Covid-19: North Korea, Citing Pandemic, Will Skip Tokyo Summer Olympics

North Korea, citing the pandemic, will skip the Tokyo Olympics.

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The North Koreans at the closing ceremony for the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.Credit...Edgar Su/Reuters

North Korea said on Tuesday that it had decided not to participate in the Tokyo Olympic Games this summer because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The North’s national Olympic Committee decided at a March 25 meeting that its delegation would skip the Olympics “in order to protect our athletes from the global health crisis caused by the malicious virus infection,” according to Sports in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a government-run website.

It is the first Summer Olympics that the North has missed since 1988, when they were held in Seoul, the South Korean capital.

North Korea, which has a decrepit public health system, has taken stringent measures against the virus since early last year, including shutting its borders. The country officially maintains that it has no virus cases, but outside health experts are skeptical.

North Korea’s decision deprives South Korea and other nations of a rare opportunity to establish official contact with the isolated country. Officials in the South had hoped that the Olympics — to be held from July 23 to Aug. 8 — might provide a venue for senior delegates from both Koreas to discuss issues beyond sports.

The 2018 Winter Olympics, held in the South Korean city of Pyeongchang, offered similar hope for easing tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Kim Yo-jong, the only sister of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, grabbed global attention when she attended the opening ceremony, becoming the first member of the Kim family to cross the border into South Korea.

Mr. Kim used the North’s participation in the Pyeongchang Olympics as a signal to start diplomacy after a series of nuclear and long-range missile tests. Inter-Korean dialogue soon followed, leading to three summit meetings between Mr. Kim and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea. Mr. Kim also met three times with President Donald J. Trump.

But since the collapse of Mr. Kim’s diplomacy with Mr. Trump in 2019, North Korea has shunned official contact with South Korea or the United States. The pandemic has deepened the North’s diplomatic isolation and economic difficulties amid concerns over its nuclear ambitions. North Korea launched two ballistic missiles on March 25 in its first such test in a year, in a challenge to President Biden.

Since North Korea’s first Olympic appearance in 1972, it has participated in every Summer Games except for the Los Angeles event in 1984, when it joined a Soviet-led boycott, and in 1988, when South Korea played host. North Korean athletes have won 16 gold medals, mostly in weight lifting, wrestling, gymnastics, boxing and judo, consistently citing the ruling Kim family as inspiration.

The Tokyo Games were originally scheduled for 2020 but were delayed by a year because of the pandemic. The organizing committee has been scrambling to develop safety protocols to protect both participants and local residents. But as a series of health, economic and political challenges have arisen, large majorities in Japan now say in polls that the Games should not be held this summer.

Even though organizers have barred international spectators, epidemiologists warn the Olympics could still become a superspreader event. Thousands of athletes and other participants will descend on Tokyo from more than 200 countries while much of the Japanese public remains unvaccinated.

Some U.S. colleges say students must be vaccinated for the fall. Others want to wait and see.

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Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., last spring before it switched to online instruction. The school is requiring all students who will be on campus this fall to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.Credit...Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times

At least six U.S. colleges and universities have announced plans in the last few days to require Covid-19 vaccinations for students who will be on campus in the fall. But many more colleges have said they will not require vaccination or will wait and see before setting a policy.

Students at Cornell University in New York, Rutgers University in New Jersey, Fort Lewis College in Colorado, Nova Southeastern University in Florida, St. Edward’s University in Texas and Roger Williams University in Rhode Island will have to be vaccinated before the fall term begins, with a few exceptions for medical, religious or other reasons.

“Covid-19 has made it very clear just how impactful and necessary it is for us to have an educational experience in person, and vaccines are our way of ensuring that we can be together for a normal fall semester,” Tom Stritikus, the president of Fort Lewis, wrote in a letter explaining the mandate.

Though most universities have been open in some capacity since the fall, campus life has been fundamentally reshaped by the virus. Quarantines, masks and mandatory testing have become part of the college experience. And when major outbreaks emerged, some schools shifted classes online or even sent students home.

The debate about whether and how to mandate vaccination is playing out on campuses across the country, as shots are becoming available to college-age adults for the first time. Some schools are rushing to offer the shots to as many current students as possible before the summer break.

But the issue of requiring vaccinations is also shaping into an ideological debate falling along political lines. Some Republicans, including Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, are calling vaccine requirements overreach pushed by Democrats.

A day after Nova Southeastern University, based in Fort Lauderdale, announced its policy for returning students to be vaccinated, Mr. DeSantis issued an executive order banning state and local government agencies and businesses from requiring so-called vaccine passports, or documentation proving that someone has been vaccinated against Covid-19.

The university’s president and chief executive, Dr. George Hanbury, said the school was caught off guard by the governor’s order.

“We’re not trying to do anything but protect our students,” Dr. Hanbury told The New York Times on Monday, adding that the university is reviewing the governor’s order and plans to follow it. The university has a wide range of health programs, and, Dr. Hanbury said, many students participate in rotations at hospitals and other health settings where they are required to be vaccinated. “So, to me it didn’t seem like it was a hard extension to require it for everybody else, especially at the advice from health professionals.”

