll keep following the doctor’s advise and work with anyone to beat #COVID19 https://t.co/AHt2cJZw3i
— Clay Jenkins (@JudgeClayJ) August 14, 2021
Scores of Texas counties have recorded even higher rates of new cases and hospitalizations than those involved in the rulings.
Mr. Abbott came under sharp federal criticism on Friday, along with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who banned school mask mandates a day after Mr. Abbott issued his executive order.
The secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, sent letters to the governors and their education commissioners, writing that he was concerned about recent executive actions taken by both governors.
Those orders, he wrote, prohibited districts from “voluntarily adopting science-based strategies for preventing the spread of Covid-19 that are aligned with the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” like universal masking. The letters were made public late Friday.
Dr. Cardona also expressed support for districts in both states that have defied the governors’ orders.
“The Department stands with these dedicated educators who are working to safely reopen schools and maintain safe in-person instruction,” he wrote.
German authorities classified the United States as “high risk” on Friday because of the rising number of cases there, affecting unvaccinated tourists who wish to travel to the European country.
After weeks of being able to visit Germany relatively easily, American tourists and other nonessential travelers will have to quarantine for 10 days, starting Sunday, if they cannot document full vaccination or immunity from a past infection. They can shorten their quarantine with a negative test on the fifth day.
The new classification is part of a weekly assessment done by German authorities based mostly on infection rates in other countries. Turkey and Israel were also reclassified as high risk.
Cases in the United States — which reported 186,840 new cases on Friday — have steadily risen since early July, driven largely by the Delta variant. Germany has averaged about 3,000 new cases per day in the past seven days, according to a New York Times database.
Germany had reopened its borders to tourists from the United States in late June, after more than a year of a complete ban on nonessential travelers from most countries outside the European Union. The United States has maintained its ban on European travelers since the early days of the pandemic.
Wealthy countries have gotten used to the idea that children are extremely rare pandemic victims. In the United States and Europe, people under 18 have accounted for about one of every 1,500 reported Covid deaths.
But the toll in less developed countries tells a different story. Across Indonesia, for instance, children have fallen victim to Covid in alarming numbers, with a striking increase since June, when the Delta variant began taking hold.
Researchers point to many reasons children would be more likely to die in developing countries, but many of those factors boil down to a single one: poverty.
The pandemic has killed at least 1,245 Indonesian children and the biggest recent jump has been among those under age 1, said Dr. Aman Bhakti Pulungan, head of the Indonesian Pediatric Society. The true rate is impossible to discern, because testing is limited and many Covid deaths have gone uncounted.
Still, the pediatric society’s figures suggest that about one of every 88 officially counted deaths in the country has been that of a child.
With a stockpile of at least 100 million doses at the ready, Biden administration officials are developing a plan to start offering Covid booster shots to some Americans as early as this fall, even as researchers continue to hotly debate whether extra shots are needed, according to people familiar with the effort.
The first boosters are likely to go to nursing home residents and health care workers, followed by other older people who were near the front of the line when vaccinations began last year. Officials envision giving people the same vaccine they originally received. They have discussed starting the effort in October but have not settled on a timetable.
While many outside experts argue there is no proof yet that the vaccines’ high level of protection against severe disease and hospitalization is waning in the United States, administration officials say they cannot afford to put off figuring out the logistics of providing boosters to millions of people. The spotty nature of the nation’s disease-reporting network makes the question of timing even trickier.
The effort comes as a Delta-driven wave of the virus grips the nation. Hospitals in states like Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi are again swamped with patients, the vast majority of them unvaccinated.
The administration is also carefully watching Israel, where some data suggests an uptick in severe disease among older adults who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine early in that nation’s campaign, according to people who have reviewed it. Some officials are concerned that even if a decline in protection merely results in mild or asymptomatic infections, those infected could still spread the virus and prolong the pandemic.
Any booster policy decision is fraught, officials said, because the administration does not want to undermine public confidence in what have proved to be powerfully effective vaccines. Nor does it want to overvaccinate Americans when many other countries have yet to even begin vaccination campaigns in earnest, increasing the threat of dangerous new variants that could spread to the United States and evade the vaccines.
Benjamin Mueller and Noah Weiland contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
With a stubborn Delta outbreak in Sydney, Australia, spreading in areas outside the city and in vulnerable Aboriginal communities, New South Wales officials announced a lockdown for the entire state on Saturday along with tightened restrictions for residents of Sydney.
The statewide stay-at-home orders, in effect for at least a week, reflect growing concern about virus clusters that appear to have been seeded from Sydney residents traveling outside the city in violation of a lockdown that began there seven weeks ago.
