Spring Break

Heading Home for the Vaccine: One Expat’s Trans-Atlantic Journey

I should mention that Covid is not my family’s first rodeo in terms of social distancing and extreme health-related stress. In 2011, our twins were born at just 23 weeks gestation, weighing 1.5 pounds each and requiring ventilators for about six weeks. We spent their first year isolating in Maplewood, N.J., awash in sanitizer, with pulse oximeters hanging from our necks, masking when needed and keeping them — and ourselves — out of circulation until their lungs had recovered from the damage caused by the ventilators before getting exposed to the typical childhood respiratory infections.

The experience taught us a lot about tolerating limitations and making the most of every easy moment that we could, so by July 2020, with daily Covid infection rates low, we were looking for pandemic silver linings. We loaded Flecha, our 5-month old Covid puppy, and ourselves into our van and zigzagged across Spain — from Cádiz at the southernmost tip to Asturias on the northern coast.

One place we didn’t plan to go last summer was the United States, by then the world leader in Covid cases and where outbreaks in Sun Belt states like Florida and Texas forever crushed the fantasy that the virus would disappear in warm weather.

My parents, who live in New Jersey, are in their late 80s and my children under 10, so we try to bring them together often, and we kept optimistically booking tickets last year in case the pandemic suddenly abated. But as international restrictions took hold, all of those flights were eventually canceled by the airline.

In the meantime, many friends in Spain had gotten sick, but thankfully most recovered. Then in early August, we lost a wonderfully gregarious friend who, at 52, was somehow gone just nine days after his diagnosis. A couple of similarly startling deaths followed and it was like the music stopped — we reverted almost to lockdown protocols, which was maybe a good thing since autumn brought a new wave of infections that has barely ebbed since.

From the outset my greatest fear was that my husband and I, who both have underlying health issues, would get seriously ill at the same time, with no relatives in Madrid to care for our kids. Thus we’ve been vigilant — only meeting people outdoors and doing lots of home testing — an area where Spain is way ahead of the United States.

All of this was in the background at dinner one night in early March when we wondered if it was time to cancel our tickets to New York for spring break at the end of that month. The United States was then still registering massive daily infections, but also setting daily records for vaccines administered.

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Online Cheating Charges Upend Dartmouth Medical School

HANOVER, N.H. — Sirey Zhang, a first-year student at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, was on spring break in March when he received an email from administrators accusing him of cheating.

Dartmouth had reviewed Mr. Zhang’s online activity on Canvas, its learning management system, during three remote exams, the email said. The data indicated that he had looked up course material related to one question during each test, honor code violations that could lead to expulsion, the email said.

Mr. Zhang, 22, said he had not cheated. But when the school’s student affairs office suggested he would have a better outcome if he expressed remorse and pleaded guilty, he said he felt he had little choice but to agree. Now he faces suspension and a misconduct mark on his academic record that could derail his dream of becoming a pediatrician.

“What has happened to me in the last month, despite not cheating, has resulted in one of the most terrifying, isolating experiences of my life,” said Mr. Zhang, who has filed an appeal.

Dartmouth recently accused of cheating on remote tests while in-person exams were shut down because of the coronavirus. The allegations have prompted an on-campus protest, letters of concern to school administrators from more than two dozen faculty members and complaints of unfair treatment from the student government, turning the pastoral Ivy League campus into a national battleground over escalating school surveillance during the pandemic.

insecure, unfair and inaccurate.

cease using the exam-monitoring tools.

“These kinds of technical solutions to academic misconduct seem like a magic bullet,” said Shaanan Cohney, a cybersecurity lecturer at the University of Melbourne who researches remote learning software. But “universities which lack some of the structure or the expertise to understand these issues on a deeper level end up running into really significant trouble.”

At Dartmouth, the use of Canvas in the cheating investigation was unusual because the software was not designed as a forensic tool. Instead, professors post assignments on it and students submit their homework through it.

That has raised questions about Dartmouth’s methodology. While some students may have cheated, technology experts said, it would be difficult for a disciplinary committee to distinguish cheating from noncheating based on the data snapshots that Dartmouth provided to accused students. And in an analysis of the Canvas software code, The Times found instances in which the system automatically generated activity data even when no one was using a device.