In Ohio, where all adults became eligible for the vaccine last week, Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, announced plans to hold on-campus vaccine clinics. Many Ohio colleges have said the vaccines will, at least for now, be encouraged but not mandatory; Cleveland State has said that students living in its dorms this fall must be vaccinated.

“While fewer of our young people get sick from Covid, the evidence clearly shows that they are significant carriers,” Mr. DeWine said. “It is a strategic move, frankly, to vaccinate them on campus before they get out in early May for the summer and scatter throughout the state and throughout the country.”

Some colleges have offered incentives to be vaccinated. Dickinson State University in North Dakota exempts vaccinated students from the campus mask mandate. Davidson College in North Carolina gives employees who are fully vaccinated a $100 bonus. Several colleges say vaccinated students will be able to skip the coronavirus testing that they require of others.

In recent weeks, the number of virus cases around the country has been increasing to what health officials consider dangerous levels, which includes the spread of new variants that, in some cases, are more contagious. As of Sunday, there have been an average of 18 percent more cases compared with two weeks earlier, according to a Times database.

Health officials are pleading with Americans to get vaccinated and to continue taking health precautions, with the hope that the growing inoculated population will stave off another surge of cases. As of Sunday, more than 61 million Americans were fully vaccinated, and 106 million have received at least one dose, according to a Times analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The country is administering an average of more than three million shots a day.

Colleges were a significant locus of coronavirus outbreaks after students returned to many campuses last fall, with more than 120,000 virus cases linked to American colleges and universities since Jan. 1, and more than 530,000 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, The Times reported.

In December, a Times analysis of the 203 U.S. counties where college students compose at least 10 percent of the population found that deaths in those communities had risen faster than in the rest of the nation. Few of the victims were students; they were mainly older people living and working in those communities.

Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

Tracking the Coronavirus ›

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Australia and New Zealand will open a travel bubble starting April 19.

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The Australia-New Zealand travel bubble is expected to deliver a boost to tourism and to families that have been separated by strict border closures.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand announced on Tuesday that her nation would establish a travel bubble with Australia, allowing travelers to move between the countries without needing to quarantine for the first time since the pandemic began.

The bubble, which will open just before midnight on April 19, is expected to deliver a boost to tourism and to families that have been separated since both countries enacted strict border closures and lockdown measures that have all but eliminated local transmission of the coronavirus.

The announcement came after months of negotiations and setbacks, as Australia battled small outbreaks and officials in both countries weighed testing requirements and other safety protocols.

“The director general of health considers the risk of transmission of Covid-19 from Australia to New Zealand is low and that quarantine-free travel is safe to commence,” Ms. Ardern said at a news conference.

Since last year, Australia has permitted travelers from New Zealand to bypass its hotel quarantine requirements. New Zealand’s decision to reciprocate makes the two countries among the first places in the world to set up such a bubble, following a similar announcement last week by Taiwan and the Pacific island nation of Palau.

Australians flying to New Zealand will be required to have spent the previous 14 days in Australia, to wear a mask on the plane and, if possible, to use New Zealand’s Covid-19 contact tracing app. In the event of an outbreak in Australia, New Zealand could impose additional restrictions, including shutting down travel to a particular Australian state or imposing quarantine requirements, Ms. Ardern said.

She warned that the new requirements would not necessarily free up many spaces in New Zealand’s overwhelmed hotel quarantine system, which has a weekslong backlog for New Zealanders wishing to book a space to return home. Of the roughly 1,000 slots that would now become available every two weeks, around half would be set aside as a contingency measure, while most of the others would not be appropriate for travelers from higher-risk countries, Ms. Ardern said.

Before New Zealand closed its borders to international visitors in March 2020, its tourism industry employed nearly 230,000 people and contributed 41.9 billion New Zealand dollars ($30.2 billion) to economic output, according to the country’s tourism board. Most of the roughly 3.8 million foreign tourists who visited New Zealand over a 12-month period between 2018 and 2019 came from Australia.

Ms. Ardern encouraged Australians to visit New Zealand’s ski areas, and said she would be conducting interviews with Australian media outlets this week to promote New Zealand as a tourism destination.

The bubble would also make it easier for the more than 500,000 New Zealanders who live in Australia to visit their families.

“It is ultimately a change of scene that so many have been looking for,” Ms. Ardern said, addressing Australians. “You may not have been in long periods of lockdown, but you haven’t had the option. Now you have the option, come and see us.”

The Texas Rangers played baseball in front of a packed house.

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Fans filled the seats on Monday for the Texas Rangers opening day game in Arlington, Texas, against the Toronto Blue Jays.Credit...Tom Pennington/Getty Images

There was no need to pipe in crowd noise at Globe Life Field on Monday, as the Texas Rangers hosted the Toronto Blue Jays in front of the largest crowd at a sporting event in the United States in more than a year.

From the long lines of fans waiting to get into the stadium to the persistent buzz of the spectators during quiet moments, the game in Arlington, Texas, was a throwback to a time before the coronavirus crippled the country.

“It felt like a real game,” Rangers Manager Chris Woodward said. “It felt like back to the old days when we had full capacity.”

