President Biden is pushing Congress for a second consecutive one-month extension of a moratorium on residential evictions, as the White House struggles to stand up a $47 billion rental relief program plagued by delays, confusion and red tape.
White House officials, under pressure from tenants’ rights groups, agreed to a one-month extension of the ban, which was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just before June 30, its previous expiration date. The freeze is now set to expire on Saturday.
Last month, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge by landlords, saying the moratorium could be extended to July 31 to give the Treasury Department and the states time to disburse cash to landlords to cover back rent that tenants did not pay during the pandemic. But Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in concurring with the majority decision that any future extension of the moratorium would require Congressional action.
On Thursday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, cited the steep rise in coronavirus infections around the country and called on Congress to extend the freeze one more month to avoid a health and eviction crisis.
“Given the recent spread of the Delta variant, including among those Americans both most likely to face evictions and lacking vaccinations, President Biden would have strongly supported a decision by the C.D.C. to further extend this eviction moratorium,” she said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has made clear that this option is no longer available.”
Mr. Biden “calls on Congress to extend the eviction moratorium to protect such vulnerable renters and their families without delay,” she added.
It is not clear whether there are enough votes in the Senate, which is divided 50-50 on partisan lines with Vice President Kamala Harris acting as a tiebreaker, to pass another extension to the moratorium.
The Biden administration’s effort to head off a crisis gained modest momentum in June, with 290,000 tenants receiving $1.5 billion in pandemic relief, according to Treasury Department statistics released last week.
But the flow of the cash, provided under two pandemic relief packages, remains sluggish and hampered by confusion at the state level, potentially endangering tenants who fell behind in their rent over the past year.
Ms. Psaki, in her statement, included a plea to local officials to accelerate their work.
“There can be no excuse for any state or locality not to promptly deploy the resources that Congress appropriated to meet this critical need of so many Americans,” she said.
Tenants’ groups have been urging Mr. Biden to extend the eviction moratorium, but White House lawyers argued that challenging the Supreme Court’s conservative majority on the case could eventually result in new restrictions on federal action during future health crises.
The moratorium was initially imposed by the C.D.C. last fall, during the Trump administration, because of the danger of virus spread that could arise from a wave of evictions stemming from economic shutdowns and job losses during the pandemic.
Earlier this week, the country’s biggest trade group for residential landlords sued the federal government over the national moratorium, claiming that it had cost owners around $27 billion that was not covered by existing aid programs.
The suit by the group, the National Apartment Association, cited industry estimates showing that 10 million delinquent tenants owed $57 billion in back rent by the end of 2020, and that $17 billion more had gone unpaid since then.
President Biden will formally announce on Thursday that all civilian federal employees must be vaccinated against the coronavirus or be forced to submit to regular testing, social distancing, mask requirements and restrictions on most travel, two people familiar with the president’s plans said.
White House officials said the administration was still reviewing details of the policy, which the president is expected to announce in a speech from the White House. In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Biden said his remarks would reveal “the next steps in our effort to get more Americans vaccinated.”
The president’s move is expected to be similar to an announcement on Wednesday by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, who said that tens of thousands of state employees would be required to show proof of vaccination or submit to weekly testing. Mr. Cuomo also said that “patient facing” health care workers at state-run hospitals would be required to be vaccinated as a condition of their employment.
Other governments around the country are beginning to put in place similar arrangements as well, as the highly contagious Delta variant has caused case numbers to balloon in recent weeks. New York City announced this week that it would require all 300,000 city employees to be vaccinated or submit to weekly testing. California also unveiled a plan to require vaccinations for state employees.
The federal plan is not expected to force employees to get a shot unless they work directly with patients at hospitals run by the Veterans Affairs Department. But public health officials are hoping that the prospect of extra burdens for the unvaccinated will help persuade more people to get inoculated.
People familiar with Mr. Biden’s announcement said it was part of a longstanding discussion about how to bring most federal workers back to the office after nearly a year and a half in which hundreds of thousands of them worked from home because of the pandemic.
A team has been working on that plan for months, trying to juggle the concerns of employees and the need to keep the government functioning. One concern that officials confronted was how to require vaccinations without potentially prompting critical employees to quit, undermining the government’s mission.
