Coronavirus PandemicCovid News: Three West Coast States Will Ease School Mask Mandates

Three West Coast states are ending school mask requirements on March 11.

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Ana Zavala, left, teaches a kindergarten class at Washington Elementary School last month in Lynwood, Calif.Credit...Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

California, Oregon and Washington will stop requiring masks in schools after March 11, the governors of the three states said Monday in a joint statement.

California will also lift its remaining indoor mask mandate for unvaccinated people in public settings on Tuesday, according to the announcement.

People in the three states will still have to wear masks in certain higher-risk settings, including health care facilities and public transit, as required by state and federal rules. And some local governments may retain their own requirements after the statewide mandates end.

“As has been made clear time and again over the last two years, Covid-19 does not stop at state borders or county lines,” Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon said in the statement. “Together, as we continue to recover from the Omicron surge, we will build resiliency and prepare for the next variant and the next pandemic.”

All three of the governors are Democrats.

States and cities across the country have been moving to wind down the emergency measures that have constrained so much about American life over the course of the pandemic. Ms. Brown noted on Monday that Oregon recorded its first Covid-19 case exactly two years before, at a time when officials were scrambled to address an outbreak of a little-understood but deadly coronavirus at a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash. Scientists later learned that by that point, the coronavirus was already circulating in other cities and states as well.

Now, as new-case counts decline nearly everywhere in the United States and support for restrictions wanes, officials in states led by Republicans and Democrats alike have been easing mask and vaccine requirements.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidance on Friday about how to decide where the risk of infection was high enough to warrant restrictions. Based on the new criteria, which give more emphasis to strains on hospitals and less to new case reports, the agency said that about 70 percent of Americans could safely stop wearing masks and maintaining social distance.

The C.D.C. also loosened its guidance for mask-wearing in schools, saying that it was necessary only in counties considered high-risk under the new criteria. Before Friday, the agency recommended mask mandates for schools everywhere.

New reported cases by day
Feb. 2020
Sept.
Apr. 2021
Nov.
Jun. 2022
Jan. 2023
50,000
100,000 cases
7-day average
2,433

These are days with a reporting anomaly.

Source: State and local health agencies. Daily cases are the number of new cases reported each day. The seven-day average is the average of the most recent seven days of data.

In California, the nation’s most populous state, mask requirements and other restrictions in schools have been particular points of contention, helping to fuel an unsuccessful attempt last year to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom from office.

California state officials have promised to work closely with teachers' unions and school administrators on plans to ease mask requirements in schools.

It was not immediately clear on Monday when or whether individual school districts would follow state moves to lift mask mandates.

Public health officials have continued to urge residents to get vaccinated, and to go on wearing masks if they want to minimize their risk of contracting or transmitting the virus.

Still, millions of vulnerable Americans say they feel ignored and left behind as pandemic precautions are discarded.

Wales and Scotland move to relax some pandemic restrictions.

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The regional government in Wales said it was dropping mask requirements for cinemas and some other indoor public venues. Masked moviegoers were spaced far apart in May at a theater in Cardiff, Wales.Credit...Ben Birchall/Press Association, via Associated Press

Wales and Scotland, which set their own public health policies within Britain, each said on Monday that they were relaxing some pandemic rules, though neither went quite as far as England did last week.

Wales dropped its mask mandate for some indoor public venues, like cinemas, theaters and gyms, though it kept a requirement to wear them in retail shops, on public transportation and in health care settings.

“Thanks to everyone’s hard work and all their sacrifices, cases of coronavirus are falling across Wales,” the region’s first minister, Mark Drakeford, said in a statement. “Now is the right time to relax the general requirement to wear a face covering in many indoor public places.”

Wales also lifted its mask mandate for students in classrooms, though it said secondary-school students should continue to wear them in communal areas.

The Welsh government said that if “public health conditions continue to improve,” the region’s remaining mask rules could be dropped by the end of March. Mr. Drakeford is expected to speak on the subject later this week.

