Daily Covid Briefing
Aug. 7, 2021Updated
Aug. 7, 2021, 8:37 p.m. ET
Aug. 7, 2021, 8:37 p.m. ET
The authorities in Austin, Texas, warned the public on Saturday that the city’s Covid-19 situation had grown desperate, as a surge in cases driven by the Delta variant swamped hospitals while city officials were prevented from issuing mask mandates or vaccinations by order of the state’s governor, Greg Abbott.
In an alert sent via text, phone call, email, social media and other channels to people in the area on Saturday, the city authorities said: “The Covid-19 situation in Austin is dire. Healthcare facilities are open but resources are limited due to a surge in cases.”
Bryce Bencivengo, a spokesman for the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said that Friday had been one of the worst days for Austin’s hospitals since the pandemic started. More than 100 new Covid patients were admitted that day, he said, and intensive care units were near capacity, with Covid patients occupying more than 180 I.C.U. beds and 102 of those patients on ventilators.
“We are in the single digits of I.C.U. beds available,” Mr. Bencivengo said, adding that patients in emergency rooms were being forced to wait for space in the I.C.U.s to open up.
Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, said in an interview on Saturday that the crisis could have been avoided if Mr. Abbott had not barred local government authorities from issuing mandates on masking. He said the city’s authorities wanted to avoid suing Mr. Abbott, but that “ultimately we’re going to need to do what is necessary to fight for the safety of our community.”
“Our hospitals are just beyond strained,” he said.
Alison Alter, a City Council member, was more blunt. “The governor is preventing the city from keeping kids and adults safe,” she said in an interview. “He’s going to have a lot of deaths on his hands here. This is a matter of life and death for our community.”
An executive order Mr. Abbott issued in May prevents counties, cities, public health authorities and local government officials from requiring people to wear masks, and warns that violators could be fined $1,000. Mr. Abbott signed a more far-reaching executive order on July 29 barring both mask and vaccination mandates, and prohibiting public agencies and any private entities that take public funds, including grants and loans, from requiring proof of vaccinations.
In a statement on Friday, four Austin-area hospitals said the vast majority of the Covid patients they were admitting were unvaccinated or partly vaccinated.
“We urge the community to get vaccinated to protect themselves and their loved ones — and to lessen the burden on our frontline workers who have been fighting this virus for the last year and a half,” said the statement, issued by Ascension Seton, Baylor Scott & White Health and St. David’s HealthCare.
The hospitalizations in Austin are at the tip of a surge in the area, hitting heights last seen before vaccinations became widely available, according to a New York Times database. Travis County, where Austin is, reported more than 3,400 active coronavirus cases on Friday, including 467 new infections. Its daily average of new cases rose 189 percent over the last two weeks.
Scores of the state’s counties have reported caseloads that have more than doubled over two weeks, and some are seeing even larger surges than Austin. Bexar County, where San Antonio is, has seen its daily average shoot up more than 300 percent, to nearly 1,500 cases.
With 76 percent of the state’s most vulnerable population — those over 65 — fully vaccinated, deaths have risen far more slowly. But some of the counties seeing huge surges lag the state’s overall vaccination average of 44 percent. Some counties fall below 30 percent.
Sophie Kasakove contributed reporting.
Students across the United States have begun to head back to school, starting in Atlanta this week. But parents’ hopes for a return to normal instruction in the fall have begun to evaporate as the highly contagious Delta variant drives up cases and hospitalizations.
With policymakers from local school boards to the White House scrambling to balance public health and children’s learning needs, a patchwork of coronavirus rules is emerging nationwide, provoking debates, division and anxieties among families, teachers and education officials.
Some large school districts like Los Angeles are requiring all staff members to get tested for the virus each week. States led by Democrats, including New Jersey, California and Illinois, have imposed statewide mask mandates in schools.
Meanwhile, states with Republican-controlled governments, such as Florida, Arizona and Arkansas, have forbidden districts to impose mask rules, casting mandates as an infringement on personal freedom and parental rights.
New York City will retain its school mask requirement, but the state of New York has not imposed a statewide policy.
President Biden and federal health officials have emphasized that remote learning should not be used again as a strategy to counter the Delta variant surge. Even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised their guidance last week and called for universal masking in schools, the agency stressed the need for students to return to class.