The official crowd of 38,238 fans, which was announced as a sellout, represented 94.8 percent of the stadium’s 40,300-seat capacity. It topped the Daytona 500 (which allowed slightly more than 30,000 fans) and the Super Bowl (24,835), both of which were held in February, as the largest crowd at a U.S. sporting event since the pandemic began last year.

The lifting of capacity restrictions in Texas made the enormous crowd possible. And for Major League Baseball, which claims its teams collectively lost billions during a largely fanless 2020 season, it was a hopeful sign that large crowds can return to all of the league’s games before too long. The open question is whether such events can be safe as the pandemic continues.

M.L.B. requires all fans over age 2 to wear masks at games this season, but a large percentage of the fans in Arlington went maskless. That will undoubtedly raise fears of the event resulting in a spike in coronavirus cases.

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Walgreens wasn’t following U.S. guidance on spacing Pfizer doses, but, following complaints, will do so.

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Gov. Greg Gianforte of Montana received a shot of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine at a Walgreens pharmacy last week in Helena, Mont.Credit...Thom Bridge/Independent Record, via Associated Press

Walgreens has inoculated hundreds of thousands of Americans against Covid-19 this year using the vaccine developed by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech. But the pharmacy chain has not been following guidance from federal health officials about the timing of second doses.

People are supposed to get two doses, three weeks apart. Walgreens, however, separated them by four weeks because that made it faster and simpler for the company to schedule appointments.

There is no evidence that separating the doses by an extra week decreases the vaccine’s effectiveness. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a three-week gap, the agency says it is acceptable to separate the doses by up to six weeks if necessary.

But Walgreens’s decision, which it did not publicly announce, confused some customers and caught the attention of federal health officials. Kate Grusich, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency had asked Walgreens to stop using a longer-than-recommended time period between doses.

The company’s vaccine-scheduling system by default schedules all second doses four weeks after the first. Doses of Moderna’s vaccine, which Walgreens is also administering, are supposed to be spaced four weeks apart. Using the same gap for both vaccines was “the easiest way to stand up the process based on our capabilities at the time,” Dr. Kevin Ban, Walgreens’s chief medical officer, said in an interview.

Now Walgreens is changing its system. Starting as soon as the end of the week, the pharmacy will automatically schedule people for Pfizer doses three weeks apart, Dr. Ban said.

Walgreens is one of the largest among dozens of drugstore and grocery store chains that are giving out vaccines allocated by states and via a federal program that the White House said last week would expand to 40,000 locations. Walgreens reported last week that it had given out more than eight million Covid-19 vaccine doses, including four million in March, and expects to give out 26 million to 34 million before the end of August.

Walgreens, along with CVS, previously led an effort to vaccinate nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, during which the chain gave out Pfizer doses at facilities with visits spaced three weeks apart.

The vaccination campaign is a business opportunity for Walgreens, which is bringing in revenue from the vaccine administration fees paid by government and private payers as well as from purchases made by shoppers coming in for vaccines. The company requires people to create a Walgreens account to search online for a vaccine appointment.

Most other major pharmacies, including CVS and Rite Aid, stuck with the C.D.C.’s guidance on the timing of second doses. CVS, for example, schedules second Pfizer shots for 20 to 23 days after the first shot, said T.J. Crawford, a spokesman for the chain.

Some public health experts believe the United States should delay the second doses of vaccines by longer than Walgreens has been doing with the Pfizer vaccine. That way, more people can get partial protection through the first shots. Britain, for example, is delaying second shots by up to three months. Canada has begun delaying doses by up to four months.

But it was a three-week gap that underwent extensive clinical testing, and U.S. officials and Pfizer executives have not voiced support for alternate dosing schedules.

Asked about Walgreens’s scheduling, Kit Longley, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, said the safety and efficacy of the company’s vaccine had not been evaluated on dosing schedules different from the three-week gap tested in clinical trial volunteers.

Those 16 or older in New Jersey will be eligible for a vaccine on April 19, the governor says.

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A Covid-19 vaccination site in Newark in February.Credit...Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock

All New Jersey residents 16 or older will be eligible for Covid-19 vaccination beginning on April 19, Gov. Philip D. Murphy said on Monday. It is an announcement that heeds President Biden’s call for states to speed up their timelines for all adults to be eligible, as most other states already have.

In Maryland, those 16 or older are eligible to get a shot on Tuesday at state mass vaccination sites, Gov. Larry Hogan said on Monday. On April 12, he said, all Maryland residents 16 or older will be eligible at the other vaccine providers in the state.

Mayor Muriel Bowser of the District of Columbia joined the group of leaders expanding vaccine eligibility, saying on Twitter on Monday that all Washington residents 16 or older would be eligible on April 19.

That leaves Oregon and Hawaii as the only states yet to announce eligibility for all adults before May 1.

The announcements come as the pace of vaccinations across the country has been steadily increasing. As of Monday, an average of more than three million people are being vaccinated each day in the United States, and about 107.5 million people have received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to a New York Times database.