Scotland said on Monday that people there would no longer have to present proof of vaccination to enter nightclubs and some other indoor public venues. The Scottish government said remaining restrictions would be lifted by March 21 if new-case reports do not increase.

Saying that it was time to learn to live with the coronavirus, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced last week that he was lifting all of England’s remaining legal restrictions and ending free coronavirus testing in the nation. His move came the day after it was announced that Queen Elizabeth II had tested positive for the virus and was experiencing symptoms.

Britain as a whole reported an average of 28,430 new coronavirus cases a day over the last week, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, with both new cases and deaths declining overall. Regionally, relative to their populations, Scotland reported the most transmission, with about 109 cases for every 100,000 residents; Northern Ireland was next with 95. The figures for England and Wales were much lower, at about 36 new cases per 100,000 in England and 25 in Wales.

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A new poll finds Americans’ fears about the virus are waning.

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The number of Americans who support mask mandates is falling, according to a new poll.Credit...Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

Americans are less worried about both catching and spreading the coronavirus than they were six months ago, as the once-surging Omicron variant recedes in the United States and in much of the world, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The poll also found that support is fading for mask mandates, which are quickly easing across much of the United States.

Of the nearly 1,300 adults surveyed in mid-February, 24 percent said they were “extremely or very worried” about themselves or a family member testing positive for the virus. In December, when Omicron emerged and rapidly became the dominant variant globally, 36 percent of respondents expressed this fear.

The number of Americans who support mask mandates is also falling. Last August, 55 percent of respondents said they approved of required masking, compared with the roughly 50 percent who said they support it now, a 9 percent change in the number of people who agree.

Vaccinated Americans are more likely to be in favor of the mandates, as are Democrats, regardless of vaccination status, according to the poll. Nearly 80 percent of Democrats favor requiring Americans to wear face masks when they’re around others outside their homes. But only 22 percent of Republicans agree with that view; in fact, more than 50 percent of Republicans strongly disagree with the notion.

A growing number of states have already halted mask mandates for most indoor settings, including entertainment venues and workplaces. And although the case numbers are a fraction of what they were at the peak of Omicron, nearly 52,000 people are hospitalized with Covid across the country, according to a New York Times database. That is a decrease of about 44 percent over the past two weeks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced new guidelines last Friday suggesting the majority of Americans could remove their masks. The agency also endorsed the end of social distancing.

Though masking requirements in schools remain in many states, some of those restrictions, like in California, Oregon and Washington, are set to expire in the next several weeks.

On Sunday, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City announced tentative plans to roll back mandatory masking in early March for the city’s school district, the largest in the nation. He also said he intended to remove vaccine requirements at restaurants, gyms and movie theaters, if case numbers continue to stay low.

His announcement was celebrated by some, including businesses starved for visitors and tourists. But some health experts believe the removal of vaccination rules is premature, citing the possibility of future variants and the pandemic’s past shape-shifting.

Adeel Hassan contributed reporting.

The White House lifts its mask mandate for fully vaccinated people.

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President Biden at a joint session of Congress in April 2021, when social distancing and masks were required. Masks are optional this year.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The White House is relaxing its mask mandate in time for President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, according to a memo sent to staff on Monday.

“Effective tomorrow, Tuesday, March 1, we are lifting the requirement that fully vaccinated individuals wear masks on the White House campus,” the memo said. It added: “Some individuals will choose to continue to wear masks to protect themselves. We must respect these choices.”

The policy for unvaccinated people visiting the White House is not changing, a spokesman said: They will still be required to be tested, wear masks and maintain social distance. Nearly the entire White House staff is vaccinated.

A person familiar with the White House’s mask guidance said that the memo was a first step toward opening up the White House in the next few weeks, adding that the president and Jill Biden, the first lady, will have guests at the White House for food and drinks before the address on Tuesday. And up till now, they did not attend White House events with refreshments as part of Covid safety protocols.

Congress’s attending physician said on Sunday that the House of Representatives would lift its mask mandate in time for Mr. Biden’s address, and that all members of Congress could attend. Many states and cities across the country have also been announcing the ends of mask mandates, and on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out new guidance suggesting that 70 percent of Americans can now stop wearing masks, and no longer need to social distance or avoid crowded indoor spaces.