But the president’s announcement comes as the administration is under pressure to increase the rate of vaccinations in the country. About half of all Americans have been fully vaccinated, but the number of people getting shots has slowed significantly from the early months of the year.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the deputy White House press secretary, declined on Wednesday to provide details of the president’s speech, but said that the general approach would be to give employees a choice that would hopefully encourage them to get vaccinated.
The plan, she told reporters, is aimed at “confirming vaccination status or abiding by stringent Covid-19 protocols, like mandatory mask wearing, even in communities not with high or subsequent substantial spread, and regular testing.”
The 27 member states of the European Union altogether have now administered more coronavirus vaccine doses per 100 people than the United States, in another sign that inoculations across the bloc have maintained some speed throughout the summer, while they have stagnated for weeks in the United States.
E.U. countries had administered 102.66 doses per 100 people as of Tuesday, while the United States had administered 102.44, according to the latest vaccination figures compiled by Our World in Data. This month, the European Union also overtook the United States in first injections; currently, 58 percent of people across the bloc have received a dose, compared with 56.5 percent in the United States.
The latest figures provide a stark contrast with the early stages of the vaccination campaigns this year, when E.U. countries, facing a shortage of doses and delayed deliveries, looked in envy at the initially more successful efforts in the United States, Britain and Israel.
But the European Union is now vaccinating its populations at a faster pace than most developed countries. More than 70 percent of adults in the bloc have now received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said the achievement put E.U. countries “among the world leaders.”
“The catch-up process has been very successful,” she said in a statement on Tuesday.
As inoculation campaigns in many American states have been marred by widespread anti-vaccine sentiment, E.U. countries have been able to immunize their populations with less pushback.
Around 75 percent of residents in the bloc agree that vaccines are the only way to end the coronavirus pandemic, according to a public survey conducted across the European Union in May.
Furthermore, 79 percent said they intended to get vaccinated “sometime this year.”
Yet the spread of the Delta variant has added new urgency. Cases have soared in countries such as the Netherlands and Portugal, and hospitalizations have increased in France and Spain, among others, driving officials to try to speed up vaccination campaigns that have slightly slowed in recent weeks.
“Countries have tried in the first half of the year to stretch the interval between the first and the second doses, but now they have to reduce it to the minimum, with the shortest possible interval,” Andrea Ammon, director of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, said this month.
The center said last week that the Delta variant was now dominant in a majority of countries in the bloc.
Countries including France and Italy have announced new vaccine requirements to try to speed up inoculations, with proof of vaccination or a negative test set to be required to gain access to most public indoor venues. The goal, President Emmanuel Macron of France said in announcing the measures this month, is to “put restrictions on the unvaccinated rather than on everyone.”
As campaigns have slightly decreased or plateaued in some E.U. countries, health officials have also urged younger age groups to get vaccinated.
“We have focused a lot on the elderly, and it’s left a very strong perception among younger people that they’re not at risk, or that if they are, it’s very mild,” said Heidi Larson, an anthropologist and founder of the London-based Vaccine Confidence Project, which tracks opinions about immunization across the world.
Vittoria Colliza, a Paris-based epidemiologist at Inserm, the French public-health research center, said that vaccine saturation levels were high among many populations, but that large pockets had yet to even receive one dose.
She added that new lockdown restrictions may have to be reimposed to stem the spread of the Delta variant if immunization fails to keep up.
“They’re increasing already,” Dr. Colliza said about inoculations, especially among younger people. “But the fear is that the Delta variant will begin to fully impact our lives by the end of August.”
Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington said on Thursday that an indoor mask mandate would be reimposed in the nation’s capital on Saturday, becoming the latest jurisdiction to change public health protocols after new federal guidance advised even vaccinated people in coronavirus hot spots to resume wearing face coverings in indoor public spaces.
The announcement from Washington came as some states and municipalities were quick to update their own mask rules, while others expressed outrage, another example of the political tensions that have often accompanied public health precautions during the pandemic.
The new federal guidance also suggested masks for all children, staff members and visitors in schools, regardless of their vaccination status and community transmission of the virus.
The mayors of Atlanta and Kansas City, Mo., both Democrats, reinstated mask mandates; Atlanta’s took effect immediately and Kansas City’s will start on Aug. 2. Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada, a Democrat, ordered that residents in counties with high rates of transmission — including Clark County, home to Las Vegas — wear masks in public indoor spaces starting on Friday. In Minnesota, health and education officials urged all students, staff and visitors to wear masks in schools, but held off making the guidance a state requirement.
Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, a Democrat, announced a mask requirement for state employees and visitors in public areas of state government buildings, starting on Aug. 2. She also recommended masks for all residents in counties with high transmission rates, while acknowledging the frustrations of vaccinated people.
“I take no pleasure in asking you to put a mask on again,” she said at a news conference on Wednesday, the same day a mask requirement went into effect in a central Kansas school district.
On Wednesday, at least six Republican governors, Greg Abbott of Texas, Doug Ducey of Arizona, Brian Kemp of Georgia, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, and Ron DeSantis of Florida, signaled their opposition to the recommendation.
“It’s very important that we say unequivocally, no to lockdowns, no to school closures, no to restrictions, and no mandates,” Mr. DeSantis said in a speech at a gathering held by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative lobbying group.
Nine states — Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — had already banned or limited face mask mandates, leaving cities and counties with few options to fight the virus spread.
Some municipalities in states that have resisted mandates faced headwinds even before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its new guidance. On Monday St. Louis County, Mo., reinstated a mask mandate, only to face a lawsuit hours later from Eric Schmitt, the state’s Republican attorney general.
Major employers are also struggling with how best to interpret the new mask recommendations. Apple announced that it would require masks for customers and employees in more than half of its U.S. stores and in some corporate offices, and MGM Resorts International, the casino and hotel giant, said it would require all guests and visitors to wear masks indoors in public areas.
Other companies have pushed back their return-to-office dates, while some that have already relaxed mask restrictions, like WalMart and Kroger, had not indicated their plans as of Wednesday.
Lauren Hirsch and Jack Nicas contributed reporting.
Federal regulators have approved the reopening of a troubled Baltimore vaccine-making plant that has been closed for more than three months over contamination concerns that delayed the delivery of about 170 million doses of coronavirus vaccine.
The turnabout came after a two-day inspection at the plant this week by the Food and Drug Administration and weeks of effort by Johnson & Johnson and its subcontractor, Emergent BioSolutions, to bring the site up to standard.
The F.D.A. had brought production at the factory to a halt after the discovery in late March that workers had accidentally contaminated a batch of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine with a key ingredient used in AstraZeneca’s, then made at the same site. The federal government also stripped Emergent of the responsibility to manufacture AstraZeneca’s vaccine and instructed Johnson & Johnson to assert greater control over Emergent’s operation.
“The American people should have high expectations of the partners its government chooses to help prepare them for disaster, and we have even higher expectations of ourselves,” Robert Kramer, the chief executive of Emergent, said in a statement on Thursday.
“We have fallen short of those lofty ambitions over the past few months but resumption of manufacturing is a key milestone, and we are grateful for the opportunity to help bring this global pandemic to an end,” he added.
The development, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, is welcome news for Johnson & Johnson. Because of Emergent’s failures to meet manufacturing standards, Johnson & Johnson has fallen behind on its contractual pledges to deliver vaccine to the United States government and to Europe.
Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the two other developers whose vaccines have been cleared for emergency distribution by the American authorities, have supplied most of the shots distributed in the United States. The federal government has more than enough doses of those vaccines to meet the country’s needs. It is unclear whether it will also try to deploy more doses from Johnson & Johnson or export them.
Before it halted operations, Emergent said that the plant had the capacity to produce about a billion doses of vaccine a year. Production will need to gear up in stages, officials said.
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday agreed to allow Johnson & Johnson to extend the shelf life of its coronavirus vaccine to six months.
The F.D.A.’s decision came as state health officials in the United States were growing increasingly concerned that doses of the vaccine would expire and go to waste. The vaccines were previously set to expire after four and a half months.
In a letter, the F.D.A. said its decision was “applicable to batches that might have expired prior to the issuance of this concurrence letter” and had been stored at the proper temperature, 2-8 degrees Celsius, or 35.6-46.4 Fahrenheit.
The single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine can be stored in normal refrigeration, which has helped states reach more isolated communities where it may be difficult to manage a two-dose vaccine like those made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Both of those must be stored at much lower temperatures.
As of Wednesday, more than 13 million Americans had received the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been the most widely administered in the United States, with more than 87 million Americans fully vaccinated with it. More than 63 million people in the United States have been fully vaccinated with the Moderna formula.
JERUSALEM — Israel will begin administering a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine those 60 and older, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced on Thursday, citing the rising risk of a virus surge fueled by the Delta variant.
