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N.Y.C. to Eliminate Remote Learning For Fall

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New York City will no longer have a remote schooling option come fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday, in a major step toward fully reopening the nation’s largest school system.

This school year, most of the city’s roughly one million students — about 600,000 of them — stayed at home for classes. When the new school year starts on Sept. 13, all students and staff will be back in school buildings full-time, Mr. de Blasio said.

“This is going to be crucial for families,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference. “So many parents are relieved, I know.”

New York is one of the first big U.S. cities to remove the option of remote learning altogether for the coming school year. But widespread predictions that online classes would be a fixture for school districts may have been premature. Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey announced last week that the state would no longer have remote classes come fall, after similar announcements by leaders in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

in a statement, saying the city’s teachers union wanted “as many students back in school as safely as possible.”

Still, he acknowledged that “a small number of students with extreme medical challenges” may face difficulty returning to in-person learning with the pandemic still a threat and said that a remote option could be necessary for those children.

Mr. de Blasio said that the school system would have “plenty of protections” in place when the school year begins. But his announcement will no doubt alarm some parents who remain concerned about sending their children back into school buildings, even as the pandemic ebbs in the United States.

Recent interviews with city parents have shown that while many families are looking forward to resuming normal schooling, some are hesitant about returning to classrooms.

been most likely to keep their children learning from home over the past year.

During the mayor’s news conference, the city’s schools chancellor, Meisha Porter, said there would be “no Covid-related accommodations,” signaling that teachers and school staff will no longer be granted medical waivers to work from home.

The city’s school system is currently planning for masks to be required in school buildings, Ms. Porter said. Schools would also follow the C.D.C.’s social-distancing protocol, which currently recommends elementary school students remain at least 3 feet apart in classrooms. Both those policies could change by the fall.

New York, like districts across the country, has struggled to make remote learning successful. Online classes have been frustrating for many students, and even disastrous for some, including children with disabilities.

By one estimate, three million students across the United States, roughly the school-age population of Florida, stopped going to classes, virtual or in person, after the pandemic began. A disproportionate number of those disengaged students are low-income Black, Latino and Native American children who have struggled to keep up in classrooms that are partly or fully remote.

Mr. de Blasio, who has been criticized for not doing more to improve the quality of online education, has said that remote learning is inherently inferior.

It has also been extraordinarily complex for the city to run two parallel school systems, one in person and one online, with many students switching between the two every few days. So many students and teachers operating from home made it nearly impossible for some schools to offer normal schedules.

became eligible for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Pfizer and BioNTech plan in September to submit requests for authorization of the vaccine in children ages 2 to 11.

“The data has been unbelievably clear,” Mr. de Blasio explained on Monday. “Vaccination has worked ahead of schedule; it’s had even more impact than we thought it would.”

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N.Y.C. will eliminate remote learning for the fall, in a major step toward reopening.

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New York City will no longer have a remote schooling option come fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced during a television appearance on Monday, a major step toward fully reopening the nation’s largest school system.

This school year, most of the city’s roughly one million students — about 600,000 — stayed at home for classes. When the new school year starts on Sept. 13, all students and staff will be back in school buildings full-time, Mr. de Blasio said.

New York is one of the first big cities to remove the option of remote learning altogether for the coming school year. But widespread predictions that online classes would be a fixture for school districts may have been premature. Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey announced last week that the state would no longer have remote classes come fall, after similar announcements by leaders in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

New York City’s decision will make it much easier to restore the school system to a prepandemic state, since students and teachers will no longer be split between homes and school buildings.

been most likely to keep their children learning from home over the past year.

New York, like districts across the country, has struggled to make remote learning successful. Online classes have been frustrating for many students, and even disastrous for some, including children with disabilities.

By one estimate, three million students across the United States, roughly the school-age population of Florida, stopped going to classes, virtual or in person, after the pandemic began. A disproportionate number of those disengaged students are low-income Black, Latino and Native American children who have struggled to keep up in classrooms that are partly or fully remote.

Mr. de Blasio, who has been criticized for not doing more to improve the quality of online education, has said that remote learning is inherently inferior.

extraordinarily complex for the city to run two parallel school systems, one in person and one online, with many students switching between the two every few days. So many students and teachers operating from home made it nearly impossible for some schools to offer normal schedules.