Several cases have emerged in Dubbo, an agricultural area, along with a handful in Walgett, a small town about 400 miles from Sydney that has a large and largely unvaccinated Indigenous population.
In all, New South Wales recorded 466 new local cases and four deaths on Saturday. Premier Gladys Berejiklian called the case numbers, which were the highest daily total since the pandemic began, an “extremely concerning situation” at a news conference Saturday morning.
“The Delta strain is diabolical, and we have to accept and be real about that,” she said.
Under the new rules for Sydney that were announced on Saturday, residents will need a permit to travel outside the city. Travel for exercise and essential shopping will be limited to five kilometers — about three miles — from home, and fines for violations that include lying to contact tracers have been increased to up to 5,000 Australian dollars ($3,685). Fines of 3,000 Australian dollars can now be delivered on the spot for breaching a rule that limits outdoor exercise to two people.
In smaller centers of population, schools will be closed as of Monday, and for at least seven days only essential businesses will be allowed to operate.
With Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, also in lockdown, more than half of Australia’s population of 25 million people is now required to stay at home as the country races toward vaccination for an escape. And the vaccination rate is increasing.
At the current pace, 70 percent of Australia’s population over the age of 16 will have received their first dose of a Covid vaccine by Sept. 25, with New South Wales on track to reach that milestone on Sept. 7. About 25 percent of adults are fully vaccinated nationwide and about 50 percent have received a single dose, according to the Australian government.
Oregon will deploy at least 500 National Guard troops to help its hospitals deal with a flood of coronavirus patients, as the state faces the largest wave of infections it has seen during the pandemic, the state’s governor said on Friday.
The governor, Kate Brown, said that hospitals were at risk of becoming overwhelmed, with 733 Oregonians hospitalized with severe cases of Covid-19, including 185 in intensive care.
The surge comes despite Oregon’s relatively high rate of vaccination, a fact that Ms. Brown noted in a videotaped address.
“I know this is not the summer many of us envisioned with over 2.5 million Oregonians vaccinated against Covid-19,” Ms. Brown said. “The harsh and frustrating reality is that the Delta variant has changed everything.”
Ms. Brown said that up to 1,500 National Guards members could be deployed to help at hospitals around the state, and that she had reached out to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for further support and funding.
The Delta variant has driven infections and hospitalizations to all-time highs in some Southern states, so much so that “pandemic of the unvaccinated” has become Biden administration shorthand for the latest wave. But it has also begun to hammer states with relatively high rates of vaccination, like Oregon and Hawaii.
In recent days, those two states have recorded their highest number of cases since the start of the pandemic. The seven-day average of cases in Hawaii has been above 500 for nearly a week, about double the peak the state reached in August 2020.
Oregon narrowly surpassed its highest previous average, reaching a seven-day average of 1,540 cases on Thursday, according to a New York Times database. Over the past two weeks hospitalizations have risen nearly 130 percent in Oregon and 140 percent in Hawaii.
Earlier this week Ms. Brown announced an statewide indoor mask mandate, which took effect on Friday. Under the new rules, everyone older than five needs to wear a mask in most indoor settings; children older than two will need to wear them on public transportation.
Hawaii has had the country’s fewest reported cases per capita for most of the pandemic.
But earlier this week, Gov. David Ige imposed new social distancing and gathering restrictions. Before that, Mr. Ige announced that state and county employees would have to show proof of vaccination by next Monday or be tested weekly.
The vast majority of people hospitalized with Covid-19 in Hawaii had not been vaccinated, according to a message on Twitter from the state’s lieutenant governor on Tuesday.
When it comes to our children and Covid, we have more questions than answers. How will new variants affect them? How will they go back to school safely? Join Dr. Anthony Fauci and Times journalists (who are parents themselves) for a vital Q&A session for parents, educators and students everywhere.
The Delta variant is nearly twice as contagious as prior variants and just as contagious as chickenpox — meaning more than the seasonal flu, the common cold or polio. It replicates rapidly in the body, and people carry large amounts of the virus in their nose and throat.
Dr. Andrew T. Chan, an epidemiologist and physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and one of the lead investigators of the Covid Symptom Study, has been tracking millions of people from Britain, the United States and Sweden via an app that asks participants to monitor their symptoms.
Among vaccinated adults, “the symptoms we are seeing now are much more commonly identified with the common cold,” Dr. Chan said. “We are still seeing people presenting with a cough, but we are also seeing a higher prevalence of things like runny nose and sneezing.” Headaches and sore throat are other top complaints, he added. Fever and loss of taste and smell are being reported to a lesser degree.