But even as the rollout of vaccinations continues to pick up pace, federal health officials and public health experts have been warning that the country could face a possible fourth surge in coronavirus cases.

Last week, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pleaded with Americans to “hold on a little while longer.”

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De Blasio is easing a rule in N.Y.C. public schools that had forced many to temporarily shut.

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Students exiting I.S. 238 in Queens last month.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

Mayor Bill de Blasio will change a rule that has, for months, created a paradox in New York City’s school reopening plan: Classrooms that had been reopened to students often closed again because school buildings had to shut temporarily whenever two unrelated virus cases were detected.

The mayor announced Monday that he would alter the rule, but he did not explain how. He said the new rules would be outlined in the coming days, but did not commit to making changes this week.

The closure rule has been extremely frustrating for many parents, who have said that every day brings uncertainty about whether their children will be able to attend school the following morning. Many schools have closed multiple times and sometimes have been open for just a few days before the next closure. The rule has also been intensely disruptive for educators, who have been forced to toggle between in-person and online learning with only a few hours’ notice.

The controversy over the closure rule has highlighted the enormous difficulties and trade-offs inherent in reopening schools during the pandemic. Mayors and education leaders across the country have scrambled to find ways to return students to classrooms while experimenting with safety protocols in real time.

Closures have accelerated in recent weeks and months, as middle and high school students have returned to their buildings after months of all-remote learning. The vast majority of New York City students — roughly 700,000 out of 1 million — have chosen to learn remotely full time, which means the closure rule did not affect most families.

But the city is giving all families an opportunity to switch from remote learning to classroom instruction for the rest of the school year, so that number may shift. Some students will get full-time instruction, while others will go in a few days a week and learn from home the rest of the time, based on individual school capacity. Families have until the end of the day on Friday to switch.

In recent weeks, some epidemiologists and medical experts have told ProPublica and the education news site Chalkbeat that New York’s two-case rule was arbitrary and had led to unnecessary closures, and called on the mayor to adjust it.

“The way to beat Covid is not by closing schools excessively, but by suppressing transmission both inside and outside of schools,” Dr. Dave A. Chokshi, the city’s health commissioner, said during a news conference on Monday.

The city’s schools have had very low virus transmission in classrooms since they began to reopen last fall. Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, has strenuously opposed any changes to the rule for months, arguing that the city’s schools were safe only because of the strict safety measures, including the two-case threshold.

“We can’t just say because they’re an inconvenience we don’t want them,” Mr. Mulgrew said of the guidelines during a radio interview last month.

The closure rule was settled last summer during a period of intense turmoil between City Hall and the union, at a moment when it was unclear whether Mr. de Blasio would be able to reopen schools at all. The city and union eventually agreed on a host of safety rules that cleared a path for New York to become the first large school district in America to reopen schools for all grades.

Iran: ‘We have lost control of containing the Covid-19 dragon.’

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Iran is experiencing an increase in coronavirus infections and deaths.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Iran’s coronavirus infection and death rates have reached what amounts to a fourth wave, health officials said Monday, a few weeks after many Iranians ignored warnings against traveling and congregating for the Nowruz new year holiday.

Tehran and several other big cities were declared red zones — the worst level in the color-coded system of risk devised by the health authorities to deal with managing the scourge.

“Today we have lost control of containing the Covid-19 dragon,” said the health minister, Saeed Namaki. “It remains unclear when we will be able to lower three-digit death rates. It is an extremely difficult situation.”

The health ministry said 172 people had died and 13,890 had tested positive for the virus in the past day. The numbers are the highest in four months. The head of Tehran’s biggest cemetery said the number of dead from the virus in the capital had tripled in just a few days.

Besides Tehran, 96 other cities and towns — constituting nearly half the country — were placed in high-risk categories of red and orange zones. Officials announced new restrictions for red cities that include closures of schools and educational establishments; reduced number of people going to work; a ban on travel to and from the cities; and a cap of 15 persons at gatherings.

The recent surge in numbers follows Iran’s Nowruz celebrations in mid-March, when Iranians packed shopping areas and restaurants, held large house parties and traveled across the country. The authorities warned the public to take safety measures for the holidays but did little to enforce it.

Health officials have said that the dominant virus in Iran is now the British variant that first entered Iran from its southwestern borders with Iraq. The southwestern provinces in Iran were the first to face a new surge and were placed under lockdown, but now the variant has spread across the country.

Iran has been especially hard hit by the pandemic, with some of the highest infection and death rates. Vaccination has been slow, entangled in politics and disinformation. Less than 1 percent of the population of 80 million, mostly medical workers, have been vaccinated.

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An N.H.L. team has been frozen by an outbreak.

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Four of the Vancouver Canucks’ games have already been postponed with more expected after at least 16 players tested positive for the coronavirus. Credit...Bob Frid/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

The National Hockey League’s Covid-19 protocols have sidelined more than half of the Vancouver Canucks, as well as one member of the coaching staff, an extraordinary impact of the coronavirus on a sports team.

The Canucks have not played a game in nearly two weeks. At least 16 players are on the league’s protocol list after testing positive. An N.H.L. roster is typically 23 players. The protocol list is based on testing and contact tracing.

