CoronavirusCovid Updates: Los Angeles Public School Students Could Attend School Without Masks

Los Angeles students were allowed to attend school without masks.

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Shep Lupo, 5, with his mother, Mer Lupo, during a rally demanding the removal of the indoor mask mandate for Los Angeles Unified School District last week.Credit...Caroline Brehman/EPA, via Shutterstock

Students in the Los Angeles Unified School District were allowed to attend class without masks for the first time in more than a year on Wednesday, after staff and administrators in the second-largest U.S. school district reached a long-sought deal on the issue last week.

Masks are still strongly encouraged in classrooms, and students and staff will continue to be tested for the coronavirus weekly through the end of the school year, according to the agreement. But the lifting of one of the last large school district mask mandates in the country was another signal that leaders are trying to guide Americans back to some sense of normalcy.

“Now that this important issue is behind us, it is time to focus on each student’s full academic potential,” the district’s new superintendent, Alberto M. Carvalho, said in a statement.

California schools were shuttered longer than in many other states — which Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state leaders credited with saving lives, but which frustrated some parents and helped fuel an unsuccessful effort to oust the governor from office last year.

Throughout the pandemic, Los Angeles’s public schools have operated under particularly strict safety protocols negotiated by the district’s large, powerful teachers’ union.

Still, as case numbers have decreased and restrictions have been rapidly lifted across the United States, California and Los Angeles officials have rolled theirs back in recent weeks. A statewide school mask mandate was lifted on March 11, although individual districts could opt to keep their rules in place longer. In San Francisco, masks will no longer be required in all schools starting April 2.

On a sweltering Wednesday across the Los Angeles district, which covers more than 700 square miles, students, parents and educators said that normal now includes masks — just not all the time, and not on everyone.

“I will probably plan to keep mine on as long as it’s strongly recommended inside,” said Jennifer McAfee, an eighth-grade English teacher at Dodson Middle School in Rancho Palos Verdes. “As an educator, I feel like I’ve just gotten used to it, and as far as being able to read facial expressions, I’ve had to get better at looking at people’s eyes.”

Ms. McAfee, who chatted during her brief lunch break, said that all but one of her students so far that day had been masked.

Veronica Sasso, principal of Franklin Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles’s Los Feliz neighborhood, grinned as she led the way through the halls just before dismissal.

“It’s good to slowly but surely begin to establish the post-pandemic routines,” she said.

For now, she said, she has enjoyed seeing the children’s “bright smiles.”

Shanna Vasquez had a lime green KN95-style mask on her wrist as she stood on the lawn outside the nearly century-old school watching her 6-year-old daughter, Stella, sprint back and forth with her classmates — some still donning masks, others not. The mask was Stella’s.

“I forgot mine — I stopped wearing it this week,” Ms. Vasquez said.

She said that her family was cautious throughout the pandemic, wearing masks and mostly staying home, but now that conditions are safer, they’re ready to “get back to normal” — or at least find a way to live with the virus. Although Ms. Vasquez said she’ll probably still bring a mask to the mall or other potentially crowded indoor spaces, she wants her newborn son to be able to recognize her face, because he hasn’t seen it with a mask on. She wants Stella to be able to play comfortably in the heat.

“You took your mask off in class?” she asked Stella, who took a break from her game. Stella nodded.

“I like no mask,” the girl said.

Mayor Adams will end New York City’s vaccine mandate for performers and athletes.

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Nets guard Kyrie Irving, left, during a road game in Orlando, Fla., last week.Credit...Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

Mayor Eric Adams plans to announce on Thursday that professional athletes and performers working in New York City will no longer be required to show proof of vaccination against Covid-19, according to a person familiar with his plans.

This means that Kyrie Irving, the Nets’ star point guard who has refused to get vaccinated, will be able to take the floor at Barclays Center in Brooklyn for the first time this season.

Adams, a Democrat who took office in January, had openly quarreled with Irving’s supporters over the city’s broad vaccine mandate for employees of private companies.

