The Dallas Independent School District said on Monday that everyone — students, employees and visitors — must wear a mask while on school property, starting Tuesday.
The mandate, which officials said was temporary, was imposed in defiance of an executive order by Gov. Greg Abbott that prohibits school districts from requiring masks.
The public school district, the second-largest in Texas according to its website, appears to be the first in the state to defy the order.
“Governor Abbott’s order does not limit the district’s rights as an employer and educational institution to establish reasonable and necessary safety rules for its staff and students,” the Dallas district said on its website, adding that the mask mandate would remain in force as long as necessary.
Elsewhere in Texas, the superintendent of the Houston Independent School District announced last week that he would put a similar mask mandate up for a vote before the board of education this week. And municipalities, including Houston, have announced their own mask mandates for city workers.
New coronavirus cases and hospitalizations have risen sharply across Texas in the past few weeks, and Dallas is no exception. On Monday evening the top elected official in Dallas County sued Mr. Abbott, arguing the governor’s ban on mask mandates violates Texas law.
Mr. Abbott, a Republican, has encouraged people to get vaccinated. Earlier in the pandemic, he imposed statewide restrictions, including closures and capacity limits for some businesses and a state mask mandate, which he lifted in March.
Since then, the highly contagious Delta variant has raged through Texas while the pace of vaccination lagged, with only 44 percent of the population vaccinated so far, according to federal data. While Texas is reporting about half as many new cases as at its peak in the winter, it is one of the states with the most patients being hospitalized with severe illness, according to a New York Times database.
Mr. Abbott has stood firm against calls to reimpose safety precautions, insisting that “we must rely on personal responsibility, not government mandates,” a spokeswoman for the governor said in a recent statement. “Every Texan has a right to choose for themselves and their children whether they will wear masks, open their businesses, or get vaccinated.”
Mr. Abbott on Monday evening released a statement describing steps Texas would take to curb the spread of the coronavirus, which didn’t mention masks.
Michael Hinojosa, the district’s superintendent, said at a news conference on Monday to announce the mandate that the vast majority of his students and teachers were already wearing masks.
Asked why he wanted to impose a mandate when it seemed that people were taking the precaution on their own, Mr. Hinojosa said, “Because if we can save one student, one teacher, from going through this awful pain it’ll get them more prepared to learn, and I think that if you do this together you have a better chance for success.”
Federal guidance calls for students, teachers, parents and visitors at schools to wear masks to slow the spread of the virus. Vaccines protect against serious illness or death, but do not completely prevent infection, and no vaccine has yet been authorized for children under 12. So primary and secondary schools around the country will be reopening for a largely unvaccinated population at a time when the Delta variant appears to be sickening children more than earlier virus variants did.
The Dallas district serves nearly 154,000 students in 230 schools, most of which open on Aug. 16, according to its website. The district, which required masks during the last school year, largely serves nonwhite working-class families.
School districts in other states that ban mask mandates, like Florida and Arizona, have tried to require masks anyway because of the surging Delta variant. Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Republican of Arkansas, said on Sunday that he regretted signing his state’s ban on mask mandates into law.
“Facts change, and leaders have to adjust to the new facts and the reality of what you have to deal with,” Mr. Hutchinson said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”
Dana Goldstein, David Montgomery, Giulia Heyward, Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting.
In Florida, just half of people are vaccinated against the coronavirus, and the Delta virus variant is driving a surge that has made the state one of the worst-hit in the nation. Now, as Gov. Ron DeSantis, a rising star in the Republican Party, doubles down on his strategy, several local officials are preparing to defy him.
Florida is straining under the weight of its latest, and largest, virus wave. Forty-three percent of the state’s adult intensive-care beds are filled with coronavirus patients, The Wall Street Journal reported.
On Friday, Florida recorded the highest daily average of new coronavirus cases in the country, with 19,250, according to a New York Times database. At the Impact Church in Jacksonville, six unvaccinated people died in 10 days, a pastor there said on Twitter last week. This week, the church hosted a vaccination event: 269 got the jab, the church said.
Last week in Central Florida, three men — a police officer, a deputy sheriff and a firefighter — died of Covid-19 within three days, NBC reported.
Last month, Mr. DeSantis signed an executive order blocking local officials from enacting mask mandates, and is threatening to withhold the salaries of local superintendents and school board members who enact them.
Now, local officials and community leaders are stepping in with mask requirements of their own.