“We can and we must open schools this fall, full-time,” Mr. Biden said recently. “It’s better for our children’s mental and emotional well-being, and we can’t afford another year out of the classroom.”
But with mask rules varying from state to state, and even within states and counties, the long-awaited return to school has many parents confused and unnerved.
“I think it’s going to be really important to consider what your risk is, what the risk of a child is,” said Dr. Anne Rimoin, an epidemiology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Part of that calculation, she said, is to weigh the benefits of school, both for learning and social development, against the health risks to children, most of whom are unvaccinated.
Children “benefit from being in school, but we know how to keep children safe,” Dr. Rimoin added. “That’s with having as many people who are eligible for vaccination around them as possible vaccinated, and wearing masks to stop transmission.”
Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, an expert on infectious diseases at the University of Southern California, said that certain mask mandates make sense, but interventions “should be tied to the metrics.”
Cases may rise as school gets underway, he said, but severe illness in children from Covid is rare. In the last year and a half, about 64,700 in California have died from the virus. Dr. Klausner said just 23 deaths were of children between five and 17 years old.
“I think the reality will be that there will be an increased number of cases,” Dr. Klausner said. “But, you know, parents should be reassured that the severity of illness in children is very, very low.”
Many epidemiologists and public health experts say the best way to protect school children is to get more people vaccinated. About 60 percent of American adults have been fully vaccinated, helping bring the total for the whole population — which includes roughly 50 million children under 12, who are not eligible — to about 50 percent.
“It’s not about me, it’s not about you, it’s about us and the collective good,” Dr. Rimoin said of vaccination. “Getting our kids back in school is the best thing we can do for our future.”
As the pandemic upended life in the United States, more than one million children who had been expected to enroll in public schools did not show up, either in person or online. The missing students were concentrated in the younger grades, with the steepest drop in kindergarten — more than 340,000 students, according to government data.
Now, the first analysis of enrollment at 70,000 public schools across 33 states offers a detailed portrait of these kindergartners. It shows that just as the pandemic lay bare vast disparities in health care and income, it also hardened inequities in education, setting back some of the most vulnerable students before they spent even one day in a classroom.
The analysis by The New York Times in conjunction with Stanford University shows that in those 33 states, 10,000 local public schools lost at least 20 percent of their kindergartners. In 2019 and in 2018, only 4,000 or so schools experienced such steep drops.
The months of closed classrooms took a toll on nearly all students, and families of all levels of income and education scrambled to help their children make up for the gaps. But the most startling declines were in neighborhoods below and just above the poverty line, where the average household income for a family of four was $35,000 or less. The drop was 28 percent larger in schools in those communities than in the rest of the country.
While kindergarten is optional in many states, educators say there is no great substitute for quality, in-person kindergarten. For many students, it’s their introduction to school. They are taught to cooperate and to identify numbers and letters. They learn early phonics and number sense — the concept of bigger and smaller quantities.
Yet in the country’s poorest neighborhoods, tens of thousands of 6-year-olds will begin first grade having missed out on a traditional kindergarten experience.
“We have to be deeply concerned,” said Thomas S. Dee, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, who worked with The Times on the analysis.
Public health experts say there is no evidence that migrants are driving the surge in coronavirus cases, as some conservatives, like the governors of Florida and Texas, have been claiming.
Faced with rapidly rising cases in their states and criticized by President Biden for their opposition to mask mandates, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Gregg Abbott of Texas have pointed to the administration’s border policies as a primary cause of the new cases. That sentiment has also echoed on social media, among members of Congress and among the unvaccinated.
Our reporter, Linda Qui, dug into those claims and found there was scant data to support them and that most experts disagreed with such assertions.
For starters, many of the major outbreaks are occurring in states — such as Missouri and Arkansas — that do not border Mexico. Positive rates were also increasing in every state in the country. And there is no evidence that the Delta variant or three others labeled “of concern” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention entered through the southern border.
“It’s not a border issue or a migrant issue, it’s a national issue. And it’s a particularly major issue in states with lower vaccination rates,” said Max Hadler, the Covid-19 senior policy expert at Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group. “That’s the clearest and most important correlation, and it has nothing to do with migrants but rather with rates of vaccination among people living in those states.”
