CoronavirusCovid News: Puerto Rico Drops Its Mask Mandate

Puerto Rico, among the last U.S. holdouts with a mask mandate, is easing restrictions.

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San Sebastian Street in Old San Juan, P.R., in January. Credit...Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

The governor of Puerto Rico on Monday lifted the territory’s mask mandate for most places, as one of the last holdouts in the United States eased Covid-19 restrictions.

Even as the ferocious Omicron wave receded in recent weeks, Puerto Rico, along with Hawaii, had been an outlier in the United States, with mask mandates still in place even as local and state authorities around the mainland rushed to lift them.

In a statement on Monday, the office of Puerto Rico’s governor, Pedro R. Pierluisi, said that hospitalizations on the island have dropped so much that, starting on Thursday, masks would no longer be required in most indoor or outdoor venues.

However, the Puerto Rico authorities still recommend that people wear masks in indoor areas where it is unclear if everyone is vaccinated. Masks will still be required in health care facilities and “long-term care homes” for older people.

The move comes nearly two weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that the vast majority of Americans could stop wearing masks as case numbers dropped to levels not seen since before the Omicron surge.

“We can already say that our health system is not compromised,” Mr. Pierluisi said in the statement, noting the island’s high vaccination rate.

Last year, Puerto Rico mounted one of the most successful vaccination campaigns in the United States. As of Monday, more than three-quarters of the island was fully vaccinated, compared with the country’s overall rate of 65 percent, according to New York Times databases.

The state of the pandemic in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, has seesawed over the last two years. The island was one of the first areas of the United States to order a lockdown, but after it relaxed restrictions, cases and hospitalizations surged in April 2021.

In December and January of this year, Puerto Rico had a severe Omicron surge.

But, in step with the rest of the country, new cases on the island plummeted toward the end of January.

On Monday, the governor’s office emphasized that, while mask requirements were lifting, vaccines remained the best defense against the virus.

Children may still be required to wear masks at schools if the health department “deems necessary to prevent contagion,” the statement said. Companies may still mandate masks if they choose.

The authorities also said people would no longer be required to show proof of vaccination to enter restaurants, community centers or other areas, and that capacity restrictions would be lifted in certain places.

Last week, four counties in Hawaii, the city of Boston and the states of Michigan, Illinois and Delaware became the latest places to lift some Covid restrictions.

Other U.S. territories, including Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, have not lifted mask mandates.

Contradicting federal guidance, Florida will recommend against Covid vaccines for healthy children.

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Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo during a confirmation hearing last month.Credit...Alicia Devine/USA Today Network, via Reuters

Contradicting guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Florida will soon recommend that healthy children not get vaccinated against Covid-19, the state’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, announced on Monday.

“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children,” said Dr. Ladapo, who has expressed skepticism about the vaccines’ effectiveness.

He made the announcement at the end of a 90-minute discussion convened by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, titled “The Curtain Close on Covid Theater.” (“Watch it before YouTube takes it down,” read the post on the governor’s Facebook page linking to video of the event, an apparent reference to the removal of coronavirus misinformation from social media platforms.)

During the discussion, Dr. Ladapo, a DeSantis appointee, and other panelists cited studies suggesting limited or rapidly waning protection against infection from the coronavirus vaccine in children, who already had lower infection rates than adults.

“We’re kind of scraping at the bottom of the barrel, particularly with healthy kids,” Dr. Ladapo said.

Several studies have shown that even though vaccine efficacy against infection wanes over time, the immune response remains highly protective against hospitalization and death, even against the highly contagious Omicron variant.

The C.D.C. has urged parents to get their children vaccinated. “Covid-19 can make children very sick and cause children to be hospitalized,” the agency’s website says. “In some situations, the complications from infection can lead to death.”

The government notes that vaccinating children can also protect family members who are not eligible for vaccination — including children younger than 5 — or who are at increased risk for serious illness if infected. More children were hospitalized during the Omicron surge than at any other point in the pandemic.

Asked about Florida’s move at a White House news conference on Monday afternoon, the press secretary Jen Psaki said federal recommendations on vaccines were vetted so that parents could have confidence in them.

“It’s deeply disturbing that there are politicians peddling conspiracy theories out there and casting doubt on vaccination when it is our best tool against the virus and the best tool to prevent even teenagers from being hospitalized,” she said.