The health ministry has instructed the country’s four main health care providers to begin giving on Sunday a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to Israelis in that age group who received a second dose more than five months ago. President Isaac Herzog, 60, will be the first to get a booster shot on Friday, Mr. Bennett said.
“The battle against Covid is a global effort,” Mr. Bennett said.
Whether booster shots are needed by older citizens is an issue that is far from settled among scientists. Most studies indicate that immunity resulting from the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna is long-lasting, and researchers are still trying to interpret recent Israeli data suggesting a decline in efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine months after inoculation.
Pfizer on Wednesday offered up its own study showing a marginal decline in efficacy against symptomatic infection with the coronavirus months after immunization, although the vaccine remained powerfully effective against severe disease and death. The company has begun making a case for booster shots in the United States, as well.
The latest government decision in Israel, an early leader in administering vaccines, follows an analysis by the health ministry that estimated that the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in preventing serious illness remained higher than 90 percent — but that its ability to stop infection had fallen over time.
Some experts have pushed back against a rush to approve a booster in Israel. The data are too uncertain, they say, to estimate of how much efficacy has waned. For example, the Delta-driven outbreak hit parts of the country with high vaccination rates first and has been hitting other regions later.
Since June, there has been a steady rise in Israel’s daily rate of new virus cases, and the seven-day average is 1,670 a day. The figure exceeded 2,300 one day this week, a spike that health experts have attributed to the spread of the more contagious Delta variant.
The daily rate is still far lower than at the height of Israel’s third wave of infections in January, when number of new daily cases rose briefly above 11,000. But it is far higher than in mid-June, when the figure fell to single digits and the government eased almost all antivirus restrictions to allow daily life to return to normal.
The number of coronavirus patients in hospitals nevertheless remains relatively low; a total of 159 people were hospitalized on Thursday, much less than the figure of more than 2,000 at the height of the third wave in January.
In the United States, Biden administration health officials increasingly think that vulnerable populations may need additional shots even as research continues into how long the coronavirus vaccines remain effective.
There is growing consensus among scientists, for example, that people with compromised immune systems may need more than the prescribed two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Earlier this month, Israel began administering a third shot of the Pfizer vaccine to people with compromised immune systems. The country has already given 2,000 of those people a third dose with no severe adverse events, Mr. Bennett said Thursday.
Though Israel’s vaccination rate has dwindled in recent months, it was an early leader in the race to vaccinate against the virus, allowing the country to return to ordinary life faster than most other places.
Nearly 60 percent of Israelis are fully vaccinated, mostly with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and the country is seen as a test case for a post-vaccine world.
Israeli health care leaders welcomed the decision to administer an extra shot to older citizens, while emphasizing that the original two doses still remained protective against serious illness and death.
Gadi Segal, the head of a virus ward at Sheba Medical Center in central Israel, told Kan radio that vaccinated patients admitted to the hospitals were much less likely to need ventilators.
Prof. Segal said: “There is no doubt the number of ill is rising. The vaccine’s ability to prevent infection is less, but it is very effective in preventing patients from reaching the point of respiratory failure.”
He added: “I’m under 60, and when I am offered a third dose, I will take it happily.”
Israel has faced scrutiny for its initial reluctance to offer vaccinations to significant numbers of Palestinians living under differing levels of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel initially said the diplomatic agreements signed in the 1990s with the Palestinian leadership, known as the Oslo Accords, gave the Palestinian health authorities responsibility to procure their own vaccines. Rights campaigners said other clauses of the accords, as well as the Fourth Geneva Convention, gave Israel a legal duty to assist.
But when Israel offered about a million vaccines in June to the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited autonomy in parts of the West Bank, the authority pulled out of the deal because it said the vaccines would have expired before officials would have had time to administer them. Some of the excess vaccines were later given to South Korea.
Sharon LaFraniere and Carl Zimmer contributed reporting.
AstraZeneca has released one billion coronavirus vaccine doses to 170 nations this year, the company said on Thursday, an important milestone despite the many challenges that its low-cost vaccine has faced — including legal fights with the European Union, slashed deliveries and hesitancy in many countries.
The AstraZeneca vaccine, which was developed with Oxford University, was once earmarked for broad use throughout Europe and other continents, including Africa.
But the vaccine has been held back by various problems. AstraZeneca has been embroiled in a legal dispute with the European Union after the company said this year that it could deliver only a third of the 300 million doses it was expected to provide to the bloc.