“If other schools follow the precedent that Dartmouth is setting here, any student can be accused based on the flimsiest technical evidence,” said Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, who analyzed Dartmouth’s methodology.

Seven of the 17 accused students have had their cases dismissed. In at least one of those cases, administrators said, “automated Canvas processes are likely to have created the data that was seen rather than deliberate activity by the user,” according to a school email that students made public.

The 10 others have been expelled, suspended or received course failures and unprofessional-conduct marks on their records that could curtail their medical careers. Nine pleaded guilty, including Mr. Zhang, according to school documents; some have filed appeals.

Dr. Compton acknowledged that the investigation had caused distress on campus. But he said Geisel, founded in 1797 and one of the nation’s oldest medical schools, was obligated to hold its students accountable.

“We take academic integrity very seriously,” he said. “We wouldn’t want people to be able to be eligible for a medical license without really having the appropriate training.”

Instructure, the company that owns Canvas, did not return requests for comment.

A Hunt Begins

In January, a faculty member reported possible cheating during remote exams, Dr. Compton said. Geisel opened an investigation.

To hinder online cheating, Geisel requires students to turn on ExamSoft — a separate tool that prevents them from looking up study materials during tests — on the laptop or tablet on which they take exams. The school also requires students to keep a backup device nearby. The faculty member’s report made administrators concerned that some students may have used their backup device to look at course material on Canvas while taking tests on their primary device.

administrators held a virtual forum and were barraged with questions about the investigation. The conduct review committee then issued decisions in 10 of the cases, telling several students that they would be expelled, suspending others and requiring some to retake courses or repeat a year of school at a cost of nearly $70,000.

Many on campus were outraged. On April 21, dozens of students in white lab coats gathered in the rain in front of Dr. Compton’s office to protest. Some held signs that said “BELIEVE YOUR STUDENTS” and “DUE PROCESS FOR ALL” in indigo letters, which dissolved in the rain into blue splotches.

Several students said they were now so afraid of being unfairly targeted in a data-mining dragnet that they had pushed the medical school to offer in-person exams with human proctors. Others said they had advised prospective medical students against coming to Dartmouth.

“Some students have built their whole lives around medical school and now they’re being thrown out like they’re worthless,” said Meredith Ryan, a fourth-year medical student not connected to the investigation.

That same day, more than two dozen members of Dartmouth’s faculty wrote a letter to Dr. Compton saying that the cheating inquiry had created “deep mistrust” on campus and that the school should “make amends with the students falsely accused.”

In an email to students and faculty a week later, Dr. Compton apologized that Geisel’s handling of the cases had “added to the already high levels of stress and alienation” of the pandemic and said the school was working to improve its procedures.

The medical school has already made one change that could reduce the risk of false cheating allegations. For remote exams, new guidelines said, students are now “expected to log out of Canvas on all devices prior to testing.”

Mr. Zhang, the first-year student, said the investigation had shaken his faith in an institution he loves. He had decided to become a doctor, he said, to address disparities in health care access after he won a fellowship as a Dartmouth undergraduate to study medicine in Tanzania.

Mr. Zhang said he felt compelled to speak publicly to help reform a process he found traumatizing.

“I’m terrified,” he said. “But if me speaking up means that there’s at least one student in the future who doesn’t have to feel the way that I did, then it’s all worthwhile.”

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Puerto Rico Lifts Some Restrictions as Cases Plunge

The number of coronavirus cases in Puerto Rico is declining precipitously after soaring to record heights in March and April.

The U.S. territory experienced its worst outbreak of the pandemic this spring, with the seven-day average of new daily reported cases surging to a peak of 1,109 on April 20 from about 200 a day in mid-March.

The spike was driven by a confluence of factors, including the arrival of more contagious variants, a tide of spring break tourists and celebrations tied to Holy Week.

In early April, Gov. Pedro R. Pierluisi shut down in-person instruction at schools, reduced indoor capacity at restaurants and businesses and moved a nightly curfew up to 10 p.m. He also required tourists to present negative coronavirus tests, or face a $300 fine.

New York Times database. About 38 percent of people have received one dose of a Covid vaccine, and 26 percent are fully vaccinated.

lock down to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus, another blow to an island that suffered the ravages of Hurricane Maria in 2017, including a nearly yearlong loss of electricity; earthquakes in 2020; and a prolonged financial crisis.