The White House’s move reflects how quickly the conditions of the pandemic have changed in a matter of a few weeks, and how eager Mr. Biden is to project a symbolic return to normalcy. For last year’s State of the Union address, the president spoke to a mask-wearing audience in the Capitol that was kept much smaller than usual to accommodate social distancing.

Nationally, the United States is now averaging roughly 66,000 new coronavirus cases a day, according to a New York Times database — a figure that has plummeted from a peak of more than 800,000 a day in mid-January to a level comparable with the height of the summer surge in July 2020.

Mr. Biden said in an interview taped for the Super Bowl on Feb. 13 that it was “probably premature” for states to begin lifting mask mandates, though he acknowledged that the decision was a “tough call,” and that measures to contain the virus came at a cost.

“Omicron and all of the variants have had a profound impact on the psyche of the American people,” he said at the time.

Katie Rogers contributed reporting.

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New York City is rolling back pandemic restrictions, but is it too soon?

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Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, appeared on Wall Street on Monday as part of his campaign to restore a sense of normalcy to the city.Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The day after announcing that he planned to end New York City’s mask mandate for public schools and a proof-of-vaccination requirement for indoor dining, gyms and entertainment venues, Mayor Eric Adams smiled broadly as he rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

His appearance on Wall Street on Monday was part of his campaign to restore a sense of normalcy to a city battered by the coronavirus. The end of the mandates, planned for March 7, is part of his approach.

Mr. Adams decided to roll back the restrictions after meeting with his top health advisers and union leaders and watching the number of virus cases and hospitalizations in the city drop steeply.

Nearly 77 percent of New York City residents are fully vaccinated, including nearly 87 percent of adults, according to city data. Rates are lower among children; about 56 percent of those ages 5 to 17 are fully vaccinated, and children under 5 are not yet eligible.

Asked about concerns that visitors from other places, particularly those with lower vaccination rates, could spread the virus, Mr. Adams said he was not worried: “We want tourism back. It’s a major economic boost for us.”

While plenty of New Yorkers celebrated the easing of restrictions, some health experts and elected officials argued that Mr. Adams was moving too quickly. They questioned his decision to remove the vaccination rules while masks were also coming off.

For now, Mr. Adams is keeping other vaccine mandates in place, including one for municipal workers like police officers and teachers and one for all employees of private companies who work in person. He has suggested that he will end other pandemic precautions in the coming months.

Masks are still required in a number of places, including on the subway and at Broadway theaters, and individual businesses are allowed to require masks if they want to.

Some health experts said it was premature to lift mask mandates in schools. Dr. Oni Blackstock, a New York City physician and founder of a racial and health equity consulting practice, said she was concerned about disparities in vaccination rates among districts and reports that vaccines were far less effective in younger children.

After grueling months on the front lines, pharmacists are getting a daily break that’s locked in.

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Patricia Reveles, a CVS pharmacy technician, in 2020 in Los Angeles.Credit...Maggie Shannon for The New York Times

Pharmacists and technicians, who have played a crucial role on the front lines of the pandemic for the past two years, will receive a scheduled and uninterrupted break, beginning Monday, from one of the biggest U.S. drugstore chains.

CVS, which has almost 10,000 stores, will close most of its pharmacies — including those inside Target stores — from 1:30 to 2 p.m. daily in every time zone, the company said.

“This break gives our pharmacy teams a predictable and consistent daily pause while minimizing disruption to our patients,” said Amy Thibault, a CVS spokeswoman. Some stores had already changed their hours to adapt to the new policy, and CVS was notifying customers about the new schedules, she added.

Pharmacists and technicians across the country have been strained as they administer Covid-19 vaccines and tests, in addition to their longstanding functions of filling prescriptions and counseling patients. Workers have also been dealing with increasingly angry customers.

CVS stores administered more than 59 million Covid vaccines and 32 million coronavirus tests in 2021, Ms. Thibault said. While the stores have remained open throughout the pandemic, staffing shortages have stressed CVS, and other drugstore chains and independent pharmacies, over the last two years. Some had to reduce store hours, raise starting wages and offer more breaks to retain employees.

During the Omicron surge, CVS said that a fraction of its stores had to close on one or both weekend days because of a worker shortage as many employees had to call in sick to treat their own Covid- infections. A survey released in January from the American Pharmacists Association, an advocacy group, found that 47 percent of respondents said they were working more hours during the pandemic, while only 12 percent reported a salary increase.

“They’re burned out and leaving for other jobs that pay more and are less stressful,” said Mitchel Rothholz, a pharmacist who leads immunization policy for the American Pharmacists Association. “Pharmacy is not any different than other providers in the health care system. Pharmacy teams have been there throughout the pandemic.”

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Hong Kong hospitals can’t keep up with the deaths amid an Omicron surge.

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Patients waiting at a temporary treatment area outside the Caritas Medical Center in Hong Kong on Saturday.Credit...Kin Cheung/Associated Press

Dead bodies are piling up on gurneys in hospital hallways as Hong Kong’s health system is overloaded by its biggest Covid-19 outbreak of the pandemic.

Officials said they were struggling to move the dead to the city’s public morgues quickly enough after more than 400 people died from Covid-19 last week, according to the latest official statistics. The news comes as the city is struggling to tamp down on an Omicron-fueled outbreak, with more than 26,000 cases and 83 deaths reported on Sunday.

The city’s hospital authority blamed transportation delays for the situation. “That is why some bodies that were planned to be transported stayed in the hospital,” said Lau Ka-hin, the chief manager of quality and standards at Hong Kong’s hospital authority.

The city’s three public mortuaries, which can take up to 3,000 bodies, are nearly at full capacity, a top official for the Center for Health Protection said on Sunday.

Public hospitals are overwhelmed as many of the sick have rushed to seek medical help in recent weeks. Over the last two weeks, Hong Kong has recorded an 821 percent spike in new cases, according to a New York Times database. Hospitals have run out of beds in isolation wards, leaving many patients waiting on gurneys on the street outside the hospitals.

The surge in cases is putting Hong Kong’s strict zero-Covid strategy under pressure. Mainland China has pursued a similar strategy. Chinese officials and pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong have been calling for more stringent measures to try to stamp out the outbreak, including a citywide lockdown.

But Hong Kong lacks the kinds of resources that mainland officials have used to lock down entire cities. Hong Kong officials said they planned to ease strict testing and isolation rules in order to help free up resources, including allowing some children who test positive to stay at home instead of separating them from their parents and hospitalizing them.

They have also appealed to the public to only go to the hospital if they have severe symptoms in order to allow more space for medical emergencies.

Kyrie Irving still won’t be able to play in Brooklyn if the mayor lifts some Covid restrictions next week.

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Kyrie Irving, left, in a game in Milwaukee on Saturday. He has played in only 15 of the Nets’ 61 games, in part because of his refusal to be vaccinated.Credit...Benny Sieu/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

Kyrie Irving, the Nets’ star guard, will still be ineligible to play in home games at Barclays Center in Brooklyn if New York City lifts its vaccine mandate for restaurants, gyms and most indoor spaces, as Mayor Eric Adams said Sunday he intended to do by March 7 if Covid-19 cases remain low.

Irving, who is unvaccinated against the coronavirus, will still be subject to a separate private-sector vaccine mandate.

Fabien Levy, a press secretary for Adams, confirmed as much on Sunday, writing on Twitter, “Fastest way for all New Yorkers to get back to normal life is for us ALL to get vaccinated.”

It’s unclear if the private sector mandate will be lifted, although Adams has been suggesting in recent weeks that many vaccine requirements will be removed. The city’s press office didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did the Nets.

“Within the next few weeks you’re going to see many of these mandates dissipate,” Adams said last week. Earlier this month, Adams had called the rule that bars Irving from playing in home games “unfair,” given that unvaccinated athletes from opposing teams can play at both Barclays Center and Madison Square Garden, the home of the Knicks.

