Two court rulings on Tuesday cleared the way for local leaders who oppose a ban by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas on mask mandates to at least temporarily require face coverings to help curb a rise in cases.
The first ruling came in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio. Masks can now be required in public schools and other public buildings there.
Masks will also be required for county and city employees, said Andy Segovia, the city attorney for San Antonio. The chief executive of Bexar County, Judge Nelson W. Wolff, said that the ruling was important because many students who are too young to be vaccinated would otherwise be coming back to school with no protection.
The second ruling was delivered by a district judge in Dallas County who said the ban prevented officials from protecting residents during an emergency.
“Dallas County citizens will be irreparably harmed” if local leaders cannot require face coverings to stop the transmission of the virus, the judge, Tonya Parker, wrote in the ruling.
In light of the decision, Clay Jenkins, the county’s chief elected official, said he planned to issue an emergency order for the county on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Texas recorded 20,000 new virus cases, nearly double the number of cases as two weeks ago, according to a New York Times database.
Some hospitals in the state are nearing capacity and are bracing for an influx of patients. The intensive care unit at Houston’s Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital is at full capacity, and 63 percent of those patients are Covid cases, CNN reported.
On Tuesday, a temporary mask mandate for students, staff members and visitors to public schools in Dallas went into effect.
Brendan Steinhauser, a consultant who lives in a Republican-leaning suburb of Austin, said the rising number of cases had led more people to wear masks.
“It is palpable,” he said of his neighbors’ mask-wearing attitude. “I noticed it and it was like, ‘Whoa.’”
Correction: An earlier version of this item misspelled the surname of Bexar County’s chief executive. He is Judge Nelson W. Wolff, not Wolf.
Amid new evidence that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections can carry as much coronavirus as unvaccinated people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged people in high-transmission areas to wear masks in public indoor spaces, regardless of their vaccination status.
Vaccines remain highly effective at preventing severe illness and death, but the highly contagious Delta variant and persistent vaccine refusal have taken the United States in an unexpected direction. Reported cases have spiked to the highest levels in six months.
Still, most vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are likely to have mild symptoms, and each exposure to the virus is an opportunity for the immune system to strengthen its defenses against future variants.
Here’s what’s useful to know about breakthrough infections and the Delta variant:
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The vaccines were intended to prevent hospitalization and death, in large part the result of damage to the lungs and other organs. The vaccines produce antibodies in the blood that prevent the coronavirus from taking root in those organs.
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Early in the infection, when people are most likely to be contagious, the Delta variant seems to replicate in amounts that are perhaps 1,000 times as much as those seen in people infected with other variants, defeating immune defenses in the nose and throat.
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Some experts believe breakthrough infections are likelier after exposure to the Delta variant than to prior forms of the virus. Even when more recent data becomes available, however, it still is likely to show that most hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19 occur in unvaccinated people.
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In some rare cases, breakthrough infections may lead to persistent symptoms. “Long Covid” is a poorly understood set of symptoms that can affect people for several months after an active infection has ended. A couple of small studies have investigated how common or severe long Covid may be after breakthrough infections. It is likely to be rare, some experts say, because breakthrough infections are uncommon and shorter in duration.
Recovery in some of the world’s major economies appears to be slowing down as people spooked by the Delta variant spend less, travel less and dine out less, according to new report by the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, the research and policy group of the world’s richest countries.
In recent months, as vaccination rates increased globally, optimism that life appeared to be returning to normal helped spur consumer spending from Ohio to Paris to Beijing.
But that renewed sense of confidence may be ebbing amid news of breakout infections, lockdowns and other requirements. In countries like France and Italy, people now need health passes — paper or digital proof of being fully vaccinated, a recent negative test or recent Covid-19 recovery — to attend big concerts and to enter cinemas, museums and theaters.
The O.E.C.D., a Paris-based organization, looked at economic indicators including employment, retail sales, manufacturing output and wage growth in 38 member countries. It said the indicators suggested that growth in major economies like the United States and China may be slowing down, with similar signs of sputtering in Europe, including in Britain, France and Germany.