The new policy will take effect on Thursday, allowing athletes and performers who are not vaccinated to return to playing at New York City venues immediately, according to the person who was familiar with the plans but was not authorized to speak publicly. The news was first reported by Politico.

Adams will keep in place vaccine mandates for municipal workers and other employees of private companies. The vaccine mandates were implemented by his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, and were among some of the most strict local health measures in the United States.

Adams, who has been singularly focused on the city’s recovery from the pandemic, has ended other restrictions as coronavirus cases dropped over the last month. He recently ended a mask mandate for schools and a proof-of-vaccination policy for restaurants and gyms.

In recent weeks, several notable basketball figures had criticized the mandate as far as it applied to Irving.

As a countrywide trend toward lifting coronavirus-related restrictions gained steam, pressure on Adams mounted. When a heckler at a public event shouted at Adams about Irving, Adams suggested a simple solution: “Kyrie can play tomorrow. Get vaccinated.”

Irving is one of the best players in the N.B.A., and in his most recent game before Wednesday night’s matchup against the Memphis Grizzlies, more than a week ago, he scored a whopping 60 points. He could help the Nets win the championship in June. But Wednesday’s game was only Irving’s 20th while the Nets have played 73, and his team’s struggles in his absences have left the Nets in danger of missing the playoffs.

Irving’s situation raised concerns that the vaccine mandate would prevent unvaccinated Yankees and Mets players from participating in home games during the upcoming Major League Baseball season. Adams’s change eases those worries, but has brought about new ones.

Dr. Jay Varma, an epidemiologist and health adviser to de Blasio, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday evening that vaccines work “unless you’re rich and powerful, in which case lobbying works.”

Dr. Varma called the new policy the “Kyrie Carve Out” and said he was concerned that the legal standing of the city’s vaccine mandates could now be challenged in court as “arbitrary and capricious.”

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Moderna will seek authorization of its coronavirus vaccine for young children.

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Hudson Diener, 3, peeked into a cabinet during an appointment for a Moderna Covid-19 vaccine trial in Commack, N.Y., in November.Credit...Emma H. Tobin/Associated Press

Moderna said on Wednesday that it would seek emergency authorization of its coronavirus vaccine for children younger than 6, after interim results from its clinical trial showed that volunteers in that age group had a similar immune response to young adults when given a dose one-fourth as strong.

But the company said the vaccine proved only about 44 percent effective in preventing symptomatic illness among children 6 months to 2 years old, and 37 percent effective in children 2 through 5.

Dr. Jacqueline Miller, the firm’s senior vice president for infectious diseases, said the relatively low level of protection demonstrated the ability of the Omicron variant to evade the vaccine’s shield. Nonetheless, she said in an interview, “what we have seen is a successful trial.”

“What I will say is 37.5 percent and 43.7 percent are higher than zero,” she said. “If I were the parent of a young child, I would want there to be some protection on board, especially if we see another wave of infections.”

The firm’s announcement comes as officials are debating whether the oldest Americans, at least, should be offered a second booster shot this spring, and studies are seeking to determine whether the existing vaccines can be reconfigured to provide more protection against Omicron and its BA.2 subvariant.

Now, Moderna’s findings about how well its vaccine works in the nation’s youngest children — the only Americans not yet eligible for shots — are bringing another question to the forefront: What level of effectiveness is good enough for a pediatric vaccine?

Last month, Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, delayed seeking emergency authorization for their coronavirus vaccine in young children after data gathered during the Omicron surge showed two doses were less than 50 percent effective against symptomatic disease, according to people familiar with the situation.

Whether the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the public will be willing to accept Moderna’s efficacy rate of about 40 percent on average for children under 6 is unclear.

The White House is pressing Congress for more Covid funds as an Omicron subvariant spreads.

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Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during an appearance before a Senate committee in November.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

White House officials are again pleading with Congress for more emergency aid to buy coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics as a highly infectious Omicron subvariant spreads, though the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sought Wednesday to assuage concerns about it.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, said BA.2 accounts for about 35 percent of new U.S. coronavirus cases, and appears to be driving small increases in cases in both the city and state of New York, as well as some hospitalizations in New England, where more than half of all infections are attributable to BA.2.