The players have reported symptoms including fever, fatigue and mild headaches, as reported by The Vancouver Province. Members of the players’ immediate families and team staff have also been affected, according to reports, and it is believed to be the Brazilian P.1 variant of the virus, a first in the N.H.L.

“Finally made it to the couch after two days,” one Canucks player told a local journalist.

Four games have already been postponed with more expected. The Canucks, who last played on March 24 in a home loss against the Winnipeg Jets, are prohibited from practicing until April 6 at the earliest and are restricted from playing games until April 8, when they are scheduled to play the Calgary Flames on the road. At press time, that game has not been canceled.

On Sunday, Jim Benning, the Canucks general manager, released a statement expressing gratitude for the well wishes from fans as well as acknowledging the organizations that have provided medical support to the club. “We hope for a return to full health as soon as possible,” the statement read. “Our focus continues to be the health of everyone involved.”

A low-cost vaccine entering clinical trials could change how we fight the pandemic.

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A nurse administering the NDV-HXP-S vaccine in Bangkok last month during the first human trial for the vaccine in Thailand.Credit...Government Pharmaceutical Organization of Thailand, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A new coronavirus vaccine that is entering clinical trials in Brazil, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam could change how the world fights the pandemic. The vaccine, called NDV-HXP-S, is the first in clinical trials to use a new molecular design that is widely expected to create more potent antibodies than the current generation of vaccines. And it could be far easier to make.

Existing vaccines from companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson must be produced in specialized factories using hard-to-acquire ingredients. In contrast, the new vaccine can be mass-produced in chicken eggs — the same kinds of eggs that produce billions of influenza vaccines every year in factories around the world.

If NDV-HXP-S proves safe and effective, flu vaccine manufacturers could potentially produce well over a billion doses of it a year. Low- and middle-income countries currently struggling to obtain vaccines from wealthier nations may be able to make NDV-HXP-S for themselves or acquire it at low cost from neighbors.

“That’s staggering — it would be a game-changer,” said Andrea Taylor, assistant director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

First, however, clinical trials must establish that NDV-HXP-S actually works in people. The first phase of clinical trials is to conclude in July, and the final phase will take several months more. But experiments with vaccinated animals have raised hopes for the vaccine’s prospects.

“It’s a home run for protection,” said Dr. Bruce Innis of the PATH Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access, which has coordinated the development of NDV-HXP-S. “I think it’s a world-class vaccine.”

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Rapid antigen tests catch the most contagious children, a study finds.

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A child being tested for the coronavirus in New Delhi last month.Credit...Money Sharma/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A widely used rapid antigen test detects about half of children who are infected with the coronavirus but more than 90 percent of those with the highest viral loads, according to a new study.

“When kids are likely to be infectious, the test is pretty accurate,” said Neeraj Sood, director of the Covid Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and one of the study’s authors. The study, which included more than 200 children infected with the virus, was published Monday in the scientific journal PLoS One.

Rapid antigen tests are typically cheaper and faster than P.C.R. tests, which can detect the virus at very low levels, but they are less sensitive and more likely to produce false negatives. They have been evaluated primarily in adults, and one previous study, conducted at a community testing site in Massachusetts, found that they were less sensitive in children.

Dr. Sood and his colleagues worked with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and the Los Angeles mayor’s office to evaluate the performance of BinaxNOW, a rapid antigen test manufactured by the U.S. company Abbott Laboratories that has emergency use approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

In late November and early December, more than 700 children who received P.C.R. tests at a coronavirus testing site in Los Angeles also took antigen tests. In total, 226 children between the ages of 5 and 17 tested positive for the virus on the P.C.R. tests. Of those, 56.2 percent of them also tested positive on the rapid antigen test. That suggests that one-off antigen testing of children is likely to miss roughly half of those who are infected with the virus.

“You’re missing roughly one out of every two positives,” Dr. Sood said. “But not all positives are significant from a public health point of view.”

People are most likely to be infectious when their virus levels are high. The antigen tests caught 93.8 percent of those children with the highest levels of virus in their bodies, the researchers found. The antigen tests were also slightly better at detecting the virus in children who had coronavirus symptoms than in those who were asymptomatic.

“This is another piece of information telling us that these rapid cheap tests are good, not great,” said Michelle Mello, a professor of health research and policy at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. “You need to test often to make up for the fact that they’re not great.”

A test might miss a student who has been infected recently and whose viral load is still low. But a follow-up test, conducted after the virus has had a chance to replicate, might catch that child.

Researchers should continue to evaluate how well these tests, and the screening programs that use them, perform when they are rolled out in real school environments, Dr. Sood said.

Gayle Smith, who helped lead the U.S. response to Ebola, will run Biden’s vaccine diplomacy.

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Gayle Smith Appointed to Lead Global Covid-19 Response

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announced on Monday that Gayle Smith, a leader in the Obama administration’s Ebola response, would head up vaccine diplomacy for the Biden administration.