The group said that there might be higher than usual fluctuations in how economic recoveries are playing out because of persistent uncertainties, “despite the gradual lifting of Covid-19 containment measures in some countries and the progress of vaccination campaigns.”
The report also said that growth was slowing in Russia and Brazil, where the pandemic has buffeted society and industry. In Brazil, millions have gone hungry in recent months, with scenes of undernourished teenagers holding placards at traffic stops with the word hunger in large print.
China, a manufacturing powerhouse, has played a leading role in an upward global economic trend. But some economists say that its growth has started to level off in recent months and that the government’s tougher pandemic restrictions could undermine it.
There have been some cautiously encouraging signs, however. Since the pandemic recession bottomed out in the United States in the spring of 2020, the nation’s economic output has been resilient, with second-quarter output 0.8 percent higher than before coronavirus.
American parents of school-age children are more supportive of school mask requirements than mandatory coronavirus vaccines, according to a new survey. It found that nearly two-thirds of those parents want schools to insist on masks for students, teachers and staff members who do not have their shots.
The survey, to be released on Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, offers a window into the thinking of U.S. parents at the outset of another complicated school year. Debates over mask mandates are raging, the Biden administration is making a push for young people to get inoculated, and the Delta variant is sending more young people to the hospital with Covid-19.
The survey found that 63 percent of parents wanted masks required in schools for people who are unvaccinated. But parents’ views about vaccinating their children are complicated, the survey found, and tend to fall along the partisan lines that have shaped the discussion around vaccinating adults.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in May for use in people aged 12 and older. But more than half of the parents of school-age children said they still did not think schools should require it.
The Kaiser research, part of an ongoing study of public attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccination, is based on a nationally representative sample of 1,259 parents with a child under 18 in their household. It found that one in five parents of children ages 12 to 17 said their child would “definitely not” get vaccinated.
“Despite controversy around the country about masks in schools, most parents want their school to require masks of unvaccinated students and staff,” Drew Altman, the foundation’s chief executive, said in a statement. “At the same time, most parents don’t want their schools to require their kids get a Covid-19 vaccine despite their effectiveness in combating Covid-19.”
School officials around the country say they are deeply concerned about their ability to keep classrooms open this year, and many schools are promoting vaccination and even running vaccination clinics. But persuading parents to vaccinate their children is an uphill battle, educators say.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that just 30 percent of students ages 12 to 15 are fully vaccinated; the rate is 80 percent among U.S. adults over 65.
“The biggest challenge is just making sure that folks are understanding that the vaccines are safe and that the vaccines mitigate the effects” of Covid-19, said Raymond C. Hart, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban school districts.
The Kaiser study reflected that challenge. An overwhelming majority — 88 percent — of parents whose children were unvaccinated said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that not enough is known about the long-term effects of Covid-19 vaccines in children, and 79 percent expressed concern about serious side effects.
Nearly three-quarters of the parents said they worried the vaccines could hurt their child’s fertility, even though the C.D.C. has found no evidence of that.
Attitudes toward vaccination broke down along racial, ethnic and partisan lines.
Hispanic and Black parents were more likely than white parents to cite concerns that reflect access barriers to inoculation, including not being able to get a vaccine from a trusted place or believing that they might have to pay for it. The survey found that about two-thirds of Democratic parents favored mask and vaccine mandates, while more than three-quarters of Republicans opposed them.
After a nurse admitted to replacing the contents of a Covid vaccine vial with a saline solution in a small German inoculation center in April, the local authorities said on Tuesday that she might have systematically substituted vaccines for saline solution over a period of weeks while working at the center.
The authorities are now asking all 8,557 people who were jabbed during the nurse’s working hours to return for third, and in some rare cases fourth, jabs as a precautionary measure. She worked at the center, near the town of Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea coast, for seven weeks in March and April.
Although the saline solution itself is harmless, anyone injected with it would have missed out on the protection of a Covid vaccine.
“It is quite deceitful to sneak into a vaccination center with the intention to do something like that,” Heiger Scholz, who leads the Lower Saxony coronavirus task force, said at a news conference on Tuesday.