For the past few months, Mr. de Blasio said he expected the city to keep some kind of remote learning option for the fall. But he and his aides changed their minds in recent weeks, officials said, as virus rates plummeted throughout the city and as children 12 and older became eligible for the Pfizer vaccine.

The mayor is expected to announce more details about the city’s school reopening plan at a news conference later on Monday.

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Taiwan, excluded from a world health forum, blames Chinese interference.

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Taiwan’s government on Monday criticized the World Health Organization for capitulating to China after it failed to secure an invite to an annual health meeting convened by the international agency.

For months, Taiwan and a coalition of supporters, including the United States, had been intensely lobbying for the self-governed island to be granted observer status at the meeting of the World Health Assembly, or W.H.A., which began today and will be held virtually through June 1.

China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, has blocked the island from participating in the assembly since 2016. But Taiwan’s calls for inclusion have gained international attention in light of its successful handling of the coronavirus pandemic for nearly a year and a half.

This month, the countries of the Group of 7 — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States — for the first time voiced their joint support for Taiwan’s bid for observer status in the W.H.A., the top decision-making body of the W.H.O. Chinese officials condemned the G-7 announcement as “gross interference” in its internal affairs.

a statement released on Monday, Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, rebuked the W.H.O. for its “continued indifference” to the health of the island’s 23.5 million people and urged the organization to “maintain a professional and neutral stance” and “reject China’s political interference.”

Chen Shih-chung, Taiwan’s health and welfare minister, added that the island’s exclusion from the meeting was “not only a loss for Taiwan but also the rest of the world,” according to the statement.

“The world needs to share all available information and expertise in a collective fight against disease,” Mr. Chen said.

Taiwan’s exclusion from the meeting comes as the island’s authorities are racing to tame a surge in coronavirus infections that has prompted what is essentially its first lockdown since the start of the pandemic. After months of reporting very few locally transmitted cases of the virus, officials have confirmed more than 3,000 new cases in the past three weeks.

On Monday, the health authorities added 590 cases of local transmission to the total, including 256 infections that were confirmed because of delayed reporting. Officials also confirmed six new deaths from the virus, bringing the overall death toll to 29.

Taiwan’s health authorities on Monday also accused mainland Chinese actors of taking advantage of the outbreak to spread disinformation. Speaking at a news briefing, Chen Tsung-yen of the Central Epidemic Command Center in Taiwan said that reports of the government’s faking coronavirus data and of dead Covid-19 patients dumped in rivers had been spread by accounts linked to overseas internet addresses.

Mr. Chen added that other signs that mainland Chinese actors were involved in the spread of disinformation included the use of phrases commonly associated with the mainland and the inclusion of the simplified characters used in China, as opposed to the traditional script that is used in Taiwan.

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The pandemic has taken a devastating toll on undocumented women in New York.

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The nearly half a million undocumented immigrants who live in New York City were devastated by the pandemic, stricken by the virus and the economic fallout it caused and ineligible for stimulus checks and the unemployment benefits that kept many New Yorkers afloat.

Undocumented women were hit particularly hard, a recent estimate by the Fiscal Policy Institute found. Many had low-wage jobs in the service sector. Some were suddenly obligated to stay home with children when schools closed.

Roughly 35,000 undocumented women in New York City had too little food to eat this past March.

After months of demonstrations by groups that support immigrants, New York state lawmakers approved a budget that includes a $2.1 billion excluded-workers fund for people who are ineligible for other pandemic aid because they are undocumented. It is the largest package of its kind in the country.

The Times took a deep look at Isabel Galán, who lives in the South Bronx with her three children. In the year after the pandemic shut down the economy of one of the world’s richest and most expensive cities, Ms. Galán and her children have lived on $100 a week.

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Vaccination Rates Take on Regional Differences

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Almost half of Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. But the U.S. vaccination story varies widely across regions, with New England surging ahead of the national average, while much of the South is lagging far behind.