With the school year already underway in some parts of Florida and beginning next week in others, lawsuits have been filed against the governor’s ban and a growing number of school officials are defying the governor and considering mandating masks for students.
On Monday the superintendent of schools in Leon County announced a mask mandate for students in pre-kindergarten through 8th grade. In Alachua County public schools, masks will be required at least for the first two weeks of school. The Duval County School Board voted last week to put a mask mandate in place, but will allow students to opt-out.
The Broward County School District, one of the largest in the state, voted unanimously last month to require its students to wear masks. But in light of the governor’s recent executive order, the district said in a statement that it is “awaiting further guidance before rendering a decision on the mask mandate for the upcoming school year.”
The superintendent of another large school district, Albert Carvalho of Miami-Dade County, told NBC that he will not let the prospect of having his salary withheld affect whether that district moves forward with a mask mandate. The district requires students to wear masks on buses but has not made a final determination on whether it will require them indoors, a local NBC affiliate reported.
The Pentagon will seek to make coronavirus vaccinations mandatory for the country’s 1.3 million active-duty troops “no later” than next month, the Biden administration announced on Monday.
Officials initially said the shots could be required by the end of August to help stop the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant. But they decided to wait another month, bowing to concerns expressed by White House officials about putting a mandate in place for troops before the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval for the vaccine.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in a memo to the staff on Monday that he would seek to speed up a mandate if the F.D.A. approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine before the middle of September, which the agency aims to do. In the meantime, he told the services to begin preparing the force for mandatory vaccinations.
But the middle of September is more than five weeks away, and even then, the administration has not put a deadline in place for when troops must be fully vaccinated.
The decision to delay is the latest shift in the Biden administration’s response to the surging Delta variant. President Biden has expressed frustration with the vaccination rate around the nation and urged the private sector and state and local governments to step up pressure on the unvaccinated. But he has repeatedly passed on taking the one step he can as commander in chief to mandate vaccines that have not been fully approved by the F.D.A. for troops.
Of the 1,336,000 active-duty service members, about 64 percent are fully vaccinated. That rate is unacceptably low to the military because it is difficult to deploy troops who have not been inoculated to countries with stringent local restrictions, and because a surge of the virus among troops can cripple readiness.
“I want you to know that I will seek the president’s approval to make the vaccines mandatory no later than mid-September, or immediately upon” F.D.A. approval, Mr. Austin said in his memo, adding “whichever comes first.” He said that the department would keep a close eye on the rate of new virus cases and added that “I will not hesitate to act sooner or recommend a different course to the president if I feel the need to do so.”
LANSDOWNE, Ontario — For the first time since March 2020, Canada on Monday reopened its borders to nonessential travel by U.S. citizens and residents who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.
But the pent-up demand created by the shutdown did not lead to a surge in traffic from Americans desperate to again visit their neighbors — at least, not immediately. Midmorning Monday at the border crossing at The Thousand Islands Bridge at Lansdowne, in Ontario, private cars were outnumbered by heavy trucks, for which the border was never shut.
And so far the border reopening is only one way.
Late last month, days after Canada announced that it would reopen its border, U.S. officials made clear that they would not immediately reciprocate. “The United States is extending restrictions on nonessential travel at our land and ferry crossings with Canada and Mexico through Aug. 21,” the Department of Homeland Security said.
On Monday, even with the relatively light cross-border traffic, delays were reported to be common. Some travelers proved less adept at navigating Canada’s new pandemic rules than others.
At the Thousand Islands Bridge crossing, Tim Guinnane, who drove from New Haven, Conn., with a kayak on the roof of his Toyota Prius and a bicycle in the back, said it had taken him three hours just to reach a border guard.
“That’s not like a violation of the Geneva Convention,” he said before going into the base of the tower to buy a bottle of water. “I just thought it’d be more like an hour.”
Once he reached the border booth, Mr. Guinnane said, he was questioned by a border guard for only about five minutes.
Like several other travelers, he attributed the long wait to Americans who had failed to upload proof of vaccination and a recent negative coronavirus test to a Canadian government app. There were also travelers who had neither and were turned back.
The scene was similar hundreds of miles west at the International Rainbow Bridge that connects Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Niagara Falls, N. Y.
As the coronavirus spread, the United States closed land borders with its two neighbors in March 2020.
In mid-July, Canada said it would welcome back vaccinated travelers, including Americans, beginning Aug. 9.