Pediatricians in New York City, where 67 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, say they are seeing many of the same symptoms in children that they have seen since the start of the pandemic, and that the more severe cases tend to be among unvaccinated adolescents, especially those with underlying conditions like diabetes or obesity. Some toddlers or school-age children can get very ill from Covid too, but doctors don’t always know why one kid gets much sicker than another, said Dr. Sallie Permar, pediatrician-in-chief at New York-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine.
As the Delta variant has grown to become dominant in the United States — now making up almost all new coronavirus cases — and as the average number of new cases has now stayed above 100,000 for a week, many are wondering how to recalibrate their understanding of the risk they face.
One way of thinking about that risk — and about the strong protection vaccines still offer, especially against severe disease and death — is to imagine two groups of people who are demographically identical, but with very different vaccination rates. One group has about 20 percent vaccination, as in some of the least immunized U.S. counties; the other, perhaps a workplace that is strongly encouraging its employees to get the jab, is 95 percent vaccinated.
In the highly immunized group, the vaccine protects most of the vaccinated against becoming infected with the Delta variant. But some breakthrough infections would be expected, most of them mild or asymptomatic. Infections among the vaccinated would outnumber those among the unvaccinated simply because there were many more vaccinated people to start with. In the recent Provincetown, Mass., outbreak, most of those infected were vaccinated — because the group had a high overall immunization rate.
In the group in which few are vaccinated but all are exposed to the virus, most of the unvaccinated would become infected, and most of the vaccinated would not. But in this scenario, outcomes — from the number of people who experience symptoms at all to the number who would become seriously ill or die — look much worse.
A federal judge on Friday ruled that the Biden administration’s latest moratorium on evictions in counties where coronavirus is raging could remain in place for now, saying that she lacked authority to block such an emergency public-health policy.
But the judge, Dabney L. Friedrich, a district court judge in Washington, D.C., expressed doubts in her 13-page ruling about the legality of the policy. She said she believed “the government is unlikely to prevail” when the matter returns to the Supreme Court.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed the ban on evictions on Aug. 3 in counties where Covid-19 is surging.
The ban replaced an expired, nationwide moratorium first imposed last September to prevent a surge of people crowding into homeless shelters and relatives’ homes, spreading the virus. The new one is narrower because it applies only where transmission rates are high. Still, that category currently covers about 91 percent of counties in the United States.
In May, Judge Friedrich had blocked the nationwide the moratorium, but the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia Circuit overruled her, and the Supreme Court let that decision stand in June.
On Friday, she ruled that the replacement policy was similar enough to the original one that the earlier appeals court ruling controlled the case — for now.
“Absent the D.C. Circuit’s judgment,” she wrote, she would immediately block the government from enforcing the new evictions ban. “But the court’s hands are tied.”
The Justice Department declined to comment. But in a statement, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said: “The administration believes that C.D.C.’s new moratorium is a proper use of its lawful authority to protect the public health.”
The plaintiffs, led by the Alabama Association of Realtors, are expected to swiftly take the case back to the appeals court in an effort to speed its way to the Supreme Court, where five of the nine justices appear likely to agree with Judge Friedrich that the ban exceeds the government’s emergency powers under a broadly worded, but vague, 1944 public health law.
The pandemic shut down outdoor film shoots for months in New York, but now the production trucks and crews are back — and some people are soaking it all in.
One morning in July, Ashley Psirogianes, a 26-year-old “Sex and the City” fan who has been watching old episodes during the lockdown, was surprised, thrilled even, to run into the cast and crew making the reboot.
“I just walked around the corner, and there they were,” Ms. Psirogianes said. “I got a peek of them right before they went to lunch.”
As someone who lived a few blocks away, she was excited to have such valuable intel to share. “My group chats were all blowing up,” she said. “A bunch of my friends work in the area, so everyone was trying to walk by, trying to get a glimpse of them.”
But it also made her feel like SoHo and New York City, more broadly, was back in action. “It’s really cool they are starting things like this again,” she said.
In 2019, the film and television industry supported approximately 185,000 jobs, $18.1 billion in wages, and $81.6 billion in total economic output in the city, according to the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. Last year, however, all film permits were suspended on March 21 and did not resume until July 1. This year, in April and May alone, there were around 360 projects. In 2020, there were a total of 732 film and television projects shot in the city, a significant decrease from the 2,214 projects in 2019. Even with the recent return of activity, the mayor’s office does not anticipate this year’s number to match 2019 levels.
The pandemic has either made living on the street where a filming is taking place a delight or a terrifying experience. Some people panic at the sights of large crews descending on their block. Others find it exhilarating to be part of this action after such a quiet year.
“Could me picking up my dog’s poop end up in the background of a romantic kissing scene?” said Megan Broussard, who lives on 25th and Madison and works as a television producer. “Isn’t this why we live in New York City?”
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