On Thursday, Mr. Pierluisi announced that in-person school could resume, the nightly curfew would be pushed back to midnight and stores’ opening hours could stretch to 11 p.m. But he left in place the tighter capacity restrictions on some businesses and the tourist test requirement.

Reopening too soon had contributed to some earlier spikes, said Mónica Feliú-Mójer, a biologist and director of communications for Ciencia Puerto Rico, a nonprofit group that supports Puerto Rican researchers.

Dr. Feliú-Mójer said that even though cases appeared to be declining, they were still considerably higher than they had been before the recent surge. And she said she was concerned that the Mother’s Day holiday on Sunday could cause another spike.

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Article on Fourth Grader in ’60 Inspires Journalism Class

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Two years ago, on a soggy January day at the University of Oregon, Peter Laufer, a journalism professor, picked up a copy of The New York Times and presented his students with a reporting challenge.

He read from a feature at the bottom of Page 2 that highlights an article from The Times’s archives each day. It covered the experience in early 1960 of a fourth grader in Roseburg, Ore., not far from the college. She had written to her congressman for the names of Russian schoolchildren with whom she and her classmates could be pen pals, but the State Department denied the request, fearing they would be influenced by Soviet propaganda. The headline on the article read: “U.S. Bars a Girl’s Plea for Russian Pen Pals.”

Credit…The New York Times

“Find that girl!” Mr. Laufer told the class, an exercise designed to teach his students the skill of locating a source and, possibly, a bigger story. He thought she might still be living nearby.

For nine students, that simple instruction turned into a journalism project, which included an on-the-ground reporting trip in Nevada, digging through F.B.I. files from the National Archives and meeting face to face with modern-day fourth graders in southern Russia. This year, they published their findings in a book, “Classroom 15: How the Hoover F.B.I. Censored the Dreams of Innocent Oregon Fourth Graders.”

“It is such a small story, but it resonates so much with the time that it was in,” said Julia Mueller, who worked as the project’s managing editor and wrote a chapter in the book.

Using public records and online databases, the students located the subject of the article, Janice Hall, now married and living near Las Vegas. Her name had been misspelled as “Janis” in the original article, which made it more difficult for the class to locate her.

In 1960, during a tense period of the Cold War, a time when both the United States and the Soviet Union saw every move by the other country as a tactic aimed at world domination, Ms. Hall never had the chance to correspond with Russian students. The reporters were determined to understand why.

They abandoned the syllabus, renamed the course Janice 101 and devoted the rest of the term to unpacking the story.

Each student took a slightly different angle. One examined the fear of communism that had gripped the United States. Another reporter, who was headed to Las Vegas for a spring break trip with her sorority, made a detour to meet Ms. Hall. Yet another interviewed the family of Ray McFetridge, the teacher who had conceived of the pen-pal project and who had died years earlier. Students even obtained the F.B.I. case files on the incident through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“Why wouldn’t you want people to be friends with people across borders?” asked Zack Demars, the lead reporter on the project, outlining the students’ central question.

“I think we discovered that it was because of the level of fear at the time,” he added.

Mr. Laufer, a former NBC News correspondent, thought that a reporter needed to go to Russia to meet with current pupils. He wanted his journalism students to explore what would happen if they tried to connect schoolchildren today.

“We decided that we were not going to leave this hanging,” Mr. Laufer said. “If they couldn’t do it in 1960, we were going to do it in 2020.”

The class decided to take letters written by fourth graders in Yoncalla, Ore., and deliver them to Russian students.

In December 2019, months after the course ended, Mr. Demars took a 13-hour train ride from Moscow to the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, where Mr. Laufer had a contact who agreed to act as a guide.

Mr. Demars met with Russian fourth graders and gave them the letters from their American counterparts. They peppered him with questions: Did he have pets? Did he play sports? What did he think of Ariana Grande?

He also spoke with a group of high schoolers. They discussed American schools and movies and asked to follow him on Instagram. He thinks of these new followers as modern pen pals.

“I don’t talk to them all that often,” he said. “But we interact every now and then, and we have that level of human connection.”

Mr. Demars is now working as a reporter at a small local newspaper in Oregon. During the project, he learned the value of recording individual experiences, which can offer future generations insight into a particular era.