The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said at the time the United States would not follow suit. “We rely on the guidance of our health and medical experts, not the actions of other countries,” she said.
If that posture frustrated the Canadians, they did not say so, at least publicly.
“Every country gets to set its own rules about how it will keep its citizens safe,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said then.
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington announced Monday that most state employees and all health care workers must be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus by Oct. 18, or risk losing their jobs.
“We have essentially a new virus at our throats,” Mr. Inslee said at a news conference, referring to the Delta variant.
Mr. Inslee went beyond similar orders issued by other states by saying that a refusal could lead to being fired. This would apply to both private and public sector workers, including 60,000 state employees, as well as 14,000 that work for King County and 10,000 employed by Seattle. The policy also includes contractors who work at state, county and city locations, like construction sites, offices and health care facilities.
“These workers live in every community in our state, working together and with the public every day to deliver services,” Mr. Inslee said. “We have a duty to protect them from the virus, they have the right to be protected, and the communities they serve and live in deserve protection as well.”
Dow Constantine, the King County executive, and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan joined Mr. Inslee at the news conference to voice their endorsements.
Applications will be considered for “legitimate medical reasons or sincerely held religious beliefs,” the governor said, but not for philosophical objections. Employees will not be able to forego the vaccine and get tested weekly.
Mr. Inslee’s office said that the bill for coronavirus tests would be in the millions of dollars if continued indefinitely and the testing option had not worked well in public facilities like prisons, privately-run hospitals or nursing homes. “We’re past the point where we can test our way to safety,” he said. “They don’t solve the problem.”
Mr. Inslee is using the emergency authority powers he was granted during the coronavirus pandemic to issue the new order, his office said. The state licenses health care workers in private facilities and settings, and the governor said that the same enforcement mechanism that comes into play when a medical error or the wrong medicine is given. “This is a life-and-safety rule,” he added.
The directive does not extend to workers in higher education, public education, or employees of the legislative and judicial branches.
“The reason we’re in this pickle today is because 30 percent of our eligible citizens, so far, have chose not to get to the vaccine,” Mr. Inslee said, emphasizing that it was not too late for both residents and state employees. But those on public salaries “essentially have to have your last vaccine by Oct. 4,” he said.
The Seattle region had recorded most of the nation’s first Covid-19 deaths, as the virus rampaged through a nursing home in the Seattle suburbs in early 2020. In early 2021, the region’s deaths per capita were lower than any other large metropolitan area.
In Washington State, daily new cases have soared 154 percent in the last two weeks, according to a New York Times database, which also shows that hospitalizations have risen 60 percent and deaths are up 42 percent over the same period. Seventy percent of Washington residents 18 and older are fully vaccinated, according to federal data. People younger than 12 are not eligible for the vaccine.
Health officials in California on Thursday ordered more than two million health care workers to be inoculated, largely removing an option that let unvaccinated employees submit to regular testing instead.
President Biden also recently announced that federal workers would face restrictions and requirements, including testing, if they did not get vaccinated.
Other states and territories including New York, Virginia and Puerto Rico, have followed suit, telling their employees to get their shots or go through regular testing.
MEXICO CITY — As lines for testing again stretch for blocks and hospitals fill with patients, Mexico is experiencing another wave of the coronavirus, with six states and the capital entering a “red” alert level on Monday — the highest on the country’s coronavirus traffic light warning system.
The Mexican health ministry said on Sunday that the country had registered its first drop in weekly cases after nine straight weeks of rising cases, although the dip was only 1 percent. To date, Mexico has recorded nearly three million cases of the coronavirus.
On Sunday the country reported another 7,573 new cases of Covid-19 and 172 deaths. The authorities estimate that total deaths have now surpassed 250,000, among the highest death tolls in the world, although limited testing means that the true figure could be far higher.
With the more contagious Delta variant now dominant in parts of the country, and vaccinations still sluggish — only about 21 percent of the adult population is fully vaccinated — health experts warn that conditions could get even worse.
“The situation is very serious,” said Laurie Ann Ximénez-Fyvie, the head of the molecular genetics laboratory at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a vocal government critic. “Infections are out of control, hospitals are overwhelmed, people are dying.”
Still, despite the worrying trends, the government has continued to paint a rosy picture and has refused to implement significant restrictions or mask mandates, even in states where infections are surging. Mexico also has no meaningful travel restrictions, which could hurt the important tourism industry.