In five of the six New England states, over 60 percent of residents are at least partly vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a different story in the South, where Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee have the country’s lowest rates of residents who have received at least one shot. The rates in those states are all below 40 percent, with Mississippi, at 33 percent, at the bottom of the list.

The White House and state governments, after relying on mass vaccination sites for months, are turning their focus to more targeted, smaller-scale efforts to vaccinate underserved, harder-to-reach communities.

“This next phase of the vaccination campaign was — will be driven, more than anything, by the people and organizations and communities who help to vaccinate their families, their friends and others in their neighborhoods,” Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, said on Friday during a White House news conference. “It’s why we’ve been saying that addressing access, motivation and vaccine confidence requires an all-hands-on-deck approach.”

Cahaba Medical Care, which has 17 clinics in underserved communities in Alabama.

“Conversations with people you trust have always been important to us,” he said on Friday. “I’ve been on Facebook Live. I say: ‘Ask us the hard questions. Let’s talk.’ We pivot to the individual exam room, where they trust me to answer. We’re having success with that approach, but it’s not at the speed that the pandemic needs.”

The low rate in the South worries Thomas A. LaVeist, an expert on health equity and dean of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University in New Orleans.

“You have the carrot and stick,” he said. “I’m beginning to think that the stick is the more likely scenario.”

Dr. LaVeist said the incentive that would work fastest for adults would be mandates by employers, who are uniquely positioned to require large numbers of Americans who otherwise would not receive a vaccination to do so because their employment depends on it. The federal government has issued guidance that says employers can require workers to get a Covid-19 vaccine and bar them from the workplace if they refuse.

a Kaiser Family Foundation survey that found 28 percent of those who were employed said they would be more likely to get vaccinated if they were given time off to receive and recover from the vaccine. Another 20 percent said they would be more likely to get vaccinated if their shot was administered at their workplace. The survey looked at those who are unvaccinated, but who wanted to get vaccinated as soon as possible

Dr. LaVeist and other experts, however, say the biggest hurdle among the vaccine hesitant is anxiety over possible side effects. “How was it possible to deploy the vaccine so quickly? If more people understand that, then more people will take the vaccine,” Dr. LaVeist said. “Corners were not cut.”

A recent New York Times report from Greene County, a rural area in northeastern Tennessee, revealed the most common reason for vaccine apprehension was fear that the vaccine was developed in haste and that long-term side effects were unknown. Their decisions are also entangled in a web of views about autonomy, science and authority, as well as a powerful regional, somewhat romanticized self-image: We don’t like outsiders messing in our business.

Vaccine hesitancy in any U.S. region poses a threat to all Americans, experts warn, because the longer it takes to vaccinate people, the more time that the virus has to spread, mutate and possibly gain the ability to evade vaccines.

“My big concern is that there is going to be a variant that’s going to outsmart the vaccine,” Dr. LaVeist said. “That’s what viruses do. That’s their strategy for surviving. Then we’ll have a new problem. We’ll have to revaccinate.”

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The Pandemic is Ebbing, But What About Governors’ Emergency Powers?

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As the threat from the coronavirus pandemic grew in early 2020, so did many governors’ executive powers. Without a federal plan, it fell to the states to issue lockdown and stay-at-home orders, mandate masks, and close schools and businesses.

Nearly 14 months later, with states moving to reopen amid a drastic drop in new cases, legislators have been asking about the current need for restrictions. And just how much sweeping authority do governors need to have during a public health emergency.

Voters in Pennsylvania this week became the first in the United States to help check an executive’s authority during an emergency period. The state’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, and its Republican-controlled legislature sparred over Mr. Wolf’s emergency actions, which included closing schools and many businesses, during the pandemic.

Two measures passed on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, both with about 54 percent approval. The state’s Constitution will be amended to end a governor’s emergency disaster declaration after 21 days. And lawmakers, with a simple majority, will be given the only authority to extend or end the emergency disaster declaration. The ballot questions had been pushed forward by Republican legislators.

Mr. Wolf said this week. “So I’m looking forward to working with the legislature to figure out how to make this work.”

In New Jersey, a Democrat-led legislature took the initial step this week to roll back dozens of Covid-related orders issued by Gov. Phil Murphy, also a Democrat. But the bill that was introduced also leaves the governor with expansive powers to apply new measures in an emergency. Mr. Murphy is one of two governors to keep an indoor mask mandate, even for vaccinated people; the other is Hawaii’s.