“When I’m out reporting, I’m looking for those things that are commonplace right now but deeply unique to the time period,” he said.

Ms. Hall, 70, said she was amazed to hear from the college students, who are about the age of her grandchildren.

She was also awed by the project, and particularly by Mr. Demars’s persistence: “He hooked up these two fourth grades,” she said, “which is exactly what we were trying to do.”

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Traveling this summer? Finding a rental car may be a challenge.

The pandemic has wreaked havoc in the rental car industry as companies responded to the plunge in travelers by selling off significant portions of their fleets. With travel rebounding over spring break, many travelers found themselves frustrated, stranded or price-gouged.

The shortage of rental cars is expected to continue this summer, meaning that travelers will need to strategize well in advance. That may mean reserving a vehicle before booking a flight, and searching for car rental locations beyond the airport.

There are, of course, transit alternatives to renting a car, including ride share services, bike share systems and public transportation.

Zach Whitehead, a software engineer in Cleveland, was recently on spring break with family in Fort Lauderdale and briefly considered a U-Haul when he couldn’t find a standard rental car.

“I said to my sister, ‘I’m assuming you don’t want to ride in the back of a box truck,’ and she agreed,” said Mr. Whitehead, who stuck to Uber for the week.

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‘The Start of a Comeback’ in 5 U.S. Cities

As Covid-19 vaccinations have picked up and more businesses reopen across the country, Easter weekend saw a resurgence of tourist activity in some cities, perhaps indicating a turning point for the struggling tourism industry.

Chip Rogers, the president and chief operating officer for the American Hotel & Lodging Association, the trade organization for the hospitality industry, said that before last weekend, recovery had been “very regionalized,” with places like Florida and Texas doing well and “cities that thrive on large meetings and conventions like a Chicago, Orlando, Las Vegas” struggling to recover.

“You’re seeing really good pickup over the weekend dates, which have now extended. Traditionally they’re Friday to Sunday, now it’s Thursday to Monday,” he said, referring to the increase in leisure travel. But the lack of business travel means weekday bookings continue to lag. Still, he added, there’s reason for “cautious optimism.”

But travelers, even those who are fully vaccinated, should practice caution while visiting some states, health experts warn. Case numbers are going up in some popular destinations, like Florida, which saw a spike as revelers flocked there during spring break. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends that people continue to wear masks, social distance and frequently wash their hands, even though some local governments have relaxed or lifted these rules.

Mila Miami, a restaurant in Miami Beach, many have traveled from out of state for extended stays — particularly from places like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago — which he said “has enabled the business to pick up customers that we wouldn’t have.”

This influx proved problematic over spring break, when police officers in riot gear used pepper balls to enforce an emergency curfew and disperse revelers ignoring social distancing and mask regulations.

During the weekend of March 28 to April 3, Miami “saw its highest occupancy level since the start of the pandemic, with most hotels reporting upward of 75 percent occupancy levels,” said Suzie Sponder, a spokeswoman for the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. That’s only a 6.6 percent drop from the same weekend in 2019.

Ms. Sponder added that the average room rate for the weekend was $282.29, up 25 percent from 2019. And Mr. Rogers, of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, said that revenue, which is still down across the board, is the best indicator of the industry’s recovery, noting that Miami’s strong numbers are the exception rather than the rule.

In the tourism industry, “you still have a lot of folks that are out of work,” he said, “because it’s those large, city center urban hotels that employ the most people, because they have those extensive food and beverage operations that are not working right now. That’s where most job loss is occurring.”

Circa Resort & Casino. “It’s like trying to book a dinner reservation on New Year’s Eve. It’s not something you do the day before.” Spots at the pools at his establishments, which include two other hotels, are booked a month in advance because of reduced capacity limits and social distancing, which he said shows that there is demand for leisure travel. Hotels and other venues in the city are limited to 50 percent capacity.

Though the weekend of Easter is, historically, the second slowest weekend in the city, this year was different because of March Madness, the annual N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments. “Everything was packed to the restricted capacity level,” he said. “On Saturday, all of our venues were filled by 10 a.m. because of Final Four. I think that was the case throughout all of Las Vegas.”

Mr. Stevens said that since the Super Bowl, in February, there have been indications that the tourism industry in Vegas is recovering, adding that his three hotels have been sold out every weekend since. “I’ve never seen booking at the rate of what we’ve seen in the past three months or so. This is the strongest booking that I’ve ever experienced,” he said.

But there continues to be a dip during weekdays because of the lack of conferences or conventions. “What we’re seeing is enormous pent-up demand for leisure travel that while it’s going to take place throughout the entire summer, does not necessarily mean that business travel will follow suit,” he said.

NewOrleans.com planning a trip in the next three months. Ms. Schulz notes that she is “optimistic about the fourth quarter of 2021 with a convention and festival schedule.”

Though leisure travel over the summer is expected to keep the industry afloat, Mr. Rogers said business travel will need to pick back up in order to restore the industry to 2019 levels.

“While we’re optimistic, what we’re fearful of and concerned about is, what happens post-Labor Day when all of this leisure travel has passed?” he said. Business travel, he said, “is absolutely necessary if we’re going to survive.”

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Jobs Report March 2021: Gain of 916,000 as Recovery Sped Up

But retailers, manufacturers and transportation companies added jobs as well, which Ms. Swonk said showed that the recovery was being driven by more than just the reopening of shuttered businesses. Government aid has given Americans money to spend, and the confidence to spend it.

Businesses, too, appear to be growing more confident. Many of the jobs added in January and February were temporary positions, but in March, temporary staffing levels were essentially flat, indicating companies were filling permanent positions instead.

Amy Glaser, senior vice president at the staffing firm Adecco, said that in recent weeks, a growing share of her clients had been looking for permanent employees, or converting temporary hires into permanent ones.

“Our conversations have really shifted even over the last six weeks,” she said. “We spent the last year doing a lot of worst-case-scenario planning with our clients, and now the conversation is the opposite: How do we capture the rebound to make the most effective use of it?”

When Main Event Entertainment, which runs 44 family entertainment centers in 17 states, began reopening its doors in June, business was initially slow. But in recent weeks, customers have begun to come back in greater numbers.

“It’s been a very slow, gradual improvement, and then during spring break it was a step up,” said Chris Morris, the company’s chief executive officer. “We believe there is pent-up demand. There have been a lot of missed birthday parties.”

In response, Main Event is going on a hiring spree. The company is aiming to increase its staff by about 20 percent, adding roughly 1,000 positions.

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Florida’s Coronavirus Cases Rise, Especially Among the Young

Scientists view Florida as a bellwether for the nation, the state furthest along in lifting restrictions, reopening society and welcoming tourists.

If recent trends there are any indication, the rest of the country may be in trouble.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Florida has been steadily rising, though hospitalizations and deaths are still down. Over the past week, the state has averaged nearly 5,000 cases per day, an increase of 8 percent from its average two weeks earlier.

B.1.1.7, the more-contagious variant first identified in Britain, is also rising exponentially in Florida, where it accounts for a greater proportion of total cases than in any other state, according to numbers collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Wherever we have exponential growth, we have the expectation of a surge in cases, and a surge in cases will lead to hospitalizations and deaths,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

impose an 8 p.m. curfew, although many people still flouted the rules.

Miami-Dade County, which includes Miami Beach, has experienced one of the nation’s worst outbreaks, and continues to record high numbers. The county averaged more than 1,100 cases per day over the past week.

In Orange County, cases are on the rise among young people. People 45 and younger account for one in three hospitalizations for Covid, and the average age for new infections has dropped to 30.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has rejected stringent restrictions from the very start of the pandemic. Florida has never had a mask mandate, and in September Mr. DeSantis banned local governments from enforcing mandates of their own. Among his scientific advisers now are architects of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for political leaders to allow the coronavirus to spread naturally among young people, while the elderly and those with underlying conditions sheltered in place.

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Variants and Eased Restrictions Push US Coronavirus Cases Up Again

After weeks of decline followed by a steady plateau, coronavirus cases are rising again in the United States. Deaths are still decreasing, but the country averaged 61,545 cases last week, 11 percent more than the average two weeks earlier.

Scientists predicted weeks ago that the number of infections would curve upward again in late March, at least in part because of the rise of variants of the coronavirus across the country. The variant that walloped Britain, called B.1.1.7, has led to a new wave of cases across most of Europe. Some scientists warned that it may lead to a new wave in the United States.