He said there were indications that the nurse might be against vaccines.
A police investigation found that the nurse had shared social media posts criticizing the government’s pandemic restrictions.
The criminal investigation is focusing on accusations that the nurse’s switching of the initial vial resulted in saline solution being injected instead of six vaccine doses. But the police now say there is a credible chance that the nurse intentionally substituted vaccines on other occasions while working in the laboratory of the Friesland vaccination center. She was responsible for preparing vaccine syringes.
Officials have not said whether they plan charge her with any crime. A lawyer representing the nurse told the German news service DPA that she had switched just one vial.
The nurse, who has not been charged with any offense, admitted in April that she had refilled a broken Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine vial with a saline solution, in an episode that she described as an accident.
Unable to pinpoint exactly which vials had been compromised in April, the authorities invited 117 people to take antibody tests. They also offered additional vaccine shots to another 80 who had been to the center for second doses.
A Sydney man who caused a weeklong lockdown in a coastal Australian town is being charged with breaching public health orders.
The man, whom the local news media identified as Zoran Radovanovic, spent over a week in the town, Byron Bay, before testing positive for the virus on Monday. The town and surrounding areas imposed the lockdown amid concerns that an outbreak could devastate the region, where many people are unvaccinated.
Mr. Radovanovic “didn’t believe in the virus,” Mayor Michael Lyon of Byron Shire, which includes Byron Bay, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Tuesday.
The mayor said that Mr. Radovanovic had not been wearing a mask or socially distancing and was not cooperating with authorities.
Residents in eastern Sydney are not allowed to travel more than about six miles from their homes as part of pandemic restrictions.
On Wednesday morning Gary Worboys, the deputy police commissioner of New South Wales, the state that includes Byron Bay, told reporters that the authorities were examining whether the man had genuinely been looking at real estate during the trip as he had claimed. Travel for inspecting properties is exempt from the restrictions.
Mr. Radovanovic is being treated for the virus in a hospital in the nearby town of Lismore. The police said they intended to pursue strict bail conditions.
After a week in which Hawaii reported more cases than in any other week, Gov. David Ige said on Tuesday that he was reimposing restrictions to try to curb the surge.
“Social gatherings will be limited to no more than 10 people indoors and 25 people outdoors,” he said at a news conference. Indoor events at bars, restaurants, gyms and places of worship will be reduced to 50 percent capacity, and masks must be worn at all times except when eating or drinking, he said.
The measure, which went into effect immediately, came five days after Mr. Ige, a Democrat, ordered all state and county employees to show proof of vaccination by next Monday or face weekly testing.
“We know that we won’t see benefits from the increase in vaccinations going up for another six to seven weeks,” he said on Tuesday. “In the meantime, we must take action now in order to slow the spread of Covid-19, especially with the new Delta variant, which has wreaked havoc in our communities.”
Hawaii has had the country’s fewest reported cases per capita over the course of the pandemic, but its number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has soared from just 40 on July 1 to 246 on Tuesday, of whom 235 are unvaccinated.
“That’s a pretty rapid trajectory,” said Hilton Raethel, the chief executive of the Healthcare Association of Hawaii, a nonprofit that represents hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, home-care companies and hospices. “Hospitals are full, and then you have all these Covid patients. That really stretches our health care system.”
Mr. Raethel said that the first of 550 additional health care workers would arrive in Hawaii this weekend from the U.S. mainland. Only one other time during the pandemic has the state needed reinforcements, he said, and that was last September and October.
“The numbers tell us that the worst of the surge is in front of us,” he said.
The state, with a population of 1.4 million, has a seven-day average of more than 500 reported cases per day and a test positivity rate of 7.3 percent, Mr. Ige said on Tuesday.
Eighty-six percent of Hawaii residents 18 and older have had at least one vaccine dose, but only 65 percent are fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database.
YouTube on Tuesday removed a video by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky for the second time and suspended him from publishing for a week after he posted a video that disputed the effectiveness of wearing masks to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
A YouTube representative said the Republican senator’s claims in the three-minute video had violated the company’s policy on Covid-19 medical misinformation. The company policy bans videos that spread a wide variety of misinformation, including “claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of Covid-19.”