Most public health experts disagree with how quickly Florida dropped virus mitigation measures; more than 70,000 people have died in total. But Mr. DeSantis has only become more strident in his approach over time. The governor and Dr. Ladapo have appeared to step up their crusade against what they have characterized as unnecessary and harmful pandemic policies ever since the Florida Senate confirmed the surgeon general to his job last month.

The day after the confirmation vote, the two men issued new virus guidelines that they said would “buck” the C.D.C. Those guidelines included urging businesses to no longer require employees to wear masks.

Last week, Mr. DeSantis angrily confronted a group of high school students at an event organized by the governor’s office over the masks the students were wearing while standing behind his lectern.

“You do not have to wear those masks,” he scolded them. “I mean, please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything, and we’ve got to stop with this Covid theater. So if you want to wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous.”

Video capturing the moment went viral. Mr. DeSantis’s campaign seized on the opportunity to raise funds for his re-election.

Adeel Hassan contributed reporting.

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The Chicago teachers’ union vows to fight a plan to lift a school mask mandate.

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Members of the Chicago Teachers Union and their supporters participating in a car caravan around City Hall in January.Credit...Scott Olson/Getty

Chicago Public Schools has announced plans to lift a mask requirement in the third-largest U.S. school district starting next week, infuriating members of the teachers’ union who stopped reporting to school buildings for a week in January to demand additional Covid-19 safeguards.

The decision, announced on Monday, followed a legal fight in Illinois courts over school mask mandates, as well as recent moves by Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Lori Lightfoot to lift other virus rules as case numbers have plunged.

But teachers’ union officials vowed to file an unfair labor practices charge. They said the decision to roll back the mask mandate was premature, especially amid relatively low student vaccination rates, and said it was a violation of the deal that led them to return to classrooms early this year.

“Today’s move by Mayor Lightfoot and C.P.S. not only violates the union’s agreement with the district, it ignores the impact that Covid-19 has on communities of color,” the Chicago Teachers Union said in a statement. Black and Latino students make up more than 80 percent of the roughly 330,000 students in Chicago’s public schools.

An analysis of vaccination data by WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station, found that at nearly 75 percent of schools in the district, fewer than half of students had been fully vaccinated as of Feb. 22.

In Chicago and across the country, few pandemic issues have been more contentious than whether to hold in-person classes and whether to require masks. Teachers in Chicago stopped reporting to classrooms shortly after winter break, during the worst of the Omicron surge, arguing that schools were not safe, a dispute that canceled classes.

Back then, both the union and the district supported mandatory masking. But Mr. Pritzker, a Democrat, lifted a statewide mask order for schools last week. And school district leaders said improvement in Chicago’s Covid outlook made it prudent to make masks optional in schools there beginning next Monday.

C.P.S. was one of the first to require universal masking in schools, and we would not be moving to a mask-optional model unless the data and our public health experts indicated that it is safe for our school communities,” Pedro Martinez, the district’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Cook County, which includes Chicago, was averaging more than 11,000 new cases a day at the height of the labor dispute in January. The county is now averaging about 600 new cases daily, and hospitalizations have also plunged. Masks became optional at most other places in the city last week, and proof of vaccination is no longer required to dine indoors.

The school district had faced legal pressure to withdraw its mask mandate. The Chicago Tribune reported that Thomas DeVore, a lawyer who lives in Southern Illinois and who is seeking the Republican nomination for state attorney general, filed a motion in a downstate court last week asking a judge to block enforcement of the mask mandate in Chicago schools.

New York City public school children head to their first day of class without masks.

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New York City public-school children attended their first day of classes with masks optional for students in kindergarten and up.CreditCredit...Brittainy Newman for The New York Times

Schoolchildren from the Upper East Side to East New York turned up to classrooms on Monday morning with nothing on their faces — except, perhaps, the remnants of a milk mustache.

In other words: Masks are now optional for public school children in New York City, from kindergarten on up.

It is a day some have yearned for and others think has come too soon, prompted by the decision by Mayor Eric Adams to lift the mask mandate in city schools. The move came hours after Gov. Kathy Hochul announced she would lift the statewide mandate.

“We did our jobs as New Yorkers, and now we’re winning,” Mr. Adams said in a television interview Monday on NY1. “Covid is no longer in control of our lives. We are in control of our lives.”