BANGKOK — More than a thousand anti-government protesters clashed with the police on Saturday as they demonstrated against the Thai government’s failure to handle coronavirus outbreaks and its impact on the economy.
About a hundred police officers in riot gear sealed off a road near Victory Monument in the capital, Bangkok, and used water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets to stop a march toward Government House, the office of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha.
“We want Prayuth to resign because people aren’t getting vaccines,” said a 23-year-old male protester, who only gave his first name, Aom, for fear of repercussions. “We don’t have jobs and income, so we have no choice but protest.”
The pandemic is worsening in the country, which until early this year largely escaped the pandemic. But an outbreak that began in April shows no sign of letting up. After recording fewer than 5,000 cases in all of 2020, the country reported daily records of nearly 22,000 new coronavirus cases and 212 deaths on Saturday.
A police spokesman said that the demonstrators had thrown small explosive devices known as ping pong bombs, as well as stones and marbles. “Our goal is to maintain order,” the official, Krisana Pattanacharoen, told reporters.
Dozens of protesters were seen being carried away on motorcycles and in ambulances. The Erawan Emergency Medical Centre said at least two civilians and three officers had been injured.
Some 6 percent of Thailand’s population of more than 66 million has been fully vaccinated, and most of the country, including Bangkok, is under lockdown with a nighttime curfew. Gatherings of more than five people have been banned.
But with frustrations mounting over the government’s management of the pandemic, protests have been called by several groups, including some formerly politically allied with the prime minister.
The Southeast Asian country has reported 736,522 total cases and 6,066 deaths from the coronavirus since the pandemic began last year.
New Yorkers began the summer with expectations of a grand reopening — tourists flocking to visit, curfews lifted, and dining and nightlife regaining their former effervescence. But many restaurants are still dealing with fallout from the pandemic shutdowns, while scrambling to satisfy a public determined to enjoy a normal summer.
“Everyone was like, ‘OK, restaurants, go ahead; you can open up again,’” said Tren’ness Woods-Black, an executive at Sylvia’s Restaurant, a 59-year-old Harlem mainstay, and a granddaughter of the founder, Sylvia Woods. “But it’s not as easy as flipping on a light switch.”
Though clearly recovering from the blows of the past year and a half, New York’s dining business faces a host of disruptions. Many of the part-time artists and actors who worked the city’s restaurants left town as cultural venues closed. Staff shortages have exhausted the remaining employees and curtailed service. Gaps in food supplies have resulted in stripped-down menus. And a crush of eager, sometimes impatient, diners is adding to the strain.
Responding to a surge in Delta variant cases the city announced Tuesday that it would require all restaurant employees and indoor-dining customers to show proof of vaccination, starting Aug. 16. The big concern for restaurateurs is that the Delta variant’s advance in coming months could imperil the rebound in revenue they had hoped for.
“Being in business as long as we have, we’re resilient, and we know how to be nimble,” Ms. Woods-Black said. “But this is just a tough, tough time for all of us.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has been unyielding in his approach to the pandemic in recent weeks, declining to change course or impose restrictions in the face of uncontrolled spread and spiking hospitalizations.
It is an approach that may be the biggest gamble of his rising political career.
The governor reopened his state’s economy last spring and kept it that way, defying coronavirus surges that filled hospitals, and then celebrated as a statewide vaccination campaign took hold and life in Florida began to look normal.
Now Mr. DeSantis is gambling again. A new virus spike has led to a record number of Covid-19 hospitalizations that have undone some of Florida’s economic and public health gains and again raised the stakes for Mr. DeSantis.
If the latest surge overwhelms hospitals, leaving doctors and nurses unable to properly care for the younger, almost entirely unvaccinated people packing emergency rooms and intensive care units, Mr. DeSantis’s perch as a Republican Party front-runner with higher aspirations could be in serious trouble.
If, however, Florida comes through another virus peak with both its hospital system and economy intact, Mr. DeSantis’s game of chicken with the deadly pandemic could become a model for how to coexist with a virus that is unlikely to ever fully vanish.
Mr. DeSantis successfully sued the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over its requirement that cruise ship passengers be vaccinated, though some of the cruise lines were keeping the mandate anyway.