“This pandemic won’t end at home until it ends worldwide. And I want to spend a minute on this because it’s critical to understand, even if we vaccinate all 332 million people in the United States tomorrow, we would still not be fully safe from the virus. Not while it’s still replicating around the world, and turning into new variants that could easily come here and spread across our communities again. And not if we want to fully reopen our economy or start traveling again. Plus, if other countries’ economies aren’t rebounding because they’re still afflicted with Covid, that’ll hurt our recovery too. The world has to come together.” “Our challenges now are two: First, to shorten the lifespan of a borderless pandemic that is destroying lives and livelihoods all over the world. And the second is to ensure that we can prevent, detect and respond to those future global health threats we know are coming. American leadership is desperately needed, and I’m extremely confident we can rise to the occasion. I’m honored to be here. And thank you, very, very much.”

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Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announced on Monday that Gayle Smith, a leader in the Obama administration’s Ebola response, would head up vaccine diplomacy for the Biden administration.CreditCredit...Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press

An ardent advocate of protecting some of the world’s poorest countries from Covid-19 has been selected to lead the Biden administration’s vaccine diplomacy in an effort to corral wealthier nations into distributing immunizations more evenly around the globe.

Gayle Smith, a former U.S. Agency for International Development administrator and chief executive of the ONE Campaign to eradicate poverty and preventable disease, will step into the role, a new post at the State Department.

With about 62 million people in the United States already fully vaccinated against Covid-19, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken made a case on Monday for ensuring that more people are protected abroad.

“We have a duty to other countries to get the virus under control here in the United States,” Mr. Blinken said at the State Department. “But soon, the United States will need to step up our work and rise to the occasion worldwide. Because again, only by stopping Covid globally, will Americans be saved for the long term.”

Mr. Blinken said other nations have been asking the United States “with growing desperation” to share its vaccine supply. “We hear you, and I promise we’re moving as fast as possible,” he said.

Ms. Smith will be focused largely on trying to coordinate the international response, even as the virus mutates and threatens to extend the pandemic. So far, the United States has contributed or pledged $4 billion to Covax, the global vaccination drive, largely bound for low- and middle-income countries, and Congress last month approved $11 billion in efforts abroad to fight the pandemic on top of billions of dollars sent to foreign nations and nongovernmental organizations in the first year of the outbreak.

More than 665 million vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.

Yet China, India and Russia have already outpaced the United States in providing vaccines globally as an instrument of diplomacy. Just last month, the ONE Campaign urged President Biden to share 5 percent of its doses abroad when 20 percent of Americans have been vaccinated, and increase the doses globally as more people in the United States receive theirs. According to the group, the U.S. government has purchased 453 million excess vaccine doses.

Ms. Smith, who will receive her second vaccine shot on Tuesday, helped lead the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014 that swept across borders in West Africa, and into the United States, while the World Health Organization was stunted by staffing cuts and other resource shortages. Officials said the U.N. agency has since fostered a stronger collaboration of scientists and health experts to better track diseases.

The Trump administration withdrew from the W.H.O. last year after it refused to blame China for failing to stop Covid-19 where it originated, but the United States has recommitted to working with the agency under Mr. Biden.

“If the virus is moving faster than we are, it’s winning,” Ms. Smith said after Mr. Blinken announced her appointment on Monday. “But with unity of purpose, science, vigilance and leadership, we can outpace any virus.”

Mr. Blinken said there would be enough vaccines for all adults in the United States by the end of May, following the deaths of more than 550,000 Americans from the virus since February 2020. More than 2.8 million people worldwide have been killed by the pandemic.

Other world leaders have begun to step up demands for wealthy nations to share vaccines with poorer countries; on Sunday, Pope Francis called the vaccines “an essential tool” to stop the pandemic.

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Global Roundup

China tries to contain an outbreak near the Myanmar border.

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A photograph from Chinese state news media showing a line for vaccinations on Thursday in Ruli, a city near the border with Myanmar.Credit...Chen Xinbo/Xinhua, via Associated Press

After almost two months of near-zero local coronavirus infections, China is working to contain a small outbreak in a southwestern city near the border with Myanmar.

Ruili, a city of 210,000 people in Yunnan Province, has recorded 48 new cases in the past week, including 15 reported on Monday. It has been on lockdown since last week as officials conduct citywide virus testing. The local authorities also said they would aim to vaccinate every resident by Tuesday in an effort to contain the virus.

The city is the main crossing point on the border between Yunnan and Myanmar, which was difficult to secure even before a Feb. 1 coup by the Myanmar military set off deadly unrest. Nineteen of the 48 infected patients are Myanmar nationals, and officials in Ruili said on Saturday that the outbreak was most likely traceable to people or goods arriving from across the border.

Since largely stamping out the virus last spring, China has responded aggressively to new outbreaks with lockdowns and other measures — including in Ruili last September, after infections were found in two people from Myanmar accused of crossing the border illegally. China’s last major outbreak, which began in January in the northeast, prompted lockdowns in several cities that affected millions of people.

In other news from around the world:

  • Investigations have begun in France after government officials and others were accused of dining in secret restaurants in violation of coronavirus restrictions. The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed that it was looking into whether parties were organized in disregard of health restrictions and to determine who organized and participated in the events, a spokesman said.