But, she added, there’s no evidence that the BA.2 variant results in more severe disease or is more likely to be able to evade our immune protection.

Dr. Walensky’s comments came at the first White House briefing on Covid-19 since March 2, the day that the administration unveiled President Biden’s plan to transition away from pandemic crisis mode and toward what many experts are calling a “new normal.” But that plan depends on funding from Congress, which so far is not forthcoming.

The administration has asked lawmakers for $22.5 billion in emergency Covid aid, mostly to purchase new vaccines and treatments.

Officials have said that they have enough vaccine on hand to offer additional booster doses to immunocompromised people and those 65 and older this spring if regulators recommend it. But they do not have enough to prepare for a possible fall surge that might warrant fresh booster shots for all adults. And the administration has already been cutting back its shipments of monoclonal antibody drugs to states.

The administration wants the money without strings attached. But Republican lawmakers are demanding that the spending be offset by taking funds from other programs. They also want an accounting of how previous relief packages have been spent.

On Wednesday, there were hints of progress. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, who earlier this month led a group of about three dozen senators in sending a letter asking the White House for such an accounting, told reporters on Wednesday that he expected to receive a revised proposal soon.

“The White House did provide a listing of money that’s not been spent, and the Democrat leadership is sending over today a proposal and I’ll take a look at that and see where we stand,” Mr. Romney said, according to The Hill.

Mr. Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, Jeffrey D. Zients, said during Wednesday’s briefing that “Congress has all the information it needs” to act. He came prepared with visuals to make the point: a 385-page stack of charts and documents that he said the White House had shared with lawmakers.

“With every day that passes, we risk not having the tools we need to fight Covid-19,” he said, adding, “The virus is not waiting for Congress to act. With every minute this funding request is stalled, we’re losing our ability to protect people.”

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The last chance to be vaccinated at the American Museum of Natural History is March 31.

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The Covid-19 vaccination site at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan is scheduled to close.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times

When Covid vaccines became widely available last year, major U.S. landmarks seemed to transform into mass vaccination sites overnight, from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to Los Angeles’s Dodger Stadium.

One such site in New York City was the American Museum of Natural History, where residents lined up for Covid jabs under a life-size model of a blue whale that has awed visitors for over half a century. That is now coming to an end: The last day to get vaccinated there will be March 31.

Beginning in April, a mobile vaccination bus will be temporarily stationed outside the building, the museum said Wednesday. The city will continue to distribute free, at-home rapid testing kits at the 77th Street entrance.

News that the museum would set up a mass vaccination site under the famous whale was met with excitement in April 2021. Some residents went out of their way to book appointments at the Manhattan institution, and many families brought their young children as they gradually became eligible for shots.

It become an “iconic vaccination experience for so many New Yorkers and visitors,” said Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for the city health department.

More than 97,000 vaccinations have been administered at the museum, but in recent weeks, the site saw only dozens of vaccinations per day, said Scott Rohan, a spokesman for the museum.

And though the vaccination site was moved to a different location within the museum in July 2021, the museum said the 6-foot-long “post-vaccine” bandage on the whale’s fin is sticking around.

The planned closure of one of New York City’s most famous mass vaccination sites comes as the city faces a rise in new cases and low vaccination rates among children. Officials began reopening vaccine clinics at public elementary schools this week in an effort to boost inoculations.

Airlines ask Biden to end mask requirements for planes and airports.

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The mandate to wear masks on planes and in airports was recently extended until mid-April.Credit...Alyssa Pointer for The New York Times

The chief executives of the largest U.S. airlines asked President Biden on Wednesday to allow a federal mask mandate at airports and on planes to expire next month.

The group also asked that the government drop a requirement that visitors from abroad provide a negative coronavirus test before traveling to the United States.

“The persistent and steady decline of hospitalization and death rates are the most compelling indicators that our country is well protected against severe disease from Covid-19,” the chief executives of American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and several other passenger and cargo carriers wrote in a letter to Mr. Biden.