“We apply our policies consistently across the platform, regardless of speaker or political views, and we make exceptions for videos that have additional context such as countervailing views from local health authorities,” the representative said in a statement.
In the video, Mr. Paul says: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection.” Later in the video, he adds, “Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science, which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.”
In fact, masks do work, according to the near-unanimous recommendations of public health experts.
On Tuesday, Twitter suspended Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, for seven days after she posted that the Food and Drug Administration should not give the coronavirus vaccines full approval and that the vaccines were “failing.”
On Twitter, Mr. Paul called his suspension “a badge of honor” and blamed “left-wing cretins at YouTube,” while linking to an alternative site to watch the video.
The senator said in a statement that private companies had the right to bar him, but that YouTube’s decision was “a continuation of their commitment to act in lock step with the government.”
“I think this kind of censorship is very dangerous, incredibly anti-free speech and truly anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth,” he said.
Last week, YouTube removed from his channel an eight-minute Newsmax interview in which the senator said that “there’s no value” in wearing masks. According to YouTube policy, the company issues a warning for a first offense, then the weeklong suspension is part of its “first strike” response to a second offense.
The strike will be removed from his account after 90 days if there are no more violations. A second-strike in the 90 days would result in a two-week suspension, and the account would be permanently banned after a third strike.
Bangladesh’s health care system is buckling under the ferocity of the country’s third, and by far deadliest, wave of coronavirus infections, and only 4 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. Yet the country of 165 million people lifted much of its lockdown on Wednesday.
Banks, shops and malls were allowed to reopen, and buses and trains were operating at half capacity. That followed the reopening of the garment industry, a mainstay of the economy, two weeks ago.
And while health experts feared that the lifting of restrictions would worsen the outbreak, the effect of the restrictions on people’s livelihoods in Bangladesh has been devastating. The pandemic has pushed at least 24.5 million into poverty, according to an April study.
Government advisers say the country’s leaders have little choice but to reopen. “It’s not possible for the government to keep the country locked down forever,” Mohammad Shahidullah, the president of the government’s Covid-19 committee, told the local news media.
Oregon restored a statewide mandate on Wednesday, ordering both vaccinated and unvaccinated people to use face coverings when gathering indoors.
Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon, a Democrat, said on Tuesday that masks were needed to fight rising caseloads driven by the Delta variant, and that face coverings were a simple tool to help keep schools and businesses open.
“After a year and a half of this pandemic, I know Oregonians are tired of health and safety restrictions,” Ms. Brown said in a statement. “This new mask requirement will not last forever, but it is a measure that can save lives right now.”
Oregon was the third state to introduce an indoor mask mandate for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people, after Louisiana and Hawaii. Washington, D.C., has also reinstated its mask mandate, as have several large cities.
While many states brought in mask mandates and other restrictions last year, they have been reluctant to implement such orders again. Two states led by Republican governors, Texas and Florida, have barred mask mandates entirely, though some local leaders plan to impose them anyway.
On Tuesday, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said that masks would again be mandated in all of the state’s schools.
Oregon has made it through the pandemic with some of the lowest numbers of virus cases and deaths in the country. But cases have surged in recent days from an daily average of 110 a month ago to nearly 1,300 on Tuesday.
With 84 percent of people over 65 fully vaccinated in the state, the rise in deaths has been far smaller, reaching a daily average of six as of Wednesday. But hospitalizations have quadrupled in the past month, and the daily average number of hospitalized patients is more than 550.
Ms. Brown’s office projects that the state’s hospital capacity could be overrun in the next several weeks if mitigation measures are not in place, leaving Oregon as many as 500 beds short by next month.
“When our hospitals are full, there will be no room for additional patients needing care — whether for Covid-19, a heart attack or stroke, a car collision or a variety of other emergency situations,” Ms. Brown said. “If our hospitals run out of staffed beds, all Oregonians will be at risk.”
Ms. Brown also said that all employees working under the state’s executive branch would be required to be fully vaccinated. Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State, a Democrat, announced a similar mandate on Monday.
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