Instead, the government is betting heavily on vaccination.
“We have the guarantee, which we didn’t have before, that now because of the vaccine, there are fewer hospitalizations,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at a news conference on Friday. “The most important thing of all, what gives us the most calm, is that there are fewer deaths.”
Mr. López Obrador held a call with Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday afternoon, in which he said they discussed immigration, mutual cooperation to confront the pandemic and potentially reopening the U.S. land border, where the Mexican government has been concentrating vaccination efforts.
But with less than a quarter of Mexico’s population fully vaccinated, compared to more than 50 percent in the United States, vaccines are unlikely to halt the spiraling spread of the virus south of the border any time soon, which could lead to new and more dangerous variants, health experts said.
For the first time since February, the United States is averaging more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day, a resurgence that is hitting especially hard in states where large portions of the population remain unvaccinated.
The pace of new case reports slowed in the spring as vaccination efforts picked up speed. A cautious optimism returned, and the summer was supposed to bring a joyous rebound to normalcy.
But the seven-day average of new case reports has doubled in the last two weeks, according to a New York Times database, and deaths have nearly doubled, to an average of 516 a day.
The surge is tied to the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus. Vaccines provide a high degree of protection against the variant, which was first detected in India, but only half of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated.
Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has described the current stage as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
The rise in cases has reignited debates around mandates for masks and vaccinations. In a reversal, Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, a Republican, said on Sunday that a state law banning mask mandates had been a mistake.
“It was an error to sign that law,” he said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “I admit that.”
Mr. Hutchinson signed the bill in April, but “facts change,” he said, “and leaders have to adjust to the new facts and the reality of what you have to deal with.”
Randi Weingarten, the head of the powerful American Federation of Teachers, also urged a reversal of her union’s position against vaccine mandates. The rising caseloads are a “public health crisis,” she said Sunday on the NBC program “Meet the Press.”
Ms. Weingarten recently traveled to Missouri and Florida, two of the hardest-hit states. “I do think that the circumstances have changed and that vaccination is a community responsibility,” she said.
She said that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, two of the most powerful opponents of mask mandates had spread disinformation that is “hurting people in terms of their public health.”
The charge against Mr. Abbott was echoed earlier in the weekend, when officials in Austin, Texas, warned that the situation was desperate.
“We are in the single digits of I.C.U. beds available,” said Bryce Bencivengo, a spokesman for Austin’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. He said patients in emergency rooms were being forced to wait for space.
The mayor of Austin, Steve Adler, said that the crisis could have been avoided if Mr. Abbott had not barred local government officials from issuing mandates on masking.
The nation’s top infectious disease doctor, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, said on “Meet the Press” that vaccine mandates for adults were necessary to give children who were not yet eligible for inoculation a “shield of vaccinated people.” The United States has yet to authorize a vaccine for children under 12.
Pediatric cases of Covid are still a fraction compared with adults, but they have risen sharply, just as schools are preparing to reopen.
No major school districts have abandoned plans to reopen, but Dr. Fauci was blunt in his assessment. “You’ve got to protect the children,” he said.
Ethan Hauser and
Global Roundup
Guards in biohazard suits, ready to stop anyone from leaving. Athletes giving interviews from behind plastic walls, speaking through microphones. All-day armpit thermometers, with tiny transmitters to sound the alarm should someone develop a fever.
With the Winter Olympics in Beijing just six months away, the Chinese authorities are planning elaborate precautions against Covid-19. The measures are expected to go far beyond those taken at the Tokyo Games, which ended Sunday with more than 400 reported cases.
China has made clear that containing the virus is its top priority. On July 30, as case numbers were climbing in Tokyo, Beijing organizers announced plans to redesign their 39 Olympic venues. Workers are now dividing passageways lengthwise and installing new toilets and other facilities.
The design changes are supposed to ensure that athletes have practically no contact with referees, spectators or journalists, groups that will be kept separate from one another as well. The goal is to minimize cross-infection.
China has taken a zero-tolerance approach to the virus since bringing it largely under control last year. The borders are almost completely sealed, and the authoritarian government has quashed sporadic outbreaks by locking down entire cities and mobilizing large numbers of people to test and trace infections. Scattered outbreaks of the Delta variant in recent days have officials even more concerned than usual.
In Tokyo, the authorities barred almost all Olympic spectators and had participants from overseas stay in designated hotels and ride special buses to events. But enforcement was haphazard, and news outlets found many violations.