“Given that we have entered a different phase of dealing with this virus, we strongly support your view that ‘Covid-19 need no longer control our lives,’” they said, citing a phrase the president used in his State of the Union address earlier this month.

The letter represents the first time that the industry has publicly united against the mask mandate, which was recently extended until mid-April. At a congressional hearing in December, Gary Kelly, the chief executive of Southwest Airlines, cast doubt on the effectiveness of masks on planes, but he stood alone. A day later, Delta’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, told CNBC, “Masks are going to be important as a safeguard for a while yet.”

Earlier this week, TWU Local 556, the union that represents flight attendants from Southwest Airlines, wrote a letter to the Biden administration urging it to drop the federal mask mandate for public transportation.

A growing chorus of Americans, politicians and business leaders have called for an end to such mandates. This month, Hawaii became the 50th and final state to drop its indoor mask mandate.

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Global Roundup

New Zealand moves to drop vaccine passes, and other global virus news.

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Fans watched a match during the Women’s Cricket World Cup in New Zealand this month. As part of a loosening of Covid restrictions, the country will lift limits on outdoor gatherings.Credit...Marty Melville/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

New Zealand moved on Wednesday to eliminate vaccine passes, limits on social gatherings and vaccine mandates for some government workers, signaling another significant step toward loosening the country’s coronavirus restrictions, which have been some of the world’s toughest, in a bid to bolster its economy.

Starting April 4, vaccine passes will no longer be required to enter public facilities, and vaccine mandates will be dropped for education, health, police and defense workers, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in a speech on Wednesday, adding that the rules were no longer necessary given the country’s high vaccination rates.

“With one of the most highly vaccinated populations in the world, we are able to keep moving forward safely,” Ms. Ardern said, adding, “This is not the end, but in some ways, it is a new beginning.”

About 82 percent of New Zealand’s population is fully vaccinated, according to the Our World in Data at the University of Oxford.

New reported cases by day
Mar. 2020
Oct.
May 2021
Dec.
Jul. 2022
Feb. 2023
10,000
20,000 cases
7-day average
1,634
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.

The announcement came as cases in New Zealand have plateaued his month and as officials have said they expect them to decline further in the coming weeks, the prime minister said. New Zealand is reporting a daily average of nearly 20,000 new cases, a 3 percent decline from the average two weeks ago, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Starting Friday, New Zealand will also lift all limits on outdoor gatherings and will double the capacity for indoor events to 200 people, who will no longer be required to scan QR codes for contact tracing purposes.

The move this week comes after a series of significant changes to New Zealand’s travel restrictions announced last week. Starting May 1, the country will reopen its borders to vaccinated travelers with valid visas and those from visa-waiver countries. Vaccinated visitors from Australia will be allowed to arrive earlier, starting April 12.

Early in the pandemic, New Zealand pursued a strategy of “Covid zero,” until an outbreak of cases fueled by the Delta variant last year upset those aspirations. The country has since faced a recent wave driven by the Omicron variant and BA.2, its highly transmissible subvariant. Health ministry officials reported last week that BA.2 accounted for at least 75 percent of recent sequenced cases.

In other virus news from around the world:

  • Spain will end its seven-day mandatory isolation period next week for people who are infected with the coronavirus but who have no symptoms or only mild ones. The move, which will take effect on Monday, removes one of the last significant pandemic measures in the country.

  • Greece will suspend collection of a 100-euro-a-month fine from adult residents 60 or older who remain unvaccinated, the health minister said Wednesday. The fine, which started being enforced on Jan. 15, will be suspended on April 15. The minister, Thanos Plevris, said the government would review in September whether to resume collecting the fine.

Raphael Minder and Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting.

Africa’s low Covid death rates are a mystery. There are some theories, though.

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Mariama Bangura and Alieya Kamara at their wedding in the village of Kamakuyor in northern Sierra Leone last month.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

KAMAKWIE, Sierra Leone — There are no Covid fears here.