Irving has played in only 15 of the Nets’ 61 games, in part because of his refusal to be vaccinated, and will not be able to play Monday night’s home game against Toronto. Irving’s inconsistent availability and injuries to other players are among factors that have contributed to the Nets’ descent from one of the best teams in the N.B.A. to one now fighting just to make the playoffs. The Nets (32-29) are the Eastern Conference’s eighth seed with roughly a quarter of the season left. To avoid the league’s play-in tournament for the postseason, the Nets would need to finish as the sixth seed or better.

“I’m following it as much as you guys are,” Irving told reporters after the Nets’ victory over the Milwaukee Bucks on Saturday. “So just remaining patient and just seeing where things end up in this next week or so or next two weeks, I’m not too sure.”

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Global Roundup

South Korea tries to free up workers to battle a surge in cases.

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Seoul on Monday. Coronavirus deaths in the country have reached their highest level of the pandemic.Credit...Ahn Young-Joon/Associated Press

South Korea said it would temporarily stop checking for proof of vaccination at cafes, restaurants and other venues starting on Tuesday, in order to free up more workers to focus on battling the Omicron surge gripping the nation.

In a sign that the current wave has yet to peak, the country reported its highest death toll in a 24-hour period on Monday. The 114 deaths recorded surpassed the previous record set only two days before.

There were 139,626 new confirmed cases on Monday, according to the government. South Korea is currently reporting more than twice as many cases as the United States every day. The nation’s daily average of new cases is up by 160 percent over the past two weeks, according to Our World in Data.

The vaccine pass used at restaurants and other public venues was introduced in December. Those who don’t have a vaccine pass need to show a negative P.C.R. test, and having to administer all those Covid tests and deliver the test results was overburdening the staff.

Park Hyang, a senior health ministry official, said at a briefing on Monday that eliminating the vaccine pass would allow workers to focus on the detection of the virus in high-risk groups — those in their 60s and older, as well as people with pre-existing medical conditions. The majority of people who test positive are being asked to simply look after themselves at home.

In other developments:

  • Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand announced that vaccinated New Zealanders and visa holders from Australia will be able to enter the country freely without isolating beginning on Wednesday. The country abandoned its zero Covid approach last year and is now battling a coronavirus outbreak of its own.

  • France lifted its mask mandate on Monday for indoor establishments that require proof of vaccination to enter, a category that includes restaurants, bars, movie theaters and museums. Masks will still be mandatory in spaces like public transportation or stores that do not require vaccination.

Explore how to live with the solitude the pandemic will, at times, continue to require.

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Walking in Waubonsie State Park in Iowa.Credit...Madeline Cass for The New York Times

Sally Snowman loves to be alone. As the keeper of Boston Light, a centuries-old lighthouse on Little Brewster Island in Boston Harbor, she’s had a lot of practice. For most of the last 19 years, she’s lived there from April through October.

She fills the days with work, cleaning the windows, mowing the lawn and sweeping the spiral staircase of the 90-foot lighthouse tower. She reads a lot and has watched a lot of sunsets. And she relishes every minute.

“It’s a relief to be out on the island,” Ms. Snowman, 70, said. When she’s by herself, “the wheels stop spinning.” Her time alone is restorative.

But not everyone feels the same way about solitude, and for the last two years, the pandemic has forced some version of it upon us all. We’ve seen fewer friends and spent more time at home. Some people have found themselves feeling lonelier, particularly if they were already single or living alone.

As we enter a new phase of the pandemic that’s less “wipe down your groceries” and more “welp, I guess this is our new normal,” occasional periods of isolation may be something we just fold into our lives, like digital vaccination cards or having a dedicated drawer for masks.

Whether you’re hoping for more time alone or less these days, solitude is something you can learn to appreciate.

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The Upshot

U.S. schools are back in person, but many children aren’t back to full time.