Several European countries, as well as Australia and Canada, stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine for young people after reports of extremely rare but serious blood clots. Denmark and Spain have stopped using it altogether because of the blood clot risk. South Africa stopped using the vaccine after it was found to be ineffective on a variant there. And the United States has not authorized its use. (AstraZeneca said on Thursday that in the second half of the year, it would seek full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a process that can take many months to complete.)
Experts say they fear that the negative publicity the vaccine has received in some countries — President Emmanuel Macron of France called the vaccine “quasi-ineffective” among those over 65 — may have also affected others that are in critical need of doses.
“We are definitely seeing that hesitancy in high-income countries can affect low-income countries,” Andrew Pollard, a professor of pediatric infection and immunity who leads the group at Oxford University that developed the vaccine with AstraZeneca, said on the BBC on Thursday.
Dr. Pollard added that he believed most people across the world were desperate to receive the vaccines and that the main issue remained the inequitable distribution of doses.
AstraZeneca, which has pledged not to make any profit from the shots, said on Thursday that its Covid vaccine sales for the first half of the year had reached $1.2 billion. In comparison, Pfizer, which created a shot with the German company BioNTech and has made no such promise, said it predicted its Covid vaccine sales to reach more than $33 billion by the end of the year.
Companies are rushing to revisit their coronavirus precautions, with some mandating vaccines and pushing back targets for when employees are expected to return to the office, as cases rise across the United States, fueled by the Delta variant and slower pace of vaccinations.
Lyft said on Wednesday that it would not require employees to return to the office until February, while Twitter said it would close its newly reopened offices in San Francisco and New York and indefinitely postpone other reopening plans.
Their actions follow announcements by authorities in California and New York City that they will require hundreds of thousands of government workers to get inoculations or face weekly testing. And President Biden is set to announce that all civilian federal workers must be vaccinated or submit to regular testing, social distancing, mask requirements and restrictions on most travel.
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Apple will start requiring employees and customers to wear masks regardless of their vaccination status in more than half of its stores in the United States, it said on Wednesday, a new sign that shopping in the country may soon resemble earlier days of the pandemic.
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Google will require employees who return to the company’s offices to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. It also said it would push back its official return-to-office date to mid-October from September. Google has more than 144,000 employees globally.
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Netflix will require the casts of all its U.S. productions to be vaccinated, along with anyone else who comes on set. It’s the first studio to establish such a policy.
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Facebook will require employees who work at its U.S. campuses to be vaccinated, depending on local conditions and regulations. Facebook, which has roughly 60,000 workers, said in June that it would permit all full-time employees to continue to work from home when feasible.
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The Durst Organization, one of the largest private real estate developers in New York City, is requiring all of its employees in nonunion positions to be vaccinated by Sept. 6 or face termination. Durst has about 350 nonunion employees and about 700 union workers.
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The Walt Disney Company said Wednesday that it would require cast members and guests older than 2 to wear face coverings in all indoor locations at its Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort, effective July 30.
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Citigroup is reinstating mask requirements in common areas for employees across its U.S. offices, a person familiar with the situation said.
Global roundup
Officials in Thailand on Wednesday began building a Covid-19 treatment center on the grounds of an international airport as the country grapples with a prolonged surge in infections.
The Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok plans to turn a cargo warehouse into a 1,800-bed facility that is expected to open Aug. 12. The facility will treat asymptomatic patients and those with mild symptoms, and is a joint effort by a private hospital, the government and volunteers.
The warehouse “hasn’t been used for years, is open, airy and has good ventilation,” said Dr. Rienthong Nanna, director and chairman of the hospital involved, Mongkutwattana General.
“Patients in the community are like ticking time bombs, and we take them to the hospital to defuse the bombs, and the bombs won’t spread the virus more,” he said.
The facility is not designed to handle serious cases, he added, and patients who develop more severe symptoms will be transported to a field hospital for treatment. As Thailand faces a shortage of medical staff to deal with the outbreak, health officials are training volunteers to handle nonurgent cases.
Thailand recorded a new daily high of 17,699 cases on Thursday, according to health officials, as an outbreak that began in April shows no sign of letting up. After recording fewer than 5,000 cases in all of 2020, the country has now reported more than half a million, with the average of daily cases up 68 percent over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database.
