Coronavirus UpdatesCovid News: New York and New Jersey Make Big Moves to Reopen

New York is adopting C.D.C. mask guidelines, but New Jersey is keeping its indoor mask mandate.

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Cuomo Announces New York Will Adopt C.D.C. Mask Guidelines

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that effective Wednesday, New York state will adopt the new C.D.C. mask guidance, which says that fully vaccinated individuals do not need to wear a mask or observe social distancing in most situations.

Let’s get back to life. This shutdown has caused all sorts of damage, damage that we’re not even aware of. Everybody points to the economic damage, and that’s certain. Businesses closed, people lost their jobs, but there’s all sorts of other damage that people are not yet understanding, I believe. What did it mean to keep children out of a school, out of school for a year? Effective this Wednesday, we’re going to adopt the C.D.C.’s new guidance and regulations on masks and social distancing for vaccinated people. By the C.D.C. guidance, immunocompromised people, unvaccinated people should continue to wear a mask and social distance. But if you are vaccinated, you are safe. No masks, no social distancing. We’re also going to follow the C.D.C.’S guidelines that you will still need to wear a mask on public transportation, the subways, the buses, nursing homes, homeless shelters, correctional facilities, schools and health care facilities.

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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that effective Wednesday, New York state will adopt the new C.D.C. mask guidance, which says that fully vaccinated individuals do not need to wear a mask or observe social distancing in most situations.CreditCredit...Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

The governors of New York and New Jersey, both Democrats, took major steps on Monday toward fully reopening their states.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that New York will lift several mask requirements beginning Wednesday, and Gov. Philip D. Murphy said that New Jersey’s public school students will no longer have the option to learn remotely starting in September. But Mr. Murphy said in recent days that his state is not lifting his indoor mask mandate for vaccinated residents.

“I don’t want to get burned,” he said at a news conference on Monday. “I don’t want to go back.”

Mr. Cuomo’s announcement was in accordance with the new guidance for vaccinated people that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week. “No masks, no social distancing,” he said of the policy that will go into effect for vaccinated people on Wednesday.

Masks will still be required in nursing homes, schools, health care facilities and on public transit. Unvaccinated people should continue to wear a mask, he said in a news conference at Radio City Music Hall in Midtown Manhattan.

The move dovetails with the previously scheduled lifting of most capacity restrictions statewide at offices, museums, restaurants and stores on Wednesday. It was significant, however, given the longstanding restrictions imposed on one of the hardest hit cities in the United States. Illinois, Massachusetts and Ohio are among the states that are taking a similar approach to New York. On Monday, however, California said that it is keeping its rule to wear masks in all indoor settings outside of home for four weeks, until June 15.

In addition, New York City’s subway system returned to 24-hour service on Monday. There has been more than one year of overnight closings during the coronavirus pandemic to provide more time to clean and disinfect trains, stations and equipment. It was the longest planned shutdown since the subway opened in 1904.

As of Monday, 52 percent of New Yorkers had received at least one vaccine dose and 43 percent were fully inoculated.

Those in the most crowded public settings must continue to wear masks, Mr. Cuomo said, referring to students at school, public transit passengers and people in homeless shelters.

In New Jersey, some of the largest school districts have not yet reopened to all students, and many families continue to keep their children home.

New Jersey has recorded 1,263 cases of in-school transmission of the virus since schools began to reopen in September, according to the New Jersey Health Department. Less than 1 percent of the state’s K-12 students and teachers had a coronavirus case linked to in-school transmission, while the positivity rate among the general population was 11 percent.

New York is hosting upcoming N.B.A. playoff games inside Madison Square Garden and the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, where at least 50 percent of seating will be for vaccinated people, Mr. Cuomo said. Masks and social distancing will be required in the section for unvaccinated fans.

Mr. Cuomo said that the Tribeca Festival would return next month and its final night would be held at Radio City Music Hall with full capacity for vaccinated filmgoers and no masks required. The New York City Marathon will return in November at 60 percent capacity, or about 33,000 runners.