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Erica Baber, center, helping her family with schoolwork in Atlanta. Schools there were remote for the first week of 2022 because of a high number of Covid-19 cases in multiple districts.Credit...Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

In January, at the height of the Omicron wave, one-quarter of U.S. schoolchildren missed more than a week of in-person learning, according to a national survey of 148,400 parents by The New York Times and the survey and data firm Dynata.

The majority of students were home at least three days, and nearly one in 10 were out for half the month or more. The disruptions were spread across the country, with no region spared.

The survey revealed more widespread interruptions than other recent measurements have suggested. It demonstrates the degree to which classroom closures have upended children’s education and parents’ routines, even two years into the pandemic.

Five days of in-person school each week used to be virtually guaranteed. Some parents are now wondering if they’ll get that level of certainty again.

“I would say I’m about 75 percent certain school will be open” each week, said Noelle Rodriguez, a mother and hair stylist in Fresno, Calif., who moved her salon to her house when it became clear school wouldn’t open last year. “I can’t say 100 percent, which is one of the reasons I stayed working from home.”

The reasons for being sent home reached beyond Covid infections and exposures. Schools continued to face the fallout from remote school last year, including burnout and shortages among teachers and staff, and students who are struggling with academics, social skills and classroom behavior. In some cases, teachers have staged sickouts or asked for “wellness” or “school climate” days.

It’s much less common than last year for whole districts to close. Instead, schools are shuttering individual buildings or classrooms or quarantining small groups of children or teachers. That has enabled more children to stay in school, but has left little data on the question of how many school days students are missing. The survey, conducted online Feb. 4 to Feb. 16 by Dynata at the request of The Times, asked parents how many weekdays their youngest child was home in January. (The Times asked how many days were missed in total; some parents may have counted Martin Luther King’s Birthday or snow days, and others may not have.)

In New York City, roughly a third of students stayed home most days in January. Some districts, including in Atlanta and Detroit, did not reopen after the holiday break as planned, to control the spread of Omicron. In Sandy, Utah, students independently study at home some Fridays to help with teachers’ “exhaustion and burnout.” In Fairview, Ore., a middle school closed for three weeks for student misbehavior.

The practice in many school districts reflects a new comfort level with keeping children home, even on short notice, in a way that was rare before pandemic-era remote schooling.

In Germany, the merging of a protest movement against Covid measures with the far right takes a sinister turn.

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A recent march against the Covid measures imposed by local and federal governments in Dresden, Germany.Credit...Felix Schmitt for The New York Times

DRESDEN, Germany — First vaccine opponents attacked the police. Then a group of them chatted online about killing the governor. And one day an angry crowd beating drums and carrying torches showed up outside the house of the health minister of the eastern state of Saxony.

The minister, Petra Köpping, had just gotten home when her phone rang. It was a neighbor and he sounded afraid. When Ms. Köpping peered out of her window into the dark, she saw several dozen faces across the street, flickering in the torchlight.

“They came to intimidate and threaten me,” she recalled in an interview. “I had just come home and was alone. I’ve been in politics for 30 years, but I have never seen anything like this. There is a new quality to this.”

The crowd was swiftly dispersed by the police, but the episode in December was a turning point in a country where the SA, Hitler’s paramilitary organization, was notorious not just for showing up at the homes of political rivals with torches and drums, but for attacking and even murdering them.

It was the clearest indication yet that a protest movement against Covid measures that has mobilized tens of thousands in cities and villages across the country was increasingly merging with the far right, each finding new purpose and energy and further radicalizing the other.

The dynamic is much the same whether in Germany or Canada, and the protests in various countries have echoes of one another. On the streets of Dresden one recent Monday, the signs and slogans were nearly identical to those on the streets of Ottawa: “Freedom,” “Democracy” and “The Great Resist.”

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The Pfizer vaccine is less effective in 5- to 11-year-olds than in older groups, new data show.

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A 10-year-old received a Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine shot last year in Cranston, R.I.Credit...David Goldman/Associated Press

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech is much less effective in preventing infection in children ages 5 to 11 years than in older adolescents or adults, according to a large new set of data collected by health officials in New York State — a finding that has significant ramifications for these children and their parents.