The rise in infections is also a result of state leaders pulling back on mitigation measures, and large social interactions, like spring break gatherings in Florida, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s chief science adviser, said on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“The variants are playing a part, but it’s not completely the variants,” Dr. Fauci said. Most states have lifted restrictions, including on indoor dining, in response to the drop in numbers, actions that Dr. Fauci called “premature.”

8,337 known cases of the B.1.1.7 variant in the country, but the actual number is probably much higher because labs in the country analyze only a very small proportion of the diagnosed cases. Still, the trend is clear: The variant — which is more transmissible and possibly more lethal — has been rising exponentially in the United States, its growth masked by the overall drop in infections.

“It is remarkable how much this recalls the situation last year where we had introductions of virus to different places that scientists warned would be a problem,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. School of Public Health, said in an interview on Sunday. “People waited for them to be a problem before they took action — and then too late, they took action.”

Dr. Hanage said he was particularly worried about B.1.1.7 because it is at least 50 percent more transmissible than the original virus. The brisk pace of vaccinations will stem the tide somewhat, but the rising immunity in the population may be more than offset by the variant’s contagiousness, he added. “B.1.1.7 is really scary,” he said.

The vaccines in use in the United States — made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson — are expected to prevent severe disease and death from any of the variants, although they are slightly less effective against a variant that was identified in South Africa. That variant, known as B.1.351, has not yet spread widely in the United States.

Because many of the highest risk people have been inoculated, hospitalizations and deaths may not show a steep rise along with infections. But a surge in cases will still lead to some severe cases and deaths, Dr. Hanage said.

“How large it will be we’ll need to wait and see,” he said. “But ideally we would not be waiting to see, ideally we’d be taking action.”

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California and Florida Prepare to Give Vaccine Access to All Adults

Governors across the United States are speeding up eligibility for coronavirus vaccines as the number of new cases nationally plateaus, adding more urgency to vaccination efforts.

California will open up vaccine eligibility on April 1 to any resident who is 50 or older, and will expand that to residents 16 or older on April 15, state officials announced on Thursday, saying they could do so because of increasing supplies of vaccine from the federal government. And Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida announced that any state resident who is 40 or older would be eligible starting on Monday, and that the minimum age would drop to 18 on April 5.

In Connecticut, which is among the most-vaccinated states in the country, Gov. Ned Lamont said Thursday that all residents 16 and above would be eligible beginning April 1. New Hampshire will make shots available to all residents 16 and older starting April 2, and North Carolina on April 7. In Rhode Island, Gov. Dan McKee said the state was on track to make vaccines available to all residents over 16 by April 19.

Alaska, Mississippi, Utah and West Virginia are the only states where all adults are now eligible to receive shots, but many more have announced plans to expand eligibility on or before May 1, a goal set by President Biden. Some local jurisdictions have also begun vaccinating all adults.

2.5 million doses of vaccine a day. At that pace, about half of the nation’s population would be at least partially vaccinated by mid-May.

California will also allow health care providers to use their discretion to vaccinate family members of eligible people right away, even if the family members would not yet otherwise be eligible, Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

State officials said they expected California to start receiving 2.5 million doses a week in the first part of April, and more than three million by the second half of the month, a major increase from the current pace of about 1.8 million doses a week.

Mr. Newsom has been under intense pressure for weeks to speed up the state’s vaccination efforts. Experts say his ability to fend off a recall campaign may hinge on vaccinating millions of residents and lifting remaining restrictions, so that the state will be closer to normal when voters are asked to decide his fate.

The governor has repeatedly said that short and unpredictable supplies have been to blame for what has been criticized as a confusing and chaotic vaccination process that has left many poorer communities to lag behind.

New York Times analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The number of new virus cases reported in Florida has been hovering around 4,600 a day in recent weeks, a level that health officials say is still too high, even though it has fallen significantly from a peak earlier this year.

The state’s efforts to reopen its tourism industry has not been without problems. In Miami Beach, local officials have been overwhelmed with spring break revelers who have ignored safety precautions like mask wearing and social distancing. It got so bad that the city imposed a curfew and sent police officers in riot gear to disperse crowds.

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