  • Greece took cautious steps on Monday toward lifting restrictions in a bid to breathe life into its beleaguered economy and offer relief to residents that have been under some form of lockdown since November. Retail shops opened across much of the country, but bars and cafes remain closed. They are likely to open next month, just before a planned reopening of the country’s crucial tourism sector on May 14.

  • Kenya has imposed new restrictions on travelers from Britain, days after Kenya was added to a government “red list” barring entry to travelers from certain countries. Beginning April 9, anyone arriving in Kenya from a British airport will be required to quarantine for 14 days at a government-designated facility and will have to take two coronavirus tests, according to the Kenyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Kenyan citizens will be exempt from the rules, as will cargo flights between the countries.

  • Bangladesh began a weeklong national lockdown on Monday after a stark rise in new cases. The government said it would restrict movement, and all nonessential shops and services have been shut. Domestic flights and public transportation services have also been suspended.

Climbers return to Mount Everest, with social distancing and Covid-19 insurance.

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Lakpa Sherpa, managing director of Pioneer Adventure, checking oxygen masks and cylinders before sending them to Everest Base Camp for this year’s expedition.Credit...Uma Bista for The New York Times

After Nepal was forced to close its mountain trails last year, dealing its economy a devastating blow, the tiny Himalayan country has reopened Mount Everest and its seven other 26,200-foot-plus peaks in the hope of a rebound.

For this year’s climbing season, from March to May, Nepal has granted more than 300 climbers the licenses needed to ascend the world’s tallest peak. Many of those climbers hope to reach the summit, 5.5 miles above sea level.

But as the coronavirus resurges in South Asia, the pandemic has made the already deadly climb even more hazardous. Local officials have instituted testing, mask and social-distancing requirements, stationed medical personnel at the Mount Everest Base Camp, and made plans to swoop in and pick up infected climbers. Climbers are typically greeted in Kathmandu with raucous parties thrown by expedition staffers. But not this year.

“No party. No handshake. No hug. Just ‘Namaste,’” said Lakpa Sherpa, whose agency is taking 19 climbers to Everest this spring, referring to the South Asian greeting.

Nepal, one of the poorest countries in Asia, and one where coronavirus vaccination efforts are faltering, is taking a calculated risk. In 2019, tourism brought in $2 billion in revenue and employed about a million people. For tens of thousands of Nepalis, the three-month climbing season is the only opportunity for paid work.

The damage from last year’s closure was immense. At least 1.5 million people in the country of 30 million lost jobs or substantial income during the pandemic, according to Nepal’s National Planning Commission.

Porters who usually cart supplies and gear up the peaks for well-paying foreign climbers were forced to subsist on government handouts of rice and lentils. Expert expedition guides, many of whom are members of Nepal’s Sherpa tribe, returned to their villages in the remote mountains and grew potatoes to survive.

“We have no other options,” said Rudra Singh Tamang, the head of Nepal’s tourism department. “We need to save the mountaineering economy.”

Still, tourism ministry officials and expedition agencies acknowledge that Nepal has no clear plan to test or isolate climbers if one tests positive for the virus.

At the airport in Kathmandu, the capital, incoming travelers must show negative RT-PCR test results or provide vaccination certificates. Climbers initially had to get additional insurance, adding to the average $50,000 price tag to climb Everest, although the government has loosened that requirement.

Despite the challenges, the climbing season has drawn some high-profile mountaineers, including a Bahraini prince with a large entourage, a Qatari who wants to be the first woman from her nation to make the climb, and a former National Football League wide receiver who is aiming to become the oldest N.F.L. player to summit the world’s seven tallest peaks.

“I wanted to be there,” said the former player, Mark Pattison, 59, “in Nepal, this spring, at any cost.”

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Live performances make a cautious return.

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Jon Laster performing on Friday at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

More than a year after the pandemic brought down the curtain at theaters and concert halls around the world, the performing arts are beginning to return to the stage.

A smattering of theater and comedy shows lit up New York stages over the last few days, but next week will see one of the higher-profile arts returns. The New York Philharmonic is scheduled to give its first live performance in a concert hall since the pandemic began: “a musical musing on Goethe,” at the Shed at the Hudson Yards development on April 14.

The reopenings come at a confusing moment in the pandemic. Vaccinations are rising in the United States — Saturday was the first time the country reported more than four million doses in a single day, according to data compiled by The New York Times — but so are case counts.

While new cases, deaths and hospitalizations are far below their January peak, the average number of new reported cases has risen 19 percent over the past two weeks.

Still, performance spaces are carefully starting to welcome audiences, at a fraction of their capacity. There remains much debate over what regulations to impose on attendees. In Israel, concertgoers are required to have a Green Pass, which certifies that they have been vaccinated, though enforcement can be spotty.

In New York, as at the Daryl Roth Theater, an Off Broadway venue, temperatures were checked as a small audience streamed in for an immersive sound performance based on the José Saramago novel “Blindness” — a dystopian tale from 25 years ago whose resonances eerily align with the present. Mayor Bill de Blasio, masked and sneaker-clad, greeted some theatergoers on the sidewalk outside with wrist and elbow bumps.