The district’s Covid-19 response center has registered just 11 cases since the start of the pandemic, and no deaths. At the regional hospital, the wards are packed — with malaria patients. The door to the Covid isolation ward is bolted shut and overgrown with weeds. People cram together for weddings, soccer matches, concerts, with no masks in sight.

Sierra Leone, a nation of eight million on the coast of Western Africa, feels like a land inexplicably spared as a plague passed overhead. What has happened — or hasn’t happened — here and in much of sub-Saharan Africa is a great mystery of the pandemic.

The low rate of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths in West and Central Africa is the focus of a debate that has divided scientists on the continent and beyond. Have the sick or dead simply not been counted? If Covid has in fact done less damage here, why is that? If it has been just as vicious, how have we missed it?

The answers “are relevant not just to us, but have implications for the greater public good,” said Austin Demby, Sierra Leone’s health minister, in an interview in Freetown, the capital.

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The U.S. Capitol will start formally reopening to tourists next week.

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The U.S. Capitol in Washington on Monday.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times

The United States Capitol will begin formally reopening to visitors and tourists on Monday, after being closed to the public for about two years because of the coronavirus pandemic and security concerns after the Jan. 6 riot.

A limited reopening will start March 28 with lawmaker-led tours and staff-led tours of up to 15 people as well as a limited number of school tours, according to a memo from William J. Walker, the House sergeant-at-arms, and Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the attending physician. Tours of the Capitol Dome for up to eight people will begin April 25, and the Capitol Visitors Center will fully open at the end of May.

“We appreciate your continued patience and cooperation as we work together to resume public tours of the Capitol for the American people in a way that protects the health and safety of visitors and institutional staff alike,” Mr. Walker and Dr. Monahan wrote in the memo.

The two men said the phased reopening was coordinated with congressional leadership, the U.S. Capitol Police Board, the Capitol Police and other leaders.

The Capitol has seen an uptick in visitors in recent weeks, even before the announcement was made. The formal reopening comes as pandemic restrictions loosen across the country and just weeks after House leaders announced that masks would no longer be required in the chamber, regardless of vaccination status. The White House said last week that public tours would start in April, after being closed to the public because of the pandemic.

Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting representative for Washington, D.C., said that the reopening was too slow, particularly given the effectiveness of vaccines.

“America’s symbols of democracy should be accessible to the people we serve,” she said in a statement. “Already, the distance between government and the people has grown, with trust in government at historic lows. We should not entrench that distance further or longer by delaying the reopening of the Capitol, especially when the tools exist to prevent serious illness and death from Covid-19.”

Republicans, many of whom eschewed mask-wearing and other pandemic restrictions long before this year, have pushed for Democratic leaders to agree to reopen the building. But there have been a flurry of recent coronavirus cases on Capitol Hill, with Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, announcing a positive test on Tuesday.

The Capitol first shut down in March 2020, but its reopening has been delayed as new variants swept through the country and security concerns increased after the Jan. 6 riot. The ranks of the Capitol Police were depleted after the attack, as officers recovered from the mental and physical trauma they suffered defending the building.

South Korea orders funeral homes and crematories to increase capacity.

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A Covid testing site in Seoul last week.Credit...Ahn Young-Joon/Associated Press

The South Korean government has asked crematories to increase their burning capacity and funeral homes to secure more refrigerators for bodies as the nation records its biggest death toll of the pandemic.

The number of people who died from Covid in the seven days that ended on March 19 was 45 percent higher than the previous week, according to the government. During that record week, South Korea recorded 429 Covid deaths on Thursday, the most on any day since the start of the pandemic, overwhelming funeral homes and crematories.

The Omicron variant is “still a dangerous infectious disease with a high fatality rate for the elderly and unvaccinated,” Son Young-rae, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health and Welfare, said at a briefing on Tuesday.

Before Omicron, South Korea had largely controlled the spread of the virus with contact tracing, social distancing measures and quarantines, while avoiding the lockdowns other countries in the region employed. Once a vaccine was available in South Korea, the nation focused on getting people inoculated. It now has one of the highest rates in the world, with 86 percent of the population fully vaccinated according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.