He opposes mandating vaccines for hospital workers, saying that would result in worsening staff shortages. He issued an executive order threatening to cut funding for schools that impose mask mandates, even though his state now has more Covid-19 hospitalizations, including for pediatric patients, than anywhere else in the nation.
On Friday, he touted a new state rule that will further discourage local school mask mandates by allowing parents to request private school vouchers if they feel that the requirements amount to “harassment.”
“We can either have a free society, or we can have a biomedical security state,” Mr. DeSantis said this week in Panama City, Fla. “And I can tell you: Florida, we’re a free state. People are going to be free to choose to make their own decisions.”
Andrew Pantazi and Mitch Smith contributed reporting.
On the eve of the Olympic closing ceremony, Tokyo 2020 organizers claimed victory against a virus that delayed and almost derailed the Games, calling their measures a model for other major international events.
Brian McCloskey, a leading health adviser to the Games, said that Tokyo’s expansive testing regimen for athletes and others, combined with mask-wearing and social distancing, kept the Games “safe and secure” and prevented transmission of the coronavirus between international arrivals and the Japanese public.
“By following basic public health measures and by layering on top of that the testing program, we have shown that it is possible to keep the pandemic at bay,” McCloskey, the chairman of the Tokyo 2020 Independent Expert Panel, said at a news conference on Saturday. “And that is a very important lesson from Tokyo to the rest of the world.”
Olympic organizers on Saturday reported 22 new coronavirus cases, bringing the total number of infections in the Olympic bubble to slightly more than 400. McCloskey said that organizers had tested more than 600,000 people.
No athletes were among the new cases, reflecting organizers’ relative success in walling off competitors from the outbreak raging in the rest of Japan, which on Friday reached a milestone of one million coronavirus cases.
At least 409 people connected to the Games have tested positive since July 1, including 32 athletes, according to organizers. Most of the infections have occurred among Japanese nationals, including contractors and others working at Olympic venues.
McCloskey said that organizers were in talks with national teams and Japanese officials to develop a system for testing athletes and personnel after the Games concluded to monitor potential infections in the coming weeks.
The pandemic caused the Games to be postponed from last year. Weeks before the opening ceremony, an outbreak fueled by the highly infectious Delta variant prompted emergency restrictions in Tokyo and other parts of Japan. The measures have done little to slow the spread of the virus, as Tokyo and Japan as a whole have had record numbers of daily cases in recent days and officials warned that the outbreak was severely straining the health system.
Some experts say that the Games, despite their near-total lack of spectators, have contributed to a feeling of pandemic fatigue in Japan and encouraged people to let down their guard, allowing the virus to spread. McCloskey disputed that idea, saying there was no evidence of a link “between the Games and the way in which the Japanese people are or are not behaving.”
Unvaccinated people who have had Covid-19 may be more than twice as likely to get infected again than those who tested positive and bolstered their natural immunity with a vaccine, according to a small study that assessed the likelihood of reinfection.
The study, published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, examined the risk of reinfection during May and June among hundreds of Kentucky residents who tested positive for the virus in 2020.
Those who did not get vaccinated this year faced a risk of reinfection that was 2.34 higher than those who did get their shots. Released on Friday, the study suggests that for those who had overcome an infection, the addition of a vaccine offered better protection than the natural immunity generated by their original bout with the virus alone.
Even though the study examined only a small number of people in Kentucky, it would seem to counter the argument by one of its home-state U.S. senators, Rand Paul, who has repeatedly asserted that vaccination is unnecessary for people like him who had the virus and developed immunity.
Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said the data reinforced the importance of vaccination, even for those who had already had the virus.
“If you have had Covid-19 before, please still get vaccinated,” Dr. Walensky said on Friday. “Getting the vaccine is the best way to protect yourself and others around you, especially as the more contagious Delta variant spreads around the country.”
The study’s authors cautioned that much is still not known on how long natural immunity to the virus lasts and that genomic sequencing was not conducted to confirm that the reinfections were not simply flare-ups of the remains of the subjects’ initial infection.
The C.D.C. and the Biden administration have been aggressively campaigning to increase vaccinations in recent weeks as cases and hospitalizations have soared in the last month, largely because of the Delta variant, and especially in regions of the country where immunization rates are low.