New executive orders related to the pandemic are still being announced. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, said on Tuesday that counties, cities, public health authorities and local government officials in his state would be prohibited from requiring people to wear masks. His order came days after federal health officials announced new guidance that encouraged people who were fully vaccinated to forgo masks in most situations.

Democratic lawmakers in Connecticut, though, supported an extension this week of Gov. Ned Lamont’s expanded pandemic powers through mid-July. They were set to expire this week. Lawmakers argued that executive orders were still needed to manage the vaccine rollout and federal relief funds.

curtailed Mr. Cuomo’s emergency powers, and in late April, it suspended some of his pandemic directives, including a rule that required New Yorkers to order food with their alcohol orders at bars and restaurants.

Mr. Cuomo also faces federal and state investigations, including one looking into his reporting of deaths at nursing home during the pandemic.

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Germany to Ban Most Travel from U.K. Over Covid Variant Concerns

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Germany is banning most travel from Britain starting on Sunday amid concerns about the spread of a coronavirus variant first discovered in India, the German authorities said on Friday.

German citizens and residents of Germany will still be allowed to enter the country from Britain but will be required to self-isolate for two weeks upon arrival, Germany’s public health institution said as it classified Britain as an area of concern because of the variant.

The move came just days after Britain reopened its museums and cinemas and resumed allowing indoor service in pubs and restaurants. Many people in Britain have been looking forward to traveling abroad in the coming months, and Spain is set to welcome visitors arriving from Britain without a coronavirus test starting on Monday.

serve as an early warning for other European countries that have relaxed restrictions. This month, the World Health Organization declared the mutation a “variant of concern,” and although scientists’ knowledge about it remains limited, it is believed to be more transmissible than the virus’s initial form.

dozen or so other countries that Germany considers areas of concern because of variants. As of Thursday, Britain had 3,424 cases of the variant first discovered in India, according to government data, up from 1,313 cases the previous week.

Dozens of nations, including European countries and the United States, suspended travel from Britain or imposed strict restrictions earlier in the pandemic amid concerns about the spread of a variant first detected in England.

Britain’s Office for National Statistics said on Friday that the percentage of people testing positive for the coronavirus in England had showed “early signs of a potential increase” in the week ending May 15, although it said rates remained low compared with earlier this year. At its peak in late December, Britain recorded more than active 81,000 cases, compared with about 2,000 this month.

The country’s inoculation campaign is continuing apace, with an increased focus on second doses in an effort to thwart the sort of spikes that led to restrictions imposed earlier this year.

said on Saturday that people over 32 could now book an appointment.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to proceed with a plan to lift all restrictions by June 21, although scientists have warned that the spread of the B.1.617 variant could delay such plans. Most cases of the variant have been found in northwestern England, with some in London.

In Germany, the restrictions on travel from Britain come as outdoor service resumed on Friday in cafes, restaurants and beer gardens after months of closure. Chancellor Angela Merkel urged people to “treat these opportunities very responsibly.”

“The virus,” she said, “has not disappeared.”

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Indoors? Outdoors? Masks? Swimming? Experts weigh in on activities for children.

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As vaccinated Americans return to many parts of their prepandemic lives this summer, one group will be left out: children under 12, who cannot yet be vaccinated. So what should families with young children do when everyone else starts socializing again?

We asked experts as part of an informal New York Times survey. The group of 828 who responded included epidemiologists, who study public health, and pediatric infectious disease physicians, who research and treat children sick with diseases like Covid-19.

They noted that this phase was temporary. Pfizer has said vaccines for children ages 2 and up could come as soon as September. Of the survey respondents with young children, 92 percent said they would vaccinate their own children as soon as a shot was approved.

In the meantime, families with young children may need to retain more precautions, like masking and distancing, than their childless friends do. But they said some minimally risky activities could help counteract the mental health effects of pandemic living.

“Kids need to be able to be kids,” said Mac McCullough, an associate professor at Arizona State. “Outdoor activity isn’t perfectly safe, but its benefits are likely to outweigh its risks across an entire population.”