The guidance the C.D.C. issued on Thursday said that it was no longer necessary for fully vaccinated people to mask or maintain social distance in many settings. The change set off public confusion and drew objections from some local officials and labor unions, including the country’s largest union of registered nurses. A number of major U.S. retailers have already lifted mask requirements, essentially turning to an honor system that relies on unvaccinated people to keep their masks on in public.

Businesses in New York can still set individual policies and some will require masks. They do not have to do vaccination checks.

“They can check, they can ask at the door, they can ask when you are seated at the table, or not,” Mr. Cuomo said. “There is no mandatory compliance the state is imposing on the private vendors.”

The state’s health department is keeping its recommendation to wear masks indoors where the vaccination status of nearby people is not known. It applies to retail stores, food services, offices, gyms and fitness centers, amusement and family entertainment, hair salons, barber shops and other personal services, among others.

On Monday, CVS and Target said they would no longer require fully vaccinated shoppers to wear masks, except where it’s required by local laws.

Bryan Pietsch contributed reporting.

The U.S. plans to send 20 million vaccination doses to help world battle the virus.

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Biden Says U.S. Will Be an ‘Arsenal of Vaccines’ for the World

President Biden said on Monday the U.S. will send at least 20 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Johnson and Johnson, and Moderna coronavirus vaccines overseas by the end of June to help fight the pandemic.

We need to help fight the disease around the world to keep us safe here at home, and to do the right thing of helping other people. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the smart thing to do. It’s the strong thing to do. In March, we shared over four million doses of our AstraZeneca vaccine with Canada and Mexico. At the end of April, we announced that we would provide another 60 million doses of our AstraZeneca vaccine overseas. Remember, this is the vaccine that’s not authorized for use in the United States yet. So we’re going to be sending it to folks once the F.D.A.’s reviewed this, and said it’s safe. This is all the AstraZeneca vaccine produced in the United States — all of it will be sent to other countries. And today I’m announcing they will also share U.S.-authorized vaccine doses of Pfizer and Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson, as they become available with the rest of the world as well. These are vaccinations and vaccines that are authorized to be put in arms of Americans and by the end of June, when we will have taken delivery of enough of such vaccines to protect everyone in the United States, the United States will share at least 20 million of those doses, that extra supply, with other countries. This means over the next six weeks, the United States of America will send 80 million doses overseas. Just as in World War II, America was the arsenal of democracy, in the battle against Covid-19 pandemic, our nation is going to be the arsenal of vaccines for the rest of the world. We’ll share these vaccines in the service of ending the pandemic everywhere, and we will not use our vaccines to secure favors from other countries. We’ll work with Covax, the international organization set up, and other partners to ensure that the vaccines are delivered in a way that is equitable and follows the science and the public health data.

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President Biden said on Monday the U.S. will send at least 20 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Johnson and Johnson, and Moderna coronavirus vaccines overseas by the end of June to help fight the pandemic.CreditCredit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Biden, heeding widespread calls to step up his response to the pandemic’s surge abroad, said on Monday that his administration would send 20 million doses of federally authorized coronavirus vaccine overseas in June — the first time he has pledged to give away doses that could be used in the United States.

The donation is another step toward what Mr. Biden promised would be an “entirely new effort” to increase vaccine supplies and vastly expand manufacturing capacity, most of it in the United States. He also put Jeffrey Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, in charge of developing a global strategy.

“We know America will never be fully safe until the pandemic that’s raging globally is under control,” Mr. Biden said in a brief appearance at the White House. “No ocean’s wide enough, no wall’s high enough, to keep us safe.”

With new cases and deaths plummeting as vaccination rates rise in the United States, the epicenter of the crisis has moved to India and other nations. A growing and bipartisan chorus of diplomats, health experts and business leaders has been pushing the president to do more to end what the AIDS activist Asia Russell calls “vaccine apartheid.”

Mr. Biden said on Monday that 20 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines — all approved for domestic use — would be sent abroad. That is in addition to the 60 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine he pledged last month, though those doses are not approved for domestic use and cannot be released until regulators deem them safe.