Mr. Adams said he would eventually remove the mask mandate for children under 5, once he makes sure that cases don’t increase for older students, and he asked parents to trust him. “We are going to get there,” he said.

The city Department of Education said it would continue to require daily health screenings, and that students returning from suspected coronavirus infections must wear masks for several days. In addition, the department strongly recommends that students or staff members who are exposed to the virus wear face coverings, although it does not require them to do so.

As the Omicron surge has waned, pandemic restrictions have been lifted in many states, including New York, allowing local officials to make their own determinations on masks. On Monday, Mr. Adams also lifted a citywide requirement for proof of vaccination in many places indoors, including restaurants and gyms. In Connecticut, the decision was turned over to localities late last month, while in New Jersey, rules similar to New York’s took effect on Monday. Chicago, home to the nation’s third largest public school system, announced Monday that it would make masks in schools optional next week.

Like so many virus-restriction rollbacks, this one has been met with an anxious mix of excitement, hope and concern.

While New York City has an overall vaccination rate above the national figure, rates among children have continued to lag, and are not consistent from one school to another.

A recent study from the state health department found that, as with adults, most children hospitalized for or with Covid-19 were unvaccinated. The report also found that children aged 4 or younger, who are not eligible for coronavirus vaccines, were overrepresented among all pediatric hospitalizations. Masks are still required in New York City for children ages 2 to 4 in kindergarten and preschool classrooms.

The United Federation of Teachers, which represents the city’s public school educators, said on Friday that it supported moving to a system where masks are optional. President Michael Mulgrew called it “the responsible, thoughtful way to make our next transition.”

Even so, the union stressed the importance of maintaining a robust in-school and take-home coronavirus testing program, to ensure that the city, with more than one million children in its public schools, remained “on the right path.”

Some parents, public health experts, and local officials have said that it was too early to ease restrictions, and some have urged children and teachers to continue to wear masks.

With the statewide mandate gone, some districts began going maskless last week.

A complicated mixture of emotions was on display at the Cynthia Jenkins Elementary School in the Springfield Gardens neighborhood of Queens, where about 11 percent of the school’s students are fully vaccinated.

Natalie Charles, the mother of a second-grader, Ethan Scarlett, said that she was not entirely comfortable with dropping masks. “This is what I told him, you have to keep the mask on,” she said, adding that her entire family was vaccinated.

Ms. Charles wondered why the mask mandate was ending while schools were still testing students. Those contradictory signals helped lead to her decision, she said.

A slightly shy Ethan, 7, just nodded while masked, agreeing with his mother.

Sadef Ali Kully, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Adeel Hassan contributed reporting.

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Allowed to go maskless, some New York City students choose not to.

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Stuyvesant High School students walking to class in Lower Manhattan on Monday.Credit...Brittainy Newman for The New York Times

For the first time in two years, students in New York City were allowed to attend public school without masks on Monday, but some of them said they would keep them on.

At elementary schools and high schools, students and parents alike expressed concern that it was too soon, despite the declarations by Mayor Eric Adams that the city has beaten back the Omicron variant of the virus.

“We did our jobs as New Yorkers, and now we’re winning,” Mr. Adams said in a television interview on Monday on NY1. “Covid is no longer in control of our lives. We are in control of our lives.”

But only 52 percent of K-12 public school students citywide are fully vaccinated, according to city data, and 59 percent of students have received at least one dose. The city’s count also shows that the doses have not been distributed equally.

At Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan, where 93 percent of students are vaccinated, one of the highest rates in the city, more than half a dozen students said before the school day started that they would keep their face coverings in place. A few said they planned to wear masks indefinitely.

“There really is no cure for Covid at this point,” Ella Chan, 17, a junior at Stuyvesant, said before the 8 a.m. bell. “There’s just too much uncertainty for me.”

Eden Di Lella, 15, a sophomore, said: “I’ve also just been asking around, just being curious about who’s really keeping the masks on, and it just has been an overwhelming number of yeses, compared to taking it off.” She noted, though, that others had mentioned exceptions for chorus or gym class.

Max Shimbo, 14, was one of the few not wearing a mask. “I trust the people in the mayor’s office,” he said of how he made his decision. “They know how many cases we’re getting and how many people are vaccinated, so I trust they made the right choice.”

On Staten Island, Richard Kreie, 5, a kindergartner, was so relieved about the end of the mask mandate that on Friday after school he stomped on his and threw it away. On Monday morning before heading into school at P.S. 1 in the Tottenville neighborhood, where 10 percent of the students are vaccinated, he pulled down his lower lip to show why. One of his bottom teeth just had dropped out, and he couldn’t wait to mug with the new gap in his smile. “I love it,” he said. “It’s fun.”

His mother, Danielle Imparato, said she was happy about the end of the mandate. “It was good at first,” she said. “But it’s long past time now.”

Emma Billera, 7, a second grader at P.S. 1, said taking her mask off made her feel “happy, so you can breathe.”

Her mother, Gabby Billera, said she was weary of the mask mandate. “We’ve been following the rules, but nobody knew it would be this long,” she said.

But some older students said they worried that the mandate had been lifted too early.

“I think that it’s dumb, because Covid is still around, and just two months ago the cases flared up out of nowhere,” said Alana Rivers, a 15-year-old freshman at Boys and Girls High School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where 46 percent of the students are vaccinated. “So I think that if you take off the masks, it’s going to make things worse.”

She said she still planned to wear a mask. “I feel nervous because a lot of people are going to be exposed to Covid outside of school and now in school,” she said.

Adeel Hassan contributed reporting.

Moderna opens the door to enforcing its vaccine patents in some countries.

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A medical staff member prepares a dose of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at a clinic on Staten Island last year.Credit...Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In the fall of 2020, just before Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine was found to be highly effective, the company pledged not to enforce patents on its vaccine during the pandemic. The company described the pledge as an effort to help hasten the end of the crisis, and it earned Moderna good will.

On Monday, Moderna announced that it was “updating” its pledge, opening up the possibility of enforcing its patents in middle- and high-income countries. The company said it would continue to “never enforce” its patents for Covid vaccines in 92 of the world’s poorest countries, many of them in Africa or Asia, or against other manufacturers making vaccines exclusively for those markets.

It was unclear precisely what the updated enforcement may look like, or what threats the company is responding to, in part because there is no manufacturing of Moderna vaccines other than by the company itself or its contractors.

Moderna’s patent pledge has yet to produce any results in part because the company hasn’t shared its vaccine formula or transferred its technology to manufacturers that could have produced it at a lower cost for poorer nations.

Although South Africa is not included among the countries protected from patent enforcement, Moderna will not seek to block a World Health Organization-backed effort in South Africa to reverse-engineer the company’s Covid vaccine, said Colleen Hussey, a Moderna spokeswoman.

Despite Moderna’s vow not to block that effort, Zain Rizvi of the advocacy group Public Citizen, who has researched Moderna’s Covid patents, said he is concerned that Moderna’s updated pledge could still “harm efforts to make the vaccine technology available in other developing countries.”

Moderna sold 800 million doses of its Covid vaccine to governments last year, generating $17.7 billion in revenue. The company has booked agreements to sell at least $19 billion worth of its vaccine this year. Pfizer, which manufactures the other mRNA vaccine widely used in the United States and elsewhere, has a similar policy of nonenforcement of its patents in the world’s poorest countries.

Nearly a year ago, when vaccines were in severely short supply in lower-income countries, the Biden administration supported a proposal before the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property protections for Covid vaccines. That proposal, fiercely opposed by the pharmaceutical industry, has made little progress.

In the news release on Monday, the company said it “remains willing” to license its Covid vaccine technology “on commercially reasonable terms” to manufacturers in middle- and high-income countries.

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The White House said it was offering a second round of free coronavirus tests to all Americans.

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A coronavirus test kit.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

The White House on Monday said that it would begin offering a second round of four free at-home coronavirus tests to all American households, delivering on a pledge President Biden made last week in his State of the Union address, when he framed the offer as part of a broader effort to stay ahead of possible outbreaks and new variants.

The administration is reopening eligibility this week “so we’re prepared no matter what Covid-19 brings,” Mr. Biden said in a brief video the White House posted. A White House spokesman described the announcement as a “soft launch” ahead of a more formal rollout of the free tests on Tuesday. Like the first round, the tests would be delivered through the U.S. Postal Service.

The kits, which can be ordered through the same federal website — covidtests.gov — are part of a program Mr. Biden announced in December that swelled from 500 million to one billion, some of which may eventually be used outside of the mail program, White House officials said.

Dr. Tom Inglesby, the White House testing coordinator, said in an interview Monday that over 275 million tests had been delivered to nearly 69 million households as part of the Postal Service program — more than half of U.S. households. The program’s logistical apparatus, he said, was sprawling, with over 5,000 Postal Service employees in fulfillment centers packing and shipping the tests each day.

“This is the largest government effort of its kind, ever,” he said.

When Mr. Biden announced the program, public health experts criticized the White House as slow to recognize the scale and urgency of at-home testing needed to contend with the highly contagious Omicron variant, which arrived suddenly and had already spread across the nation. Long lines for rapid tests formed across the country, as pharmacy and grocery shelves emptied of them.

While some Americans received tests within days of the website going live in mid-January, many got them weeks after placing orders, a consequence of manufacturers scaling up and delivering the tests in real time after the federal government contracted for them over the winter, Dr. Inglesby said.

“We’ve been procuring the 500 million tests as quickly as they’ve been able to be manufactured,” he said. “As soon as they arrive they’re going to be sent out the door.”

The next tranche of tests should be available with a “pretty rapid turnaround,” Dr. Inglesby said.

Belgium eases restrictions weeks after other European countries.

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People strolling in Brussels last month. Belgium recently lifted many Covid restrictions, as cases have fallen significantly.Credit...Stephanie Lecocq/EPA, via Shutterstock

Weeks after many of its European counterparts lifted coronavirus restrictions, Belgium on Monday joined them in easing most of its mandates now that cases from the Omicron variant have plummeted.

The authorities in Belgium held out on lifting mandates while caseloads remained high in recent weeks, despite other European countries — including Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland — rushing to end pandemic requirements.

In a statement on Friday, Prime Minister Alexander De Croo of Belgium said the country would drop most of its Covid-19 mandates because caseloads and hospitalizations were “on a constant downward trend.”

In recent weeks, new cases in Belgium have dropped to levels not seen since before the Omicron wave, according to a World Health Organization database.

New reported cases by day
Mar. 2020
Oct.
May 2021
Dec.
Jul. 2022
Feb. 2023
20,000
40,000 cases
7-day average
1,653
Source: Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. The daily average is calculated with data that was reported in the last seven days.

Starting on Monday, the Belgian authorities are recommending but not requiring people to wear masks in most public places. However, masks are still required in health care facilities and on public transportation, and are recommended “in the event of exceptional crowds.”

The country is also ending what it called the Covid Safe Ticket, a screening pass that showed if someone was vaccinated, had tested negative for Covid, or recovered from it, the statement said. Most travelers to Belgium will no longer have to fill out health screening paperwork.

The authorities are set to end the country’s declaration of a state of an epidemiological emergency in the next week, the statement said.

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The pandemic’s official global toll surpasses 6 million known virus deaths.

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Funeral home employees moving a body outside a makeshift Covid treatment area at a Hong Kong hospital last week.Credit...Dale De La Rey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Though many global coronavirus trends are rapidly improving as countries emerge from surges driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant, the grimmest metric hit a tragic milestone on Monday.

The number of known Covid-19 deaths around the world surpassed six million, according to data from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

“Six million is really unfathomable,” said Beth Blauer, the data leader for the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins. “These are real lives.”

Five of those deaths were in the family of Ernesto Díaz, 33, an accountant in Lima, Peru, in 2020. Peru leads the world with the highest number of known deaths per 100,000 people, over the course of the pandemic.

“My father died in May, my grandfather in June, my aunt in July, my uncle and grandma on the same day, July 28,” Mr. Díaz said in an interview. “It’s been almost two years, and bit by bit you process it. Process it, in theory, because it’s still hard, especially at family gatherings.”

He said the deaths have also left his family in debt, with expenses for oxygen, medicine and funerals.

New reported deaths by day
Feb. 2020
Sept.
Apr. 2021
Nov.
Jun. 2022
Jan. 2023
5,000
10,000 deaths
7-day average
958

These are days with a reporting anomaly.

Source: Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University, U.S. state and local health agencies. Daily cases are the number of new cases reported each day. The seven-day average is the average of a day and the previous six days of data.

Public health experts agree that six million is a vast undercount and that the true devastation will never be precisely known. In Yemen, where a civil war has been raging for years, the government has reported only 2,100 deaths since the start of the pandemic while its population of 30 million is 99 percent unvaccinated.

“There’s a lot that we don’t know in places that don’t necessarily have the same infrastructure for fundamentally understanding the pandemic and reporting,” Dr. Blauer said.

Surges are still intensifying in Hong Kong, South Korea and New Zealand, but new death counts are dropping in many places as Omicron recedes. The world is averaging more than 7,000 new confirmed deaths a day, down from almost 11,000 a day in early February and the known pandemic peak of more than 14,000 a day in January 2021.

The death rate was “still far too high in the third year of this pandemic,” said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, a top World Health Organization official.

Even the United States, with ample vaccine supply, has suffered the highest known total — more than 950,000 deaths — and failed to inoculate as much of its population as other wealthy nations. The White House unveiled a plan to help transition to what some are calling a “new normal,” but an average of about 1,500 Americans are still dying each day, around a year after vaccines became readily available, according to a New York Times database.

Hong Kong, which is going through its worst outbreak yet, has also fallen short on vaccinating its people, particularly older residents. Florence Chang, a financial planner, said her 95-year-old father contracted the virus from a health aide last month and was hospitalized. He suffers from diabetes, sleep apnea and hypertension, and was advised by his doctor not to get vaccinated, she said.

“The thought that he might not be with us, with the family, is quite difficult,” said Ms. Chang, 54. “If he gets better, we will definitely spend more time together.”

And stark vaccination disparities between countries remain, leaving the entire world vulnerable to the threat of a new, deadly variant. Vaccination rates continue to lag in low-income countries, where only 14 percent of the population has received at least one dose of a vaccine. In high- and upper-middle-income countries, 79 percent of the population has received at least one dose.

“Science has given us tools to fight this virus our ancestors could not even have dreamed of — the ability to track its evolution almost in real time, to test for it rapidly, to treat it, and, of course, to prevent it with safe and effective vaccines,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general. “But the global failure to distribute those tools equitably has prolonged the pandemic.”

Mitra Taj and Tiffany May contributed reporting.

With a state mandate lifted, many New Jersey schools stop requiring masks, but not all.

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Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey announcing plans to lift the statewide mask requirement last month.Credit...Seth Wenig/Associated Press

Like their counterparts in New York City, students in most of New Jersey’s suburban schools are allowed to attend classes on Monday without wearing masks, for the first time since schools reopened during the pandemic. But that isn’t the case in several of the state’s urban school systems.

Gov. Philip D. Murphy announced in early February that the state’s in-school mask mandate would end on Monday and that individual school systems had the option to set their own rules after that.

Administrators in large cities like Newark, Paterson and Trenton decided to continue requiring students and employees to wear masks in schools, at least for now. Other districts have adopted metric-based policies that can fluctuate with factors like Covid vaccination rates and rates of community spread.

For example, in the 9,400-student West Windsor-Plainsboro district near Princeton, students in middle school and high school are being permitted to go maskless this week, based on low coronavirus transmission levels. But the district’s younger students — some of whom are too young to be eligible for vaccination — are still required to wear face coverings in class.

In a survey released on Monday by the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University, 68 percent of New Jersey residents agreed that it was time to end the state’s school mask mandate, while 30 percent disagreed.

“Over half of New Jerseyans think that the pandemic is not technically over, but they are mentally and emotionally ready for it to be,” Ashley Konig, director of the polling center, said in a statement. “Many New Jerseyans are re-entering life and returning to normal, despite knowing the pandemic will be around for a while.”

New reported cases by day
Apr. 2020
Oct.
Apr. 2021
Oct.
Apr. 2022
Oct.
10,000
20,000
30,000 cases
7-day average
534
Source: State and local health agencies. Daily cases are the number of new cases reported each day. The seven-day average is the average of the most recent seven days of data.

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A surge in cases is challenging China’s ‘zero Covid’ approach.

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People wearing protective masks in Shanghai in February. A surge in Omicron cases was reported around China last weekend.Credit...Aly Song/Reuters

BEIJING — China is facing its biggest coronavirus outbreak since the early days of the pandemic, with more than 800 new cases reported over the weekend — almost as many as were reported altogether during the previous week.

Most of the new infections have been fueled by the Omicron variant, which has been identified in nearly a dozen major cities, including Shanghai, Xi’an, Suzhou, Qingdao and Wenzhou. A few cases of the Delta variant have been reported near China’s borders with Mongolia and Myanmar.

“Right now the epidemic situation is severe and complex, with many uncertain factors,” said Wu Jinglei, the director of the Shanghai Health Commission.

The current surge, while smaller than recent waves in other countries like the United States, Germany and South Korea, is the biggest challenge to date to China’s “zero Covid” policy.

The rise of infections, including new cases reported over the weekend in 17 of China’s 31 provinces, has occurred as China’s leaders have gathered in Beijing for the National People’s Congress.

China’s national news media organizations have focused their attention almost exclusively on the session over the last several days, scarcely mentioning the resurgence of the pandemic. But the weekend surge in infections, which spared the city of Beijing, has been announced by the National Health Commission and reported by local news media.

The breakout also coincides with growing concerns among Chinese financial regulators and economists that stringent Covid measures have hurt the country’s economic growth.

China’s premier, Li Keqiang, said in his annual speech to the congress on Saturday that cities should not be too quick to impose drastic measures in response to outbreaks, but should respond in a “scientific and targeted manner.” Instead of locking down entire cities, government officials have focused on quarantining housing complexes and workplaces with confirmed cases.

Xi’an, a northwestern city of 13 million people, locked down its population for nearly five weeks in response to dozens of reported cases last December. After six cases were reported there over the past three days, the city ordered 13,000 people not to leave their homes.

Shenzhen, the mainland city bordering Hong Kong, announced last Tuesday the introduction of extensive security measures, such as border patrols, surveillance cameras and searchlights, to ensure that visitors from Hong Kong underwent at least two weeks of quarantine when crossing the border.

A video that has drawn attention shows Chinese health workers in biohazard suits conducting house searches to make sure everyone has been tested and no one has entered from Hong Kong without quarantine.

Joy Dong and Li You contributed research.

Covid may cause changes in the brain, a new study finds.

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A digital model of a human brain showing the parts of the brain that lost the most gray matter in the 401 coronavirus-infected participants in the study, in red-yellow.Credit... G. Douaud, Anderson Winkler and Saad Jbabdi, University of Oxford and NIH

Covid-19 may cause greater loss of gray matter and tissue damage in the brain than naturally occurs in people who have not been infected with the virus, a large new study finds.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature, is believed to be the first involving people who underwent brain scans both before they contracted Covid and months after. Neurological experts who were not involved in the research said it was valuable and unique, but they cautioned that the implications of the changes were unclear and did not necessarily suggest that people might have lasting damage or that the changes might profoundly affect thinking, memory or other functions.

The study, involving people aged 51 to 81, found shrinkage and tissue damage primarily in brain areas related to sense of smell; some of those areas are also involved in other brain functions, the researchers said.

“To me, this is pretty convincing evidence that something changes in brains of this overall group of people with Covid,” said Dr. Serena Spudich, chief of neurological infections and global neurology at the Yale School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.

But, she cautioned: “To make a conclusion that this has some long-term clinical implications for the patients I think is a stretch. We don’t want to scare the public and have them think, ‘Oh, this is proof that everyone’s going to have brain damage and not be able to function.’”

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Queen Elizabeth holds her first face-to-face meeting after she had Covid.

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Queen Elizabeth II receives Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during an audience at Windsor Castle, on Monday.Credit...Photo by Steve Parsons

Queen Elizabeth II met Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada on Monday in her first in-person official meeting after testing positive for the coronavirus last month, giving further reassurance about her recovery.

Queen Elizabeth, 95, first tested positive for the virus on Feb. 20, but only reported experiencing mild cold-like symptoms. Buckingham Palace announced her return to work on March 1.

The palace posted a photograph to Twitter on Monday of the queen, who is also queen of Canada, receiving Mr. Trudeau at Windsor Castle for an in-person audience, or one-on-one meeting.

Some observers on Twitter pointed out that the flowers behind the queen were blue and yellow — the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

In recent days, the Disasters Emergency Committee, which distributes relief money in Britain, thanked the Queen for making a generous donation to their humanitarian fund-raiser for Ukraine.

Mr. Trudeau is traveling across Europe this week to signify Canada’s solidarity with European countries “in the face of Russia’s unwarranted invasion of Ukraine,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement.

On Monday, Mr. Trudeau also met with Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain. They were joined by the Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands.

Truckers demonstrate outside Washington for a second day.

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Demonstrators prepare to depart the Hagerstown Speedway in Hagerstown, Md., on Monday.Credit...Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images

A convoy of truckers and other supporters circled the capital on the Beltway for a second day on Monday, protesting Covid-19 mandates and hoping to attract attention from lawmakers.

Brian Brase, a convoy organizer, told participants gathered at a staging area in Hagerstown, Md., that the convoy would again avoid entering Washington, D.C. He stressed that the protesters did not want to spur a violent event like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which he said would discredit the group.

And he said the group did not intend to tie up traffic.

“We don’t want to shut down the Beltway,” Mr. Brase said. “We want them to hear us roar.”

A similar demonstration on Sunday had minimal impact on traffic. The convoy — consisting of several dozen trucks, along with minivans, motorcycles, pickup trucks and hatchbacks — looped twice around Interstate 495, known as the Capital Beltway, before returning to a staging area at the Hagerstown Speedway, where the group has been based for several days. By the second lap, the vehicles in the group had spread out along the highway, and the congestion took on the feel of an ordinary weekday commute.

On Monday morning, there appeared to be far fewer passenger vehicles and RVs taking part than there were on Sunday, and the group planned to drive around the Beltway only once.

Jennifer Anderson, 48, a CBD shop owner from Corpus Christi, Texas, said she joined the convoy to protest vaccine mandates preventing her from visiting her children and grandchildren in Canada. “It’s been two years since I broke bread with my family,” Ms. Anderson said, adding that she did not know when she would see them again.

She said she refused to receive a Covid-19 vaccination because she believed it to be unsafe. (The Food and Drug Administration has fully approved vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna as safe and effective in adults.)

The main group behind the caravan, the People’s Convoy, has called for an end to the national emergency that was first declared by President Donald Trump in March 2020 and was recently extended by President Biden. The protesters also say they want meetings with lawmakers, congressional hearings into the pandemic’s origin and an end to government vaccine and mask mandates. Many states have already scaled back restrictions as reports of new coronavirus cases and deaths have declined in recent weeks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance in late February suggesting that the vast majority of Americans could stop wearing masks, and many medical experts say vaccine mandates are effective in persuading more people to get their shots, which they say helps prevent the spread of the virus.

Christopher Rodriguez, director of the District of Columbia Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, said on Sunday that the protest did not result in major disruptions to the city’s transportation routes. He cautioned, though, that it was an “unpredictable” event. The city’s request to extend the National Guard’s presence has been approved through Wednesday, with 249 troops and 15 heavy vehicles on hand to respond to roadway disruptions.

The People’s Convoy was one of several groups inspired by the Canadian protests against pandemic restrictions that disrupted Ottawa, the capital, for weeks. Many in the American group appeared to be aligned with far-right organizations and activists. On Saturday, organizers with the People’s Convoy shared a supportive post from a prominent QAnon account on its official Telegram channel.

Mr. Brase said the group had plans to meet with two Republican senators, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, on Tuesday.

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A Smithsonian zoo and museum are set to reopen seven days a week with masks optional.

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Visitors at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington take photos of Mei Xiang, a giant panda, eating bamboo.Credit...Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

The Smithsonian Institution says that it will expand some of its opening hours in the next week and no longer require visitors to wear a mask at its zoo and its nearly two dozen museums along the East Coast.

Two years after the Smithsonian’s institutions closed because of the pandemic, two of its most visited locations — the National Museum of Natural History and the National Zoo in Washington — will return to their seven-day-a-week schedules starting on March 14, the Smithsonian said in a statement.

Throughout the pandemic, most of the Smithsonian’s locations were closed for several days a week.

Another big change is coming for Smithsonian visitors: Starting on Friday, they will no longer be required to wear masks.

The Smithsonian said it had made the changes in response to shifting mask mandates around the country and the recent suggestion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that most Americans could stop wearing masks.

The institution reopened eight of its Washington-area museums between July and October in 2020, but closed them in November that year. In 2021, the Smithsonian reopened all of its museums between May and August.

In December last year, it temporarily closed five of its museums after some staff members contracted the Omicron variant.

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