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Covax to Receive 200 Million Johnson & Johnson Covid Doses

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Covax, the program to vaccinate the world’s poorest countries, will receive 200 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot coronavirus vaccine through an advance purchase agreement announced on Friday. The deal may eventually boost a vaccination campaign that has fallen significantly behind on its goals.

Gavi, the public-private health partnership co-leading Covax, will purchase the doses at a not-for-profit price from Johnson & Johnson. Gavi said that the goal is to supply the 200 million doses this year.

But it was not clear how quickly those doses will start being delivered or whether they can help turn around the struggling Covax program. Jake Sargent, a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson, said the company is “striving to deliver vaccine doses as quickly as possible.”

Only 71 million doses have been shipped out so far through the Covax program, the vast majority of which have been of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine. In March, the World Health Organization, another co-leader of Covax, had said 237 million doses would be allocated to participating countries by the end of May.

the growing gap in vaccination coverage between the world’s rich and poor. Only 0.3 percent of the vaccine doses administered globally have been given in the 29 poorest countries, home to about 9 percent of the world’s population.

Covax has been underfunded and behind schedule even before it faced its most significant blow last month: India, facing a devastating coronavirus crisis, halted vaccine exports out of the country, meaning that Covax could no longer receive doses from its major supplier, the Serum Institute of India. The Serum Institute signaled this week that it would not be able to provide vaccines beyond India before the end of this year.

The massive shortfall in supply has left low-income countries increasingly dependent on donations from wealthy countries. President Biden has pledged to donate 80 million doses of vaccines, most from AstraZeneca, and some of which are expected to be given through Covax. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Friday that the bloc aims to donate 100 million vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries this year.

Other vaccine makers have also said they would step up supply to low-income countries as they fight a push, supported by the Biden administration, to increase vaccine supply by waiving intellectual property protections on Covid vaccines. Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer, said on Friday that the company expects to deliver two billion doses of its vaccine to developing countries in the next 18 months. That projection reflects existing deals with governments, anticipated future agreements and Pfizer’s pledge to supply 40 million doses to Covax.

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India Ramps Up Coronavirus Testing

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The Indian government on Thursday said it had carried out 2.5 million coronavirus tests in 24 hours, the most in a single day since the pandemic began and part of an effort to try to help contain the spread of the country’s devastating second wave.

Balram Bhargava, the director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, a top government body, said that in the last week, daily average testing had been between 1.6 million to 2 million tests. The government hopes to increase the number of daily tests to 4.5 million per day by the end of June.

India has been devastated by a surge in virus cases and deaths, many of which are believed by experts to have gone uncounted. The increase in testing has largely come from an uptick in use of rapid antigen tests. India’s health officials said they increased the share of antigen tests to 60 percent of the overall number of tests administered because labs have been overwhelmed and results from P.C.R. tests come with a longer wait.

Antigen tests are generally considered less reliable than P.C.R., and may mistakenly identify uninfected people as carrying the virus. But the virus is spreading to rural parts of the country where the health infrastructure is deeply underfunded. For some areas, rapid antigen tests are the only option because the distribution is in the hands of government.

said on Twitter. “Terribly worried that there is a Covid surge in rural India that is going largely unchecked & undetected.”

The council that Mr. Bhargava leads approved the use of a self-administered rapid antigen test kit that was developed by Mylab Discovery Solutions, an Indian company, and gives results in 15 minutes. The company is aiming to ramp up production to 60 million kits per month within the next few weeks.

“This easy-to-use test combines a mobile app so that a user can know positive status, submit the result to I.C.M.R directly for traceability, and know what to do next,” said Sujit Jain, the director of Mylab Discovery Solutions. “We are sure this small step will be a big leap in mitigating the second and subsequent waves.”

Vaccinating India’s population of 1.4 billion people is a challenge. At the current rate of administering about 1.8 million doses a day, it would take the country more than three years to vaccinate 80 percent of its population.

deaths from Covid-19 and Covid-related causes are likely to be two to three times the number that countries have recorded in their official data, because of the limited capacity of many countries to test their people and other weaknesses in official health data.

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