New reported deaths by day
Feb. 2020
Sept.
Apr. 2021
Nov.
Jun. 2022
Jan. 2023
100
200
300 deaths
7-day average
11
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.

But by February, the nation was recording 100,000 new cases a day. It reported a record 621,423 last Thursday, the most in the world that day. While that has led to a rise in deaths, the number is still lower, per capita, than at the deadliest in the pandemic in the United States.

So far, about 20 percent of South Korea’s 52 million people have been infected.

Crematories had already increased burning capacity by 40 percent to 1,400 bodies a day, though operations varied by region. As of Tuesday, all 60 of the nation’s crematories will operate seven times a day, an increase of two cremation operations per day in some facilities.

The country’s 1,136 funeral homes can store 8,706 bodies, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

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Are we still wearing masks on planes? Should we be?

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Passengers wearing masks aboard a JetBlue flight to London from JFK International Airport in New York City in August.Credit...Jeenah Moon/Reuters

Air travel has been one of the last holdouts for strict pandemic mask requirements. In the United States, for example, the mask mandate — which was recently extended to April 18, when it comes up for review again — is still enforced. Over the last year, 922 of those who didn’t wear masks received fines from the Transportation Security Administration, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

But there are hints that the tide may be turning: Within the past few weeks, Danish airports and London’s Heathrow Airport have lifted their mask requirements, as have several major British airlines.

Some airline employees in England rejoiced at their reclaimed freedom from enforcing mask rules at 30,000 feet. “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream,” a woman, who identified herself as a flight attendant from Yorkshire, England, on her social media accounts, recently wrote on Twitter.

Not everyone is so happy.

“It was very unsettling,” said Rebecca Kift, 37, a clinical biochemist from Leeds, England, who had no idea that the British airline TUI Airways Limited had lifted its mask requirement until she boarded her flight to Manchester from Spain’s Gran Canaria island last Monday. Because her mother is being treated for cancer, she has spent months avoiding crowded indoor situations. But there she was with four hours ahead of her in a cabin full of unmasked flight attendants and mostly unmasked passengers. “I don’t think it’s fair,” she said.

It’s confusing. Read here for answers to questions such as when we might expect to stop wearing masks in the United States when flying and whether babies and toddlers should wear them.

Many Asian and Pacific countries are swiftly easing Covid rules, with one big exception.

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Crowds at the Manila Zoo last week.Credit...Ezra Acayan for The New York Times

Many Asian and Pacific countries are dismantling thickets of pandemic rules at bewildering speeds, even though the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is still raging in many places. The trend could be seen in the crowds packing the Manila zoo, K-Pop concerts in Seoul and Hindu festival celebrations across India over the last week.

The moves are driven by a mix of medical advice, economic pressure and a pandemic-weary public’s growing sentiment that enough is enough. But there is at least one major country bucking the trend: China.

Mainland China, with 1.4 billion people, has tried to stick with a “zero Covid” approach, including snap lockdowns and strict border controls, since early 2020. State-controlled media play up reports of the pandemic’s high toll of death and illness abroad, and point to China’s relatively low numbers as a sign of the superiority of the country’s system.

But experts have questioned the wisdom of the country’s maximalist approach, which has disrupted manufacturing and snarled frayed supply chains, as China has grappled recently with its largest outbreak since the pandemic began.

“China’s zero-Covid policy will increasingly leave it — and Hong Kong, to the extent that it follows — isolated,” said Victor V. Ramraj, a law professor at the University of Victoria in Canada.

Volkswagen said on Thursday that its large assembly plant in Changchun, in China’s Jilin Province, would remain closed on Friday, marking two weeks of closure. Jilin Province has been hit hard by Omicron, with roads closed and large urban areas locked down. Volkswagen declined to say when the assembly plant might be able to reopen. Its factories in Shanghai also closed for two days last week, but quickly reopened.