But that optimism has been tinged with more halting news that underscores how fragile these reopenings are.

The Park Avenue Armory had to postpone one of the most high-profile experiments to bring indoor live performance back to New York. A sold-out run of “Afterwardsness,” a new piece that addresses the pandemic and violence against Black people, was canceled after several members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company tested positive for the virus.

At the Comedy Cellar, a Greenwich Village club that has nursed the early careers of many comics, laughter filled the room for its first show, but reminders of reality were impossible to miss: Performers’ microphones were swapped out between each set, every fresh one covered with what looked like a miniature shower cap.

John Touhey, 27, said that his reason for coming was simple. “Just to feel something again,” he said.California officials have announced guidelines for indoor concerts, theater, sports and other events, which will be permitted beginning April 15. Capacity will be linked to a county’s health tier.

Los Angeles County, for example, on Monday moved into the orange tier, which would allow venues that hold up to 1,500 people to operate at 15 percent capacity, or 200 people. The number rises to 35 percent if all attendees are tested or show proof of vaccination.

In Minneapolis, pandemic-weary music fans may have to wait longer, but the results will be louder. First Avenue, a legendary club, last month booked its first new, non-postponed show since the pandemic began, The Star Tribune reported. The band is Dinosaur Jr., led by J. Mascis, one of the most durable indie rockers of the last 30 years. The show is scheduled for Sept. 14.

Many homeless people have no easy way to get stimulus checks.

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A line for meals at the Bowery Mission in New York last month. Some people who would benefit most from the stimulus are having the hardest time getting it.Credit...Andrew Seng for The New York Times

For most Americans, the third stimulus payment, like the first two, arrived as if by magic, landing unprompted in the bank or in the mail.

But it’s not as straightforward for people without a bank account or a mailing address. Or a phone. Or identification.

Just about anyone with a Social Security number who is not someone else’s dependent and who earns less than $75,000 is entitled to the stimulus. But some of the people who would benefit most from the money are having the hardest time getting their hands on it.

“There’s this great intention to lift people out of poverty more and give them support, and all of that’s wonderful,” said Beth Hofmeister, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society’s Homeless Rights Project. “But the way people have to access it doesn’t really fit with how most really low-income people are interacting with the government.”

Interviews with homeless people in New York City over the last couple of weeks found that some mistakenly assumed they were ineligible for the stimulus. Others said that bureaucratic hurdles, complicated by limited phone or internet access, were insurmountable.

Paradoxically, the very poor are the most likely to pump stimulus money right back into devastated local economies, rather than sock it away in the bank or use it to play the stock market.

“I’d find a permanent place to stay, some food, clothing, a nice shower, a nice bed,” said Richard Rodriguez, 43, waiting for lunch outside the Bowery Mission last month. “I haven’t had a nice bed for a year.”

Mr. Rodriguez said he had made several attempts to file taxes — a necessary step for those not yet in the system — but had given up.

“I went to H&R Block and I told them I was homeless,” he said. “They said they couldn’t help me.”

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Many of the most vulnerable U.S. counties have lower vaccination rates.

The United States reached a milestone on Saturday, topping 3 million average daily vaccinations for the first time. But speed isn’t the only priority for the country’s vaccination campaign. The Biden administration has also committed to distributing shots equitably to the communities most affected by the pandemic.

Yet more than three months into the rollout, the most socially vulnerable counties in the U.S. have a lower vaccination rate on average than the nation’s least vulnerable. The majority of the most disadvantaged counties with the fewest fully vaccinated people are in the South, while the most vaccinated, least vulnerable counties are in the Midwest.

Vaccination rates by county social vulnerability

Share of total population fully vaccinated. Circles sized by county population.

MidwestNortheastSouthWest
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Texas Department of State Health Services, Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, Massachusetts Department of Public Health, U.S. Census Bureau | Note: No C.D.C. data available for Hawaii, Texas and some counties. Georgia, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia were excluded because more than a quarter of data is missing.

Counties are ranked according to the Social Vulnerability Index, an indicator from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that is used in public health crises and is based on socioeconomic status, housing, transportation, race, ethnicity and language. Each county’s vaccination rate is its share of all residents that have been fully vaccinated, a figure that does not reflect those who have only received one dose of a two-shot vaccine.

A handful of the most vulnerable counties do have some of the top vaccination rates in the country — in places like Apache, Ariz., and Nome Census Area, Alaska — reflecting the work that states, community organizations and federal agencies, such as the Indian Health Service, have done to target at-risk populations. The C.D.C. found similar results in its own analysis, noting that many states have more work to do to reduce vaccination inequities.

In early March, a New York Times analysis of state-reported race and ethnicity information showed that the vaccination rates for Black and Hispanic people in the United States were far outpaced by that of white people. Public health experts have said that obstacles to vaccine access, such as flexible work schedules and access to dependable transportation, deserve much of the blame for these vaccination disparities.

A recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the number of Americans, particularly Black adults, who want to get vaccinated has continued to increase. But it also found that vaccine skepticism remains stubbornly persistent, particularly among Republicans and white evangelical Christians.

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