In the last week, the number of new virus cases reported each day has averaged 100,200, as of Thursday, the first time the daily average surpassed 100,000 since mid-February, according to a New York Times database. On Friday, the country logged 106,723 new daily cases.
Another study published on Friday reported that vaccinations dramatically reduced Covid hospitalizations among the elderly in February, March and April. The study examined data on 7,280 patients from a Covid hospitalization surveillance network, using state records to look at their vaccination status. The vast majority of the hospital patients had not been vaccinated or were only partially vaccinated; only 5 percent were fully vaccinated.
Although vaccination did not entirely eliminate infections, the risk of being hospitalized was significantly lower for those who were fully vaccinated. Among those 65 to 74, the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines reduced the risk of Covid-related hospitalization by 96 percent and the Johnson & Johnson one-dose vaccine reduced hospitalizations by 84 percent. In the age group of 75 and older, the Pfizer vaccination reduced hospitalizations by 91 percent; the Moderna vaccine by 96 percent; and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine by 85 percent.
A number of countries in the Asia Pacific region are being overwhelmed by their biggest coronavirus waves in months, as outbreaks fueled by the Delta variant race through populations with relatively low vaccination levels.
On Saturday, Thailand’s government reported 21,838 new coronavirus cases and 212 deaths, both single-day records that eclipsed the previous highs, set just a day earlier. Only 6 percent of Thailand’s people are vaccinated, according to New York Times data.
Australia recorded the most new cases since last August, the vast majority in the populous state of New South Wales, where a weekslong lockdown has failed to stem an outbreak that began in the Sydney area. The state reported 319 new infections and five deaths, and the state health minister, Brad Hazzard, said that the Delta variant was spreading to new parts of the state in part because residents were continuing to socialize in groups in defiance of stay-at-home rules.
“You’re not expected to go to a party, you’re not expected to go to a gathering,” he told a news conference on Saturday. “That is absolutely not what you’re supposed to be doing.”
“We need to make sure that we stay at home,” he added. “It’s a pretty simple rule.”
While vaccinations are rising in Australia, less than a fifth of the population is fully vaccinated, one of the lowest rates among wealthy countries.
Malaysia reported 20,889 new cases on Friday, its third consecutive day of record numbers. The health minister warned against easing restrictions, a day after the prime minister pledged to relax them for vaccinated individuals. Just over 25 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.
In the Philippines, the health ministry recorded more than 11,000 new infections, the highest daily total since April. The capital, Manila, on Friday imposed a two-week lockdown in the surrounding area, affecting some 13 million residents.
But with less than 10 percent of that country fully vaccinated, the lockdown prompted a race for shots on Thursday before it went into effect at midnight. Crowds jammed vaccination sites across Manila, and police were deployed to enforce social distancing.
The Philippines, which had managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic last year, has seen cases surge in 2021 as coronavirus variants have emerged and vaccine doses remain scarce. The country has now recorded more than 1.6 million cases and 28,000 deaths because of the virus, the second highest totals in Southeast Asia after Indonesia.
In Case You Missed It
China said on Friday it would provide two billion Covid-19 vaccine doses to the world this year and would donate $100 million to a global effort to distribute the doses to developing countries, as Beijing sought to take on a more prominent leadership role in curbing the pandemic.
“China will continue to do everything it can to help developing countries cope with the epidemic,” President Xi Jinping said in a statement.
He did not say whether the doses would be provided for free or would be sold, nor whether the number included doses already purchased from China, which is the world’s top exporter of Covid-19 vaccines, according to Bridge Consulting, a Beijing-based research company. It has also donated 33 million doses.
The show of concern for other countries comes as China faces its widest outbreak since quashing the first wave of the virus that erupted in the city of Wuhan last year. The highly transmissible Delta variant is rapidly spreading throughout the country, testing the limits of China’s zero-tolerance approach to Covid and undermining the ruling Communist Party’s argument that its authoritarian style has been a success in the pandemic.
In other news from around the world:
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Italy introduced a nationwide health passport for access to a wide range of social activities, one of Europe’s most far-reaching measures as authorities hope to contain the spread of the Delta variant while increasing economic activity. Residents can download the “Green Pass” on their phones. It is now required to dine indoors, go to museums and concerts, access gyms and amusement parks, and take public exams.