China plans a stricter approach. For the Winter Games, to be held from Feb. 4 to Feb. 20, the authorities intend to wall off China’s 1.4 billion people from essentially all athletes, judges, drivers, guides, journalists and others associated with the event.
In other developments around the world:
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On Monday, France began requiring proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test for access to cafes, restaurants, bars and long-distance trains as part of a push against the Delta variant. The restrictions went into effect as France’s health pass — already required for entering cinemas, theaters, concert halls, museums, discos and a host of other venues — is now being more broadly applied. Protests against the measures have been held weekly even as vaccination rates have risen.
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The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has been canceled, officials said Sunday, citing the “exponential growth of new Covid cases in New Orleans and the region.” The festival, normally held in the spring, had been rescheduled for Oct. 8 to 17 in the hope that more people would be vaccinated by then. Cases in Louisiana hit a record high this month, with the state reporting an average of 4,600 new cases a day in the past week, according to a New York Times database.
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Health authorities in Germany say vaccines prevented more than 38,300 deaths over the pandemic’s third wave in the spring. According to a scientific study released on Friday, as many as 706,000 infections were prevented. More than 60 percent of people have received at least one dose, and nearly 55 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.
Nine coronavirus patients died on Monday in a hospital in southern Russia after a system that supplied oxygen failed, according to statements by local authorities and reports in Russian media.
The deaths are the latest in a series of accidents and fires related to oxygen supply in Russian hospitals, which have struggled to treat a new Delta variant-driven wave of patients. About 19 percent of Russia’s total population is now fully vaccinated.
There were 71 patients in the intensive care unit at the Republican Clinical Hospital for Emergency Medicine in Vladikavkaz when the system failed, the regional health ministry said in a statement.
The hospital relied on an oxygen generator that fed the gas through an underground pipe to the intensive care unit, Interfax reported. The underground pipe was worn out and had a leak, the news agency reported.
The report cited the acting regional health minister, Soslan Tebiyev, saying doctors were carefully monitoring the survivors. “The rest of the patients are strictly controlled,” he said. Those patients get oxygen from canisters, reports said.
Twenty patients died last fall in Rostov-on-Don, also in Russia’s south, when a hospital ran out of oxygen. In a separate incident last fall, the oxygen supply of a hospital in the Ural Mountain city of Chelyabinsk exploded and set the hospital on fire, forcing the evacuation of 158 critically ill Covid-19 patients. Local media reported two patients died in that incident.
Pilar Villarraga had spent much of the summer counting down the days until her daughter Sophia’s birthday. In early August, Sophia would turn 12 — and become officially eligible for a Covid-19 vaccination. “I didn’t want her to start school without the vaccine,” said Ms. Villarraga, who lives in Doral, Fla.
And then, in late July, just two weeks before the milestone birthday, Sophia caught the coronavirus. At first, she just had a fever, but on July 25, after four quiet days convalescing at home, her ribs began to hurt. The next day, Ms. Villarraga took her to the emergency room, where chest X-rays revealed that Sophia had developed pneumonia. She soon began coughing up blood.
Sophia was promptly admitted to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, in Miami. Her parents and their friends were in shock. “I didn’t think that kids could get that sick,” Ms. Villarraga said.
Sophia was one of roughly 130 children with Covid-19 who were admitted to U.S. hospitals that day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hospitalizations of children have been climbing since early July; from July 31 to Aug. 6, 216 children with Covid were being admitted a day, on average, nearly matching the figure of 217 daily admissions during the pandemic’s peak in early January.
Hospitals in coronavirus hot spots have been particularly hard hit. On a single day last week, Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock admitted 19 children with Covid; Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, in St. Petersburg, Fla., had 15; and Children’s Mercy Kansas City, in Missouri, had 12. Each hospital had multiple children in its intensive care unit.
These reports have raised concerns that what once seemed like the smallest of silver linings — that Covid-19 mostly spared children — might be changing. Some doctors on the front lines say they are seeing more critically ill children now than at any previous point of the pandemic, and that the highly contagious Delta variant is probably to blame.
China has fired or reprimanded dozens of officials nationwide, saying they mishandled a coronavirus outbreak that is the country’s worst in more than a year.
More than 30 people in four provinces, including government leaders, hospital staff and airport and tourism personnel, have been punished over the outbreak, according to the state-backed tabloid Global Times. At least 15 were in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, where the outbreak began late last month at the city’s international airport.