Hong Kong, a Chinese territory whose Covid policies once mirrored those on the mainland, took a different tack this week. Alarmed at the cost of lockdowns and isolation for an economy that relies heavily on international trade, the territory’s leader, Carrie Lam, announced a reversal of its ban on flights from nine countries. She also signaled plans to further relax Hong Kong’s pandemic restrictions, as most other countries in the region are doing, even if Beijing is not.

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Millions of careers were wrecked during the pandemic. Some saw it as an opportunity.

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Jane Watiri Taylor subleased land in Lexington, Texas, and started raising produce for delivery during the pandemic.Credit...Miranda Barnes for The New York Times

When the pandemic struck, entire industries were decimated overnight, leaving workers to survive on unemployment benefits. But for a number of people, the crisis presented an opportunity to change course.

For some, it was a financial imperative. For others, lockdowns became a chance to rethink their path. The New York Times spoke to six people who transformed their careers during the past two years.

Jane Watiri Taylor is one of them.

When the pandemic hit, she was working as a nurse at the Travis County Jail in Austin, Texas. She called it the most frightening time she could remember in 10 years of nursing.

“One time this person literally tried to spit on me,” she remembered. “They said, ‘I have Covid, and I’m going to give it to you.’ They spit on my scrubs; luckily it never got on my face.”

For Ms. Watiri Taylor, 54, like so many other health care workers, “the burnout was real.”

In July 2021, she left to pursue a dream she’d had since her childhood in Kenya: to become a farmer.

She had been growing fruits and vegetables in her backyard since 2015. To learn how to run her own farming business, she signed up for a class through a nonprofit group. She subleased a small piece of land in Lexington, Texas, to grow fruits and vegetables on a larger scale. She now sells her produce at local farmers’ markets.

“I want to nurture people; that’s why I got into nursing,” she said. “With farming, you are still nurturing people, but in a different way. It is really satisfying when you grow stuff and are able to know that eventually it is going to help make sure someone has got food on the table and it is going to nourish their bodies. And to me, that’s enough.”

A C.D.C. airport surveillance program found the earliest known U.S. cases of Omicron subvariants.

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International travelers checking in at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in December, after the airport joined a coronavirus surveillance program for travelers arriving from abroad.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

An airport-based coronavirus surveillance program in the United States for travelers arriving from abroad detected the first known U.S. case of the highly contagious Omicron subvariant BA.2 in December, according to a new study.

The results, which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, suggest that pooled testing of international travelers may be an effective and efficient way to keep tabs on new variants and pathogens.

“Travelers are really an important population when tracking new and emerging infectious diseases because they’re mobile, they have the potential for exposure to disease during travel and they can spread disease from one place to another,” said Dr. Cindy R. Friedman, chief of the Travelers’ Health Branch at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the study’s lead investigator.

The program actually detected the first known U.S. cases of two Omicron subvariants, BA.2 and BA.3, which are similar to, but genetically distinct from, BA.1 and B.1.1, the versions of Omicron that drove a winter surge in U.S. cases.

The voluntary program, which screened more than 16,000 travelers this fall and winter, was conducted by the C.D.C. and two commercial partners: the XpresSpa Group, which offers testing in airports, and Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotech company with a testing initiative and a network of laboratories across the country. The program combined nasal samples from multiple people arriving from the same country or on the same flight — an approach, known as pooled testing, that allows scientists to search for the virus in multiple people at once.

The program was not the first to catch every version of Omicron; BA.1, the subvariant that was initially most prevalent worldwide, did not show up in one of the airport samples until Dec. 1, the same day that officials announced that another team of researchers had found the first U.S. Omicron case.

The researchers hope to expand the traveler surveillance program and are also preparing to launch a pilot study that will search for signs of the virus in the wastewater from airplane bathrooms, Dr. Friedman said.

The program began in late September, focusing on travelers on selected flights from India to three major U.S. airports: John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey and San Francisco International Airport in California. In late November, after Omicron emerged, the program was expanded to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and to people arriving from South Africa, Nigeria, Britain, France, Germany and Brazil.

(Omicron prompted the Biden administration to tighten travel rules. It temporarily banned travelers from eight African countries — the restrictions did not apply to U.S. citizens or permanent residents — and required international passengers to present evidence that they had tested negative for the virus within a day before departure. Previously, travelers could test within three days of departure. As of Nov. 8, only vaccinated foreign travelers were allowed into the country.)

Eligible travelers could volunteer to provide a self-collected nasal swab at the airport. Swabs from five to 25 travelers — from the same flight or country — were added to a single tube and then tested for the virus using P.C.R. testing. Positive samples were then sequenced to determine which version of the virus was present.

Between Sept. 29 and Jan. 23, 10 percent of 161,000 eligible travelers enrolled in the study, and 1,454 sample pools were tested for the virus. Despite the preflight testing requirement, more than 15 percent of the pools were positive.

This relatively high positivity rate may indicate that travelers were early in the course of their infections — and thus had viral loads too low for some tests to detect — when they took their predeparture tests, or that they contracted the virus in the time between being tested and landing in the United States, the researchers say. People may also have submitted fraudulent test results.

Before Nov. 28, nearly all of the positive sample pools contained the Delta variant, the researchers found. (The only exception was a positive sample whose exact genetic lineage could not be determined.)

After that, however, Omicron quickly came to dominate; from Nov. 28 to Jan. 23, two-thirds of the positive samples were Omicron. Most of the Omicron samples were the BA.1 subvariant, which was initially the most prevalent version worldwide. BA.1 remains the most common lineage in the United States, though BA.2 has been gaining ground and now accounts for 35 percent of infections, according to C.D.C. estimates.

But the researchers found the BA.3 subvariant in a pool of samples collected from travelers arriving from South Africa on Dec. 3. They reported the finding in GISAID, an international repository of viral genomes, on Dec. 22. It was the first reported case of BA.3 in the United States; it would be more than a month before the next was reported.

The airport program also detected the first known U.S. case of BA.2, in samples collected from South African travelers on Dec. 14. The researchers reported the finding a week before the next U.S. case of BA.2 was reported.

“This is a new tool in the C.D.C. tool kit that works, and we’ve shown it’s effective and it can be layered with all of our other mitigation measures,” Dr. Friedman said.

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New York City restarts vaccine clinics in public schools, where many children remain unvaccinated.

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While more than 87 percent of adults in New York City are fully vaccinated, according to city data, rates for children, especially those in elementary school, lag far behind.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

In an effort to bolster coronavirus vaccinations among children ages 5 to 11, New York City officials began holding vaccine clinics this week at public elementary schools. The weeklong clinics will take place in every borough except Manhattan, which has the highest vaccination rate among students. They will be held at a new set of 20 schools each week, chosen based on their size and their vaccination rates, according to a spokesman for the city’s Education Department.

Vaccination rates for New York City’s 1 million public school students significantly lag those for adults. Some health experts find the figures alarming, in part because the city recently lifted its school mask mandate, along with other pandemic restrictions. And coronavirus case rates have begun to creep up again, driven largely by BA.2, a highly transmissible Omicron subvariant.

Cases increased 31 percent in New York City in the past two weeks as of Thursday, according to a New York Times database. Case counts at schools are also on the rise, with 227 reported on Wednesday compared with 206 one week before, according to schools data. The rise in cases at schools in the seven-day period that ended on Tuesday marked the biggest weekly gain since the peak of the Omicron wave, according to an analysis from The City.

A total of 75 students were vaccinated at the clinics on Monday and Tuesday, the spokesman said. The clinics will return to the schools in several weeks to administer second doses.

The city mounted a broader effort at all elementary schools over five weeks last fall, and nearly 60,000 students and staff members were vaccinated during that push. By mid-December, about 27 percent of all vaccinated students in the 5-to-11 age group had received their shots at school.

The hope is that the clinics this time around will reach students whose parents have, until now, been hesitant or resistant, said Dr. Wayne J. Riley, the president of SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University and a co-chairman of Mayor Eric Adams’s health-equity task force.

“I think now, parents can clearly see that the vaccines work to forestall the worst effects of Covid,” Dr. Riley said, adding that it was important to continue getting information about the vaccines out to families.

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