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Israel reintroduced restrictions in what officials said was a last attempt to forestall another lockdown as the country struggled to contain the spread of the Delta variant. The government announced the restrictions late Tuesday, including expanding vaccine and mask-wearing requirements for some gatherings, shifting back to a work-from-home policy and putting in place more sweeping travel restrictions.
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The World Health Organization called on wealthy nations with a surplus of vaccine doses to put off offering booster shots until October. The W.H.O. said all vaccine supplies should be sent to poor nations until all countries have at least 10 percent of their populations vaccinated. The agency made its appeal to the world’s wealthiest nations to address the wide disparities in vaccination rates around the world. France and Germany are ignoring those calls, reiterating plans to offer booster shots in the Fall.
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Canada fined two travelers $20,000 each for providing false proof of vaccination and predeparture coronavirus tests, as well as for not complying with the country’s requirements to stay at a government-authorized accommodation and be tested upon arrival. The Public Health Agency of Canada had previously fined people for providing false testing documents, but these two travelers were the first to be fined for providing fraudulent vaccination information, a spokesman for the agency said.
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The known total of global coronavirus infections surpassed 200 million last week, according to a New York Times database, a daunting figure that also fails to capture how deeply the virus has embedded itself within humanity.
Tiara Felix loves her job at an eyewear store in the Bronx, where she spends five days a week managing customer orders in a back-room lab, surrounded by colleagues fitting and cutting lenses for glasses.
But there is one thing that could prompt Ms. Felix, 31, to leave: a vaccine mandate.
“I’ll have to quit,” she said.
Ms. Felix is among the six remaining unvaccinated employees at her company, Metro Optics Eyewear, who have been unmoved by a monthslong campaign by their bosses to persuade every employee to voluntarily get a coronavirus vaccine.
Time is running out. Employers across the United States are now confronted with the same question of whether to fire workers who refuse to get vaccinated, a dilemma that carries new urgency as the rapidly spreading Delta variant leads to a surge in hospitalizations among the unvaccinated and threatens to stall the economic recovery.
This week, New York City became the first American city to announce a vaccination requirement for workers and customers at a variety of indoor venues, including restaurants, gyms and theaters.
At Metro Optics Eyewear, which has 58 employees in four stores in the Bronx, home to the lowest vaccination rate in New York City, it has been a painstaking journey to persuade 90 percent of employees to get vaccinated.
John Bonizio, 63, the owner, was ecstatic when he learned in January that optometrists and their staff members would be among the first groups eligible for the vaccine. About half of the staff members rushed to get a shot.
But he wanted everyone to be vaccinated. He and his managers tried persuasion and incentives. The company arranged car pools to shuttle employees to vaccination appointments. Employees who got vaccinated early on received $1,000 bonuses.
But they’ve been unable to sway Ms. Felix.
“How are you going to force something on us that’s not even F.D.A. approved?” Ms. Felix said.
When the Atlanta Public Schools reopened on Thursday, students and teachers anticipated something like a return to normalcy. Schools, now open for in-person classes five days a week, greeted students with balloons.
But even on the first day, families and school employees were already bracing for things going awry.
Coronavirus cases are resurging across the state. And while the district is requiring its staff and students to wear masks and to socially distance, the rate of vaccinations among eligible students is just 18 percent, making disruptive outbreaks of illness a significant worry.
Atlanta’s schools, which serve about 52,000 students, are among the earliest in the country to open, and they provide a glimpse at the immediate future facing other big-city districts. Los Angeles opens its public schools on Aug. 16, Chicago on Aug. 30, and Philadelphia on Aug. 31.
In Atlanta, public health advocates are pushing hard to get more teenagers and their parents inoculated, but their message has not gained widespread acceptance. Among school staff members, the vaccination rate is about 58 percent.
The urgent vaccination push comes at a precarious moment for Georgia. Thirty-nine percent of residents are fully vaccinated — one of the lowest rates in the country — and the state is averaging nearly 4,000 new cases a day, its highest since February. Hospitalizations have risen to 2,500 per day, the highest since March 1, according to New York Times data.
And at one local charter school, which reopened last week, trouble with the virus has already emerged. Charles R. Drew Charter School has had to quarantine some 278 students, faculty and staff since reopening.