“He’s crossed the threshold into direct donations,” said J. Stephen Morrison, a global health expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which teamed up with three other health institutes on Monday to release a plan to ramp up vaccine supply. “That’s an important shift.”

International health activists want far more.

“Donating 80 million doses of vaccines without a plan to scale up production worldwide is like putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a longtime AIDS activist.

Those 80 million doses amounted to five times the number that any other country had donated, Mr. Biden said, noting that taking the lead in helping the world beat back the coronavirus was a chance to reassert American authority. And unlike Russia and China, which have sought to use their vaccines as an instrument of diplomacy, the United States will not expect any favors in return, the president said.

“We want to lead the world with our values, with this demonstration of our innovation and ingenuity, and the fundamental decency of the American people,” Mr. Biden said. “Just as in World War II America was the arsenal of democracy, in the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic our nation’s going to be the arsenal of vaccines for the rest of the world.”

Mr. Biden’s announcement came not long after a World Health Organization news conference at which the director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that countries with high vaccination rates had to do more to help countries that were being hit hard by the coronavirus, or the entire world would be imperiled.

Tracking the Coronavirus ›

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Is the U.S. doing enough to fight the global pandemic? Many experts and business leaders say no.

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President Biden watched as vaccines were loaded into cold storage during a tour of the Pfizer Kalamazoo Manufacturing Site in Michigan in February.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

A growing and bipartisan chorus of foreign policy experts, diplomats, global health advocates and prominent business leaders are pushing President Biden to take a more aggressive stance in combating the international coronavirus pandemic by scaling up vaccine manufacturing and exporting surplus doses.

In two open letters to the president, one released last week and the other early Monday, a string of prominent names urged Mr. Biden to do more.

The first letter came from top executives including Suzanne Clark, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; former ambassadors including John Negroponte, envoy to Iraq and the United Nations under President George W. Bush; and a former defense secretary, William Cohen, who served President Bill Clinton.

“The world has come to rely upon U.S. leadership at times of great strife,” Ms. Clark, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Negroponte and the others wrote, adding: “Today we have a generational opportunity to mobilize vaccine efforts around the world. Our friends and allies will not forget easily if we sit on surplus stockpiles of the most proven vaccines as their citizens suffer and die.”

The second letter, organized by four global health institutes and signed by experts including Mark McClellan, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner under Mr. Bush, called on Mr. Biden to, among other things, name a global coronavirus coordinator and “commit to sharing Covid-19 vaccine doses immediately.”

Mr. Biden has promised he would restore America as a leader in global health, and the letters indicate that a broad array of leaders in multiple sectors believe he has not gone far enough.

The Biden administration has already committed $4 billion to Covax, the effort by the World Health Organization to get vaccines into the arms of people in disadvantaged nations; pledged to work with Australia, India and Japan to bolster global vaccine supply; and has said it would send 60 million doses of the American supply of AstraZeneca vaccine for global deployment.

On Monday Mr. Biden announced that the U.S. would send an additional 20 million doses of authorized vaccines abroad in June.

“We need to help fight the disease around the world to keep us safe here at home,” Mr. Biden said.

Those 80 million doses amounted to five times the number that any other country had donated, Mr. Biden said, noting that taking the lead in helping the world beat back the coronavirus was a chance to reassert American authority.

“We want to lead the world with our values, with this demonstration of our innovation and ingenuity and the fundamental decency of the American people,” Mr. Biden said. “Just as in World War II America was the arsenal of democracy, in the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic our nation’s going to be the arsenal of vaccines for the rest of the world.”

To further broaden global supply, Mr. Biden recently announced he would support waiving intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines.

But J. Stephen Morrison, a global health expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who helped organize Monday’s letter, said suspending intellectual property rights would not help without White House leadership. “The world is now in great need of high-level engagement that up to now has been conspicuously absent,” his letter said.

The pharmaceutical industry opposes waiving the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, known as TRIPS, