Covid Live Updates: Mask Mandate News, Vaccines And Cases – The New York Times

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Infants whose mothers received two doses of an mRNA coronavirus vaccine during pregnancy are less likely to be admitted to the hospital for Covid-19 in the first six months of life, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, maternal vaccination was 61 percent effective at preventing infant hospitalization, the researchers found.

Vaccination later in pregnancy — after the first 20 weeks — appeared to provide better protection for infants than earlier vaccination, the study suggests.

The new study is the first real-world, epidemiological evidence that maternal vaccination can protect infants from Covid-19, likely because they are born carrying their mother’s antibodies.

“The bottom line is that maternal vaccination is a really important way to help protect these young infants,” Dr. Dana Meaney-Delman, chief of the Infant Outcomes Monitoring Research and Prevention Branch at the C.D.C., said at a news briefing on Tuesday.

The C.D.C. recommends that women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or trying to become pregnant be vaccinated against Covid-19, which can be dangerous for pregnant women and their children. Research has shown, for instance, that the disease can increase the risk of a variety of pregnancy complications, including preterm birth and stillbirth.

Prior research on other diseases has suggested that women who are vaccinated against other pathogens during pregnancy can pass antibodies to the fetus through the placenta, and scientists have previously found signs that the same antibody transfer might happen after vaccination for Covid-19.

The new study focused on children under six months of age who were admitted to one of 20 U.S. pediatric hospitals between July 1 and Jan. 17. Of the 379 infants included in the study, 176 had been admitted for Covid-19 or had symptoms of the disease; all of these children tested positive for the virus. The remaining 203 children tested negative for the virus.

Among the infants with Covid-19, 16 percent of mothers had been vaccinated during pregnancy, compared to 32 percent of the mothers of hospitalized children without the virus.

Vaccination during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy was 32 percent effective against Covid-19-related hospitalization for infants, the researchers found, whereas later vaccination was 80 percent effective.

But because of the relatively small sample size, more research is needed to determine the optimal timing of vaccination during pregnancy and whether a booster during pregnancy might provide similar protection for infants whose mothers have already received their first set of shots.

“For right now, we want to ensure that we are protecting both the mom and the infant, and so as soon as a pregnant woman is willing to be vaccinated, we recommend that she go ahead and do so,” Dr. Meaney-Delman said.

She added, “Unfortunately, vaccination of infants younger than six months old is not currently on the horizon.”

The study was also not large enough to determine whether maternal vaccination was equally protective against Delta, which was the dominant variant when the study began, and Omicron, which had displaced Delta by the time the research ended.

Tyson Foods, one of the first national employers to mandate vaccines for its workers, is moving to ease mask requirements for its employees, a decision that comes as the number of coronavirus cases in the United States falls.

The meatpacking giant said on Tuesday that fully vaccinated workers at “some facilities” could begin to remove their masks at work. It joined companies like Walmart and states like New York that have moved to loosen restrictions in hopes of achieving a new normal in the absence of revised national guidelines.

“Due to our many efforts, and most importantly, our enterprisewide vaccinated status, we’ve seen lower rates of Covid-19 infection, as well as extremely low rates of serious illness at Tyson,” Tom Brower, the company’s senior vice president of health and safety, wrote in a memo to employees.

“And in recent weeks the number of active cases at Tyson has declined significantly,” he added.

A spokesman for Tyson said the company has “had productive and ongoing conversations with union representatives about the policy change.”

Tyson has 120,000 workers in more than a dozen states. The long hours they spend working in tight quarters make them particularly susceptible to the virus. And the meat giant was criticized early in the pandemic for failing to do enough to protect its workers from the coronavirus, which killed more than 100 of its employees.

Slaughterhouses became hot spots for the coronavirus as it spread, posing a serious challenge to meat production. In April 2020, President Donald J. Trump said the slaughtering and processing of beef, chicken and pork was “critical infrastructure,” allowing the plants to remain open despite a growing number of deaths among their workers. The order followed weeks of industry lobbying led by Tyson.