The outbreak, which is driven by the more contagious Delta variant of the virus, has since grown to hundreds of cases and spread to more than half of mainland China’s 31 provinces, challenging the government’s zero-tolerance approach toward the virus.
Officials have also been disciplined in Zhangjiajie, a tourist city in Hunan Province; Yantai, a coastal city in Shandong Province; and Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, which was recently hit by deadly flooding.
In Yangzhou, a city in Jiangsu Province that has replaced Nanjing as the country’s biggest virus hot spot, at least eight officials were punished or reprimanded after mismanagement at a testing site caused more than 20 infections, the government said.
“The epidemic is in a concentrated outbreak period,” Wu Zhenglong, the governor of Jiangsu, said on Saturday, according to Yangzhou Daily. “The situation of epidemic prevention and control is very serious and complicated.”
After largely eradicating the virus early last year, China has responded to periodic outbreaks with mass testing and strict lockdowns of neighborhoods or entire cities. The central city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, tested all of its 11 million residents over the weekend after reporting its first Delta cases earlier this month. Mass testing is also being carried out in Yangzhou, Zhengzhou and other cities.
While countries like Singapore are shifting their strategies after concluding that it’s unrealistic to insist on zero virus cases, Chinese officials have resisted that idea. Gao Qiang, the former health minister, wrote in the official People’s Daily on Saturday that China’s antivirus measures were “a double insurance strategy” that combines precise epidemic control with widespread vaccination, rather than trying to achieve herd immunity, let alone “living with the virus.”
Mr. Gao said the approach to the virus in countries like Britain and the United States, which he characterized as “coexistence,” had had serious consequences for the world. “We must not make the same mistakes,” he wrote.
On the July evening that he was diagnosed with Covid-19, 7-year-old Ethan Chandra lay in bed with a high fever next to his mother, holding her hand and whispering, “I’m scared I’m going to die.”
His mother, Alison Chandra, didn’t know what to say. Although a vast majority of children his age who test positive for the virus either don’t have symptoms or fully recover, Ethan has heart and lung defects that make him especially vulnerable.
His family in Lehi, Utah, has spent much of the past year and a half at home to keep him safe. In November, Ethan’s parents tested positive for the virus after his father briefly returned to work in person, but they managed to avoid infecting their children. But recently, Ethan got Covid-19 anyway.
The Delta variant has led to a surge in cases and hospitalizations across the country, leaving families with high-risk children who are not eligible to be vaccinated especially concerned. A growing number of parents have shared their stories online, accompanied with desperate pleas for people to get inoculated.
Many parents say they are angry and exhausted from trying to keep their children safe while balancing the emotional trauma of more than a year of isolation.
Case counts among U.S. children have increased over the summer. In the last week of July, the number of new cases doubled to 71,726 from 38,654 the previous week, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
There is no estimate for the number of American children who are at higher risk from the virus because of medical conditions, said Dr. Dennis Z. Kuo, a former chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Children With Disabilities. But he estimates about 19 percent of children have special health care needs, and 1 percent have severe medical complications.
Within those groups, he said, children with heart, lung or immune system disorders are especially at risk from the virus, as well as those with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
Rick Bright, the virologist who claimed the Trump administration retaliated against him last year by ousting him from his job, has settled his whistle-blower complaint against the federal government and will receive back pay and compensation for “emotional stress and reputational damage,” his lawyer said Monday.
Dr. Bright’s removal last April as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency created upheaval within the Department of Health and Human Services in the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic.
He said he was removed from his post after he pressed for rigorous vetting of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug embraced by President Donald J. Trump as a coronavirus treatment, and that the administration had put “politics and cronyism ahead of science.”
Those allegations are still being investigated by the Office of Special Counsel, which protects federal whistle-blowers. Under Mr. Trump, H.H.S. officials denied any wrongdoing.
The Biden administration confirmed the settlement of the case on Monday in a statement praising Dr. Bright, who advised President Biden during his transition.
“The agency would like to thank Dr. Bright for his dedicated public service and for the contributions he made to addressing the Covid-19 pandemic while he served as BARDA director,” the statement said. “We wish him well in his new endeavors.”
Neither side disclosed details or specifics of the settlement. But Dr. Bright’s lawyer, Debra S. Katz, said her client had been compensated to the fullest extent allowed by the law. She said he will receive back pay, as well as damages to cover the costs of private security and temporary housing that he required after receiving threats. He will also receive compensation, Ms. Katz said, for distress “associated with the disparaging comments and threats” made by administration officials including Mr. Trump, who had blasted Dr. Bright on Twitter as a “creep” and a “disgruntled employee.”