On Thursday, the authorities in Cambodia said they would impose lockdowns in eight provinces on the border with Thailand, in what they said was an effort to stem the spread of the Delta variant.
The Thai government had promised to introduce a locally produced coronavirus shot starting in June, with the goal of inoculating 70 percent of the population by the end of the year. But hospitals canceled vaccination appointments after less than a week amid reports of a shortage of doses. Just over 5 percent of Thai residents have been fully vaccinated.
In other developments around the world:
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The German government announced that starting this weekend, all travelers arriving from abroad will have to show proof of vaccination, immunity from a past coronavirus infection, or a recent negative test to enter the country. Until now, only travelers from high-risk areas or those arriving by plane had to do that. New case reports in Germany are much lower now than in popular tourist destinations like France, Spain or Greece, but have been rising lately, and a significant surge last fall in Germany was linked in part to Germans bringing the virus home from vacations abroad.
Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.
Yu Young Jin and
Olympic organizers on Thursday reported 24 new coronavirus infections among personnel, including three athletes. A total of 198 people connected to the Games have tested positive since July 1.
Among them are 23 athletes, including six from the United States, which is fielding the largest Olympic delegation in Tokyo and also has the most members who have tested positive. They include the pole-vaulter Sam Kendricks, the reigning world champion and a bronze medalist at the 2016 Rio Games, who was forced to withdraw from competition, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee said on Thursday.
Outside the Olympic bubble, coronavirus cases are rising. Tokyo recorded 3,177 new infections on Wednesday, setting a record for the second consecutive day as health experts warned that tougher restrictions might be needed to control the spread of the Delta variant.
Across Japan, the average number of daily cases is up by 149 percent from two weeks ago, according to New York Times data. On Thursday, Japanese officials reported more than 9,500 cases nationwide, a new daily high.
Starting Friday, Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California will require all guests older than 2 to wear masks in indoor spaces, reversing its policy that allowed fully vaccinated guests to go without them.
The change was announced after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended on Tuesday that Americans, regardless of vaccination status, wear face masks in indoor public spaces in areas of the country with high rates of virus transmission.
Mayor Jerry L. Demings of Orange County, Fla., where Disney World is located, signed an executive order on Wednesday declaring a state of local emergency as cases rose in the county and said that all nonunion county employees must be fully vaccinated by the end of September.
“I urge residents and visitors — vaccinated and unvaccinated — to wear a mask while indoors and to follow updated C.D.C. guidelines,” Mr. Demings wrote on Twitter. Florida bars its counties from enforcing mask mandates.
Over the past two weeks, coronavirus infections in the county have increased by 184 percent, and hospitalizations have risen by 116 percent, according to a New York Times database.
Disney World’s new policy could draw some backlash from Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, who has opposed any new restrictions and who defiantly criticized the new C.D.C. guidance about mask-wearing indoors and in schools.
“I think it’s very important we say, unequivocally, ‘No to lockdowns, no to school closures, no to restrictions, no mandates,’” Mr. DeSantis said in Salt Lake City at a gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative lobbying group.
In Florida, which has never imposed a statewide mask mandate and has recently seen a sharp rise in virus cases and hospitalizations, the public university system issued a letter on Wednesday strongly urging students to be vaccinated before classes start in the fall. And the new mask guidance from the C.D.C. prompted Miami-Dade County to reinstitute an indoor mask mandate at county facilities.
Mr. DeSantis has said that he thinks mask requirements are counterproductive.
“I get a little bit frustrated when I see some of these jurisdictions saying, ‘Even if you’re healthy and vaccinated, you must wear a mask because we’re seeing increased cases,’” he said on July 21. “Understand what that message is sending to people who aren’t vaccinated: It’s telling them that the vaccines don’t work. I think that’s the worst message that you can send to people at this time.”
Resuming indoor mask rules is less politically fraught in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has said he planned to work closely with the C.D.C. Mr. Newsom announced earlier this week that the state would require two million health care workers and 246,000 state employees to get vaccinated or undergo frequent testing starting next month.
Disney was not the only company that reversed course in response to the C.D.C.’s advice. Apple said it would start requiring employees and customers, regardless of their vaccination status, to wear masks in certain stores across the country.
The French government accused Britain on Thursday of enforcing discriminatory new rules that will lift quarantine requirements for most vaccinated travelers — but not for those arriving from France.
The British authorities announced on Wednesday that, starting in August, a quarantine would no longer be required for travelers from the United States or from most of the European Union who had been vaccinated with shots authorized by either American or European drug regulators. Travelers will still need a negative coronavirus test taken shortly before the trip, and another upon arrival.
The new rules do not apply to travelers from France, who will still have to isolate for up to 10 days after reaching Britain.
“It’s excessive and frankly it’s incomprehensible, from a health standpoint,” Clément Beaune, the French junior minister for European affairs, told the broadcaster LCI.
“Sometimes in France, we were in a difficult health situation, and we understood — even if we regretted it — that some of our neighbors took hard decisions toward us,” Mr. Beaune said. But in this case, he added, “it is a decision that isn’t based on science and is discriminatory.”
The British authorities have said that the presence of the Beta variant of the coronavirus in France justified the decision. But Mr. Beaune said that fewer than 5 percent of new cases in France were attributable to that variant and that most of those were not in metropolitan France but in the country’s overseas territories, like Réunion and Martinique, where the pandemic has worsened recently, forcing the authorities there to declare states of emergency or new lockdowns.
Also, Mr. Beaune noted, there is much less travel to Britain from the French overseas territories than there is from the mainland.
Nonetheless, the virus has flared up again recently across France, even though about half of the population has been fully vaccinated. The average number of daily infections is about 20,000, and hospital admissions are also rising.
MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has said that local officials should detain people who refuse Covid-19 vaccinations inside their homes, a move that legal experts said would be unconstitutional.
In a late-night public address on Wednesday, Mr. Duterte argued that the coronavirus emergency trumped laws guaranteeing freedom of movement, calling his order “the law of necessity.”
“If they don’t want to be vaccinated, they should not be allowed to go out of their homes,” Mr. Duterte said. “They may say there is no law, but should I wait for a law knowing that many will die?”
It was not immediately clear how Mr. Duterte, who is known for bombastic statements and endorsing hard-knuckled police tactics, planned to enforce such a plan or when it would go into effect. Last month, he threatened to jail people who refused shots.
In his address on Wednesday, Mr. Duterte said that village chiefs — elected officials who serve at the lowest level of local government in urban and rural areas — should force people who won’t be vaccinated to stay home and that, if questioned, they could respond that they were acting on “orders of the mayor,” a reference to the strongman approach he used when serving as the longtime mayor of the southern city of Davao.
Edre Olalia, secretary general of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers in the Philippines, said that the president’s order was unconstitutional and dangerous, and “reflects his militaristic mind-set.” Although there is some vaccine hesitancy in the Philippines, especially after a dengue immunization campaign in 2017 led to dozens of deaths, Mr. Olalia said that demand for vaccines outstripped a supply that is dogged by distribution bottlenecks and erratic delivery.
“There are actually many wanting to be vaccinated but are just waiting to be called by the government,” Mr. Olalia said. “The point is, is the vaccine rollout sufficient? Anecdotally, no. There have been long queues.”
Less than 6 percent of the population of 108 million in the Philippines has been fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times tracker. The country has recorded the second-highest total coronavirus caseload in Southeast Asia, after Indonesia, and has reported dozens of instances of the Delta variant since May, when the country’s first Delta cases were found in two workers returning from overseas.
On Sunday, the authorities in Manila imposed tighter restrictions including closures of gyms, reduced capacity at restaurants and other businesses, and a nighttime curfew. Children ages 5 to 17 are not allowed to leave their homes.
The huge increase in government aid prompted by the coronavirus pandemic will cut poverty nearly in half this year from prepandemic levels and push the number of Americans in poverty to the lowest level on record, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the vast but temporary expansion of the safety net.
The country has never cut poverty so much in such a short period of time, and while poverty has fallen most among children, it has dropped among Americans across states, racial groups and age groups. The development is especially notable since it defies economic headwinds — the economy has nearly seven million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic.
But it has come at extraordinary cost. Annual spending on major programs is projected to rise fourfold to more than $1 trillion. And without further expensive measures, millions of families may find the escape from poverty brief. The three programs that cut poverty most — stimulus checks, increased food stamps and expanded unemployment insurance — have ended or are scheduled to soon revert to their prepandemic size.
The findings come as Democrats and Republicans in Congress remain divided, spurring sharp debate about the future of the safety net.
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July 29, 2021 at 11:18PM
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Covid-19 and Vaccine News: Live Updates - The New York Times
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