A recent congressional report said that at a Tyson plant in Amarillo, Texas, inspectors had observed that many employees were working with “saturated” masks. At a pork plant in Waterloo, Iowa, dozens of workers fell ill and three died. Local officials, including the county sheriff, said the company initially refused their requests to shut down the plant in the spring of 2020.

Tyson says it has spent more than $810 million on coronavirus safety measures and new on-site medical services. It conducted plant-wide coronavirus testing and hired its first chief medical officer.

In August, the company announced a vaccine requirement for its packing houses and poultry plants, many of which are in the South and Midwest, where resistance to the vaccines has been high. By November, more than 96 percent of its work force was vaccinated.

Tyson defines fully vaccinated as two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shots or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson shot, Mr. Brower said Tuesday. The company has hosted more than 100 clinics offering booster shots and it continues to “strongly encourage” booster shots for employees, Mr. Brower said.

The number of coronavirus cases has declined about 80 percent nationally since its peak in January, to a national average of 155,000 per day, about the same as it was in late December.

For Tyson, the easing of the mask rules is conditioned on local and other applicable laws, as well as federal regulations, which require the continued use of masks at certain facilities, depending on transmission rate, Mr. Brower said. Tyson plans to inform employees soon which plants and offices will be affected by the change.

It also reviewing — and considering adjusting — guidelines for social distancing and testing.

Novak Djokovic said he was prepared to miss the French Open, Wimbledon and other tournaments if he was required to get a coronavirus vaccine to compete.

In an interview with the BBC that was broadcast on Tuesday, the Serbian tennis star said he believed the freedom to choose what goes into his body was “more important than any title, or anything else.”

Mr. Djokovic said he understood that his vaccination status meant that he was “unable to travel to most of the tournaments at the moment,” but, he added, “That is the price that I’m willing to pay.”

Mr. Djokovic’s decision to remain unvaccinated, even after he was unable to compete in the Australian Open, may delay his quest to win more Grand Slam titles than his rivals. (The Spanish tennis star Rafael Nadal was able to clinch a record 21st Grand Slam title at the Australian Open.)

The French authorities said last month that players must be vaccinated to compete in the French Open, the next of the four Grand Slam tournaments. Mr. Djokovic might be able to compete in Wimbledon in June, but according to recent guidelines, he may not be able to compete in the U.S. Open in August.

Mr. Djokovic told the BBC that he was not against vaccinations generally and that he did not want to be associated with the anti-vaccination movement, but that his decision about the coronavirus vaccine was personal.

“As an elite professional athlete, I’ve always carefully reviewed, assessed everything that comes in from the supplements, food, the water that I drink or sports drinks — anything, really anything that comes into my body as a fuel,” he said in the interview, which was recorded on Monday. “Based on all the informations that I got, I decided not to take the vaccine as of today.”

America’s patchwork of Covid restrictions has begun to look more like a crazy quilt.

Since a parade of blue-state governors began loosening restrictions last week in response to rapidly declining caseloads, more states and cities have since followed suit. But officials in some cities and school districts are keeping mandates in place, with rules varying county by county in some cases.

In California, state health authorities said Monday that while some pandemic restrictions would be lifted, schoolchildren would still be required to wear masks for at least another two weeks. And a mask mandate remains in effect in Los Angeles County.

In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, is expected to sign a bill that would make wearing masks in schools voluntary and require schools to offer in-person instruction.

Mask mandates in Rhode Island, Delaware and Nevada ended last week.

Restrictions are loosening despite the United States reporting about 2,400 deaths each day — more than at any point of the pandemic except last winter — and more than 150,000 new cases.

While the movement to ease restrictions began in swing states like Colorado, Pennsylvania and Michigan, its spread to some of the bluest states reflects a country entering a new political phase in the nearly two-year pandemic. Many indoor mask requirements have evolved, but vaccine mandates have largely remained unchanged.

Federal rules still require masks on all forms of public transportation and in transportation hubs, including in subway stations, bus terminals and airports, at least until March 18.

Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said that it was too soon for Americans to take their masks off in indoor public places.

“Our hospitalizations are still high, our death rates are still high,” she said during a news briefing last week. “So, as we work toward that and as we are encouraged by the current trends, we are not there yet.”

As of Tuesday night, the authorities in over a dozen states and Washington, D.C., have changed their mask mandates in the past few weeks, with many of those decisions coming in the past several days.

Here’s a look at where other mandates have and haven’t changed:

• In Connecticut, the statewide mask mandate will end on Feb. 28, and that extends to schoolchildren. Masks will still be required in New Haven, Conn.

• Masks will no longer be required indoors in Illinois starting on Feb. 28. On Monday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago told reporters that the city’s indoor mask requirement would remain in place until caseloads decline.

• In Massachusetts, a statewide school mask mandate will be lifted on Feb. 28. Mayor Michelle Wu of Boston said the next day that public school students there will still be required to wear masks. The Archdiocese of Boston won’t require its students to wear masks.

• Beginning the second week of March, New Jersey will stop requiring students and school employees to wear masks. The Camden City School District will still require masks.

• New York State will on Wednesday end its requirement that people entering business must wear masks or show proof of full vaccination. In New York City, masks are still required at schools and health care facilities. Owners of stores, restaurants, theaters or other public spaces can still require masks.

• Oregon’s indoor mask mandate, which includes schools, was set to be lifted by March 31.

• In Washington, D.C., starting Tuesday people will no longer have to show proof of vaccination before entering many businesses. On March 1, the city will end its indoor mask mandate in many settings, but not others, including schools.

New coronavirus cases within the closed Olympic “loop” have dropped to almost nothing, a sign that stringent testing and isolation protocols are having their intended effect.

On Monday, only one person in the loop tested positive. On Saturday and Sunday, three people tested positive each day either in the loop or upon arrival at the airport. The totals have been in single digits on seven of the past eight days. By comparison, in the two weeks from Jan. 24 through Feb. 6, there was not a single day on which fewer than 10 new cases were reported.

The numbers peaked on Feb. 2, when 55 tests came back positive in the loop or at the airport — still a very low positivity rate given that officials are conducting about 60,000 tests per day within the loop alone.

China has placed intense restrictions on its citizens’ lives for most of the past two years to try to keep the coronavirus out after the initial wave. For this month’s Games, it designed the most rigid protocols ever seen at the Olympics, surpassing even the protocols in place in Tokyo last summer. Athletes, journalists, workers and other people involved in the Games are confined to the loop from start to finish — 24 hours a day — and repeatedly tested.

In total, at least 505 people with Olympic credentials, including 183 athletes and team officials, have tested positive for the coronavirus in China. Among those who have tested positive since the Games began are some prominent athletes, including the figure skater Vincent Zhou and the bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor.

California state’s health authorities said on Monday that although the state was easing some pandemic restrictions, mask requirements for schoolchildren would remain for at least another two weeks.

The announcement by Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s top health official, comes as cases are plummeting in California and elsewhere and as Democratic-run states have begun to shift away from emergency pandemic measures and toward more long-term strategies for living with the virus.

Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that California had “a date with destiny,” and set a Feb. 15 deadline for lifting the statewide requirement that vaccinated people wear masks in indoor public spaces. Unvaccinated people will still be required to wear masks.

But as in other states, masks have remained a contentious issue, with unionized school employees pushing for continuing mask requirements as a workplace protection against unvaccinated children and a vocal minority of parents arguing that the masks are uncomfortable and possibly detrimental for children.

Dr. Ghaly said that California’s school mask mandates would remain at least until Feb. 28, at which point the health authorities will reassess, based on the levels of new infections, pediatric hospitalizations, case positivity rates, vaccination rates and other metrics.

“Masking has been a valuable tool to keep schools functioning when transmission is high,” Dr. Ghaly said, noting that California has had only 1 percent of the nation’s school closures despite having 12 percent of U.S. schoolchildren.

But, Dr. Ghaly added, “masking requirements were never put in place to be there forever.”

About 70 percent of Californians are fully vaccinated, and new coronavirus cases have fallen 70 percent over the past 14 days. Hospitalizations are down 36 percent. But cases remain high and local health authorities have varied in their willingness to ease restrictions.