Dr. Bright now works for the Rockefeller Foundation, where he is developing a new institute devoted to pandemic prevention that will function as a hub for scientists in government, the private sector and academia. The goal is to identify new pathogens, he said in an interview. He said he was glad to have the episode behind him.
“Going through the assault that I experienced from the last administration, going through the public criticism from the White House and H.H.S. leadership when I was just trying to do my job, put a lot of stress on me,” he said. “They were trying to find anything they could to disparage me and discredit me.”
After clashing with his bosses, Dr. Bright was assigned to a narrower role at the National Institutes of Health to work on a “Shark Tank”-style program to develop coronavirus treatments. He later went on sick leave because of hypertension, a spokeswoman said at the time. In the interview Monday, Dr. Bright said that at the height of the controversy, he also received a diagnosis of skin cancer.
Ultimately, he quit the government — a departure that Ms. Katz characterized as effectively a termination, because, she said, he had not been given any meaningful work.
Ms. Katz said the settlement was especially satisfying to her. “Many times, whistle-blowers come forward and that’s the end of their career,” she said. But Dr. Bright, she said, has “gone from being persona non grata under the Trump administration to being a respected and important subject matter expert.”
South Korea on Monday will open its vaccination booking system to adults ages 18 to 49, a major step forward in its troubled vaccine drive as it struggles to contain its worst outbreak of the pandemic.
Inoculations for this age group, which encompasses about 16 million people, will take place through Sept. 30, and recipients will have a choice of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. Previously, the only way people in this age group could get inoculated was to sign up for leftover vaccine doses as the government focused on immunizing older people.
South Korea’s vaccination program, which began in February, has been hampered by supply shortages and technical issues. When the booking system was opened to adults in their 50s in July, as many as 10 million people logged on to the government website simultaneously, crashing the system.
“Registering as fast as possible is my first priority,” said Shin Minseo, an office worker in Seoul, the capital. “But if the age range is 18 to 49, I’m worried about the sheer number of people applying and the site crashing.”
To prevent that from happening, the government said that newly eligible people would be allowed to register for appointments only on designated days based on their birth dates.
About 40 percent of South Korea’s population has received at least one shot of a vaccine, according to a New York Times database, making it among the least vaccinated in the Group of 20 industrialized economies. Officials say their goal is for 70 percent of the population, or 36 million people, to receive at least one shot by the end of September.
South Koreans have become more anxious for shots as the country faces a fourth wave of infections driven by the Delta variant. The capital region, where the cases have been concentrated, is under the most restrictive level of social distancing regulations, with gatherings of more than two people prohibited after 6 p.m. Last week the government said those restrictions would be extended for two weeks through Aug. 22.
A federal judge on Sunday granted Norwegian Cruise Line’s request for a preliminary injunction, temporarily allowing the company to require proof of vaccination from passengers despite a Florida law that bans businesses from doing so.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office said in an emailed statement on Monday that it plans to appeal the ruling. Mr. DeSantis signed a state law in May that set fines for businesses requiring customers to provide proof of vaccination.
Norwegian’s next cruise ship to sail from Florida is set for Aug. 15, out of Miami. In a statement on Sunday, the company said the ruling would allow it to “operate in the safest way possible.”
“We welcome today’s ruling that allows us to sail with 100 percent fully vaccinated guests and crew, which we believe is the safest and most prudent way to resume cruise operations amid this global pandemic,” said Frank Del Rio, the president and chief executive.
In the order, Judge Kathleen Williams of U.S. District Court noted that scientific research shows that “cruise lines are hotbeds for Covid-19 transmission.” She also cited the potential for the cruise line to suffer financially if Norwegian was forced to cancel trips or reroute around Florida.
Judge Williams wrote that the “defendant fails to articulate or provide any evidence of harms that the state would suffer if an injunction was entered,” and added that Norwegian “has demonstrated that public health will be jeopardized if it is required to suspend its vaccination requirement.”
A preliminary injunction generally will stay in effect until there is a final ruling in a lawsuit.
The judge’s order came as coronavirus cases have risen sharply in Florida. Over the past two weeks, cases have increased 84 percent and hospitalizations have doubled, according to New York Times data.
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