The Pfizer vaccine is the only Covid-19 shot authorized for that age group in the United States. It still prevents severe illness in the children, but offers virtually no protection against infection, even within a month after full immunization, according to the data, which were collected during the Omicron surge.

The sharp drop in the vaccine’s performance in young children may stem from the fact that they receive one-third the dose given to older children and adults, researchers and federal officials who have reviewed the data said.

The findings, which were posted online on Monday, come on the heels of clinical trial results indicating that the vaccine fared poorly in children aged 2 to 4 years, who received an even smaller dose.

Public health experts worried that the news would further dissuade hesitant parents from immunizing their children. Other studies have shown the vaccine was not powerfully protective against infection with the Omicron variant in adults, either.

“It’s disappointing, but not entirely surprising, given this is a vaccine developed in response to an earlier variant,” said Eli Rosenberg, the deputy director for science at the New York State Department of Health, who led the study. “It looks very distressing to see this rapid decline, but it’s again all against Omicron.”

Still, he and other experts said they recommended the shot for children given the protection against severe disease shown even in the new data.

“We need to make sure we emphasize the doughnut and not the hole,” said Dr. Kathryn M. Edwards, a pediatric vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University.

Retention rates for New York City public schools rose a bit during the pandemic.

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A kindergarten classroom in the Bronx last year. Data released last fall showed that overall enrollment in city public schools dropped by about 50,000 from the fall of 2019 to late 2021.Credit...Anna Watts for The New York Times

Student retention in New York City schools, the nation’s largest public school system, has risen slightly since the pandemic began, according to a report released on Tuesday. But data in the report suggests that enrollment of new students is declining in the city, especially in the younger grades — adding to a national trend.

The retention rate measures how many students who were enrolled in the public schools in one year return to the public schools the following year. Retention rates in New York City varied widely by grade, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.

Overall, the number of students enrolled in the city’s more than 1,800 public and charter schools fell by about 50,000 between the fall of 2019 and late 2021. A decline in new enrollment in the first year of that period seems to have been a major factor; full data is not yet available for the second year. There are now roughly one million children in the city’s public schools.

Retention rates for prekindergarten students fell in all demographic groups, the new report found, and especially among the city’s least vulnerable students: higher-income white children without disabilities who speak English as their first language.

Among K-12 students, the trends were more mixed. The study found notable decreases in retention among younger white students — the rate fell by more than four percentage points among white students in third grade or below — and increases among older Black and Hispanic students, low-income students and students in temporary housing, particularly those enrolled in high school.

The report, which compared enrollment data for returning students in the 2020-21 school year with data for the year before, foreshadows challenges for Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, since the city’s education budget hinges on how many students are enrolled. Among those challenges is that the schools are attracting fewer new enrollees. The proportion of newly enrolled students declined in every grade, and particularly in the early grades and ninth grade, where it fell to 5.9 percent from 9.3 percent the year before.

The relative stability of retention rates in the city schools came as a surprise, said David Bloomfield, a professor of education at the CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College. He said the data countered the impression held by many experts that the pandemic and lengthy periods of remote learning could cause many students to temporarily drop out.

“While it isn’t necessarily predictive of the future, it presents a stark contrast to the expectations and common narrative that many kids just didn’t go back,” he said.

He noted, though, that the report measures enrollment, not attendance.

Professor Bloomfield said the report did not assess the effects on enrollment of factors like the nationwide decline in births or the fact that the city does not require parents to enroll their children before age 6; many parents may have put off doing so in the early months of the pandemic.

Given unknowns like those, he said, it is difficult to draw any concrete conclusions about future enrollment or retention trends. Still, he said, the new data suggests that the city’s schools will not have to brace for the steep loss of students that some experts feared.

A correction was made on 
March 1, 2022

An earlier version of this article described incorrectly data on retention rates in New York City public schools. Retention increased slightly, though new enrollment dropped; it did not decrease slightly.

How we handle corrections

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