The public health chief in Los Angeles, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, has said it may take weeks or months for infection rates to fall to a point where it is safe to lift that county’s indoor mask mandate.

More than six million children are enrolled in K-12 school in California. A state mandate that is being introduced in phases requires them to be vaccinated against Covid as soon as the fall as a condition of in-person attendance unless they have medical issues or “personal beliefs” that preclude vaccines.

State lawmakers are working to end the personal-belief exemption, as they did several years ago for vaccines against other contagious diseases such as whooping cough and measles. Less than a third of children aged 5 to 11 are vaccinated against the coronavirus in California.

In May 1889, a respiratory virus known as the Russian flu began infecting people in the Russian Empire. It swept the world, overwhelming hospitals and killing the old with special ferocity.

More than a century later, the virus is intriguing some researchers and historians who are studying the trajectory of that pandemic for clues about the future of Covid-19.

The Russian flu’s patterns of infection and symptoms — some of the sickened reported lingering exhaustion and a loss of smell and taste — have led some virologists and historians of medicine to wonder: Might the Russian flu actually have been a pandemic driven by a coronavirus? And could its course give us indications about how our pandemic will play out and wind down?

If a coronavirus caused the Russian flu, some believe that pathogen may still be around. Its descendants could be circulating worldwide as one of the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold. If so, it would be different from flu pandemics whose viruses stick around for a while only to be replaced by new variants years later that cause a new pandemic.

If that is what happened to the Russian flu, it may bode well. But there is another scenario. If today’s coronavirus behaves more like the flu, immunity against respiratory viruses is fleeting. That might mean a future of yearly Covid shots.

But, some historians voice caution about the Russian flu hypothesis.

“There is very little, almost no hard data” on the Russia flu pandemic, said Frank Snowden at Yale.

There is, though, a way to solve the mystery of the Russian flu. Molecular biologists now have the tools to pull shards of old virus from preserved lung tissue from Russian flu victims and figure out what sort of virus it was.

New York City fired 1,430 city workers on Friday for failing to comply with its vaccine mandate, a figure that represent less than 1 percent of the city’s work force, but likely the nation’s largest mass termination of municipal employees in response to a Covid vaccine mandate.

Mayor Eric Adams announced on Monday that 1,428 workers, who had already been on unpaid leave for months, were sent termination notices after they failed to receive a first dose of the vaccine. Two newer hires, who faced more stringent requirements, were also fired for failing to receive two vaccine doses. Nearly 4,000 city workers had faced a deadline of Friday to comply with the vaccine mandate.

Mr. Adams celebrated that many of the city’s 370,000 workers got vaccinated by the deadline. About 95 percent of the city’s workers have received at least one dose of the vaccine, an increase from 84 percent when the mandate was first announced in October.

“Our goal was always to vaccinate, not terminate, and city workers stepped up and met the goal placed before them,” Mr. Adams said in a statement on Monday.

Many medical experts say mandates have been effective in persuading more people to get vaccinated, which they say is essential to helping prevent the spread of the virus. Mandates at companies and elsewhere have been typically successful once implemented, including at private companies like Tyson Foods.

About 900 of the fired staff worked at the Department of Education; about 100 worked at the New York City Housing Authority, the public housing agency; 36 were from the New York Police Department.

More city workers could still face dismissal. About 9,000 additional city workers are still unvaccinated, but are seeking exemptions, or working with unions to avoid terminations.

All city workers are required to receive one dose of the vaccine. New hires must get two doses if they received a vaccine that includes a second dose. Booster shots are not required, but Mr. Adams has said he was considering the idea.

Vaccination rates among city agencies have been uneven. The Police Department and Correction Department have the lowest rates with 88 percent of workers who have received at least one dose.

Of all the city workers who were fired on Friday, only the two new hires were working last week, and more than 99 percent of new hires got vaccinated and kept their jobs, city officials said.

The city vaccine mandate for municipal workers was put in place by Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio.

Opponents of the mandate faced a series of legal defeats, the last being the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection on Friday of an emergency request that it consider an appeal by a group of city teachers.