President Biden signed two more executive orders that provide aid to struggling families and raise wages for certain workers.
In “exceptional situations,” the C.D.C. said patients can be switched to another vaccine for the second dose, despite a lack of data.
The drug maker Eli Lilly said its monoclonal antibodies prevented infections in nursing home staff members and residents.
Get the latest updates here, as well as maps and vaccines in development.
Complacency and its costs
The next phase of the pandemic in the United States will most likely be determined by two factors: the new virus variants and the vaccine rollout.
Public health experts have likened the situation to a race. If the more contagious variants are able to spread faster than the country can distribute vaccines, experts fear the nation may see another powerful surge of the virus — as happened in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere.
And yet there are things Americans can do right now to help get the virus under control and save lives. Those measures include wearing masks, avoiding large gatherings, and staying home as much as possible. Experts have been asking these things of the public for nearly a year. Tragically, large swaths of the country still refuse to follow this simple advice.
Our colleague David Leonhardt, who writes The Morning newsletter, recently took a road trip across the country to help his mother get vaccinated, and said that almost everywhere he stopped — including gas stations, rest stops and hotels in half a dozen states — people ignored mask restrictions.
“I came home from my trip shaken by what I had seen,” he wrote. “I feel like I just drove across a country that is losing a winnable fight.”
Nationally, only about half of Americans wear masks when in close contact with people outside their households, according to a new survey by the University of Southern California.
Throughout the pandemic, many communities have resisted virus restrictions, or have removed them quickly after they are put in place. No region has had a higher case rate during the pandemic than Yuma, Arizona, which is experiencing another surge of the virus. Cleavon Gilman, an emergency medicine doctor at Yuma Regional Medical Center, blames the state’s governor, Doug Ducey, for failing to enact stringent measures.
“Everything is open — restaurants, gyms, barbershops,” he said. “People are needlessly dying because there is no statewide mandate to prevent it.”
Not long ago in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo pledged to largely lock down areas where positive test rates consistently topped 4 percent. But as rates rose above that threshold statewide, those plans were scrapped. Now, New York City has 54 ZIP codes showing a positive test rate over 10 percent, and records around 5,000 new cases a day.
Gareth Rhodes, an adviser to the governor, said that there was not much more the state could do get people to follow health guidelines, noting that restaurants were still shut down, and many office workers had not yet returned to their workplaces. “The reality is that personal behavior is what matters now,” he said.
Public health experts are beginning to wonder how much worse the data needs to get before officials consider new steps and restrictions. The country is still recording tens of thousands of cases a day and deaths are near record highs.
“I feel like people are numbed by the numbers; I worry about the complacency and fatigue,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “I worry about the focus on vaccines, rather than what’s happening with the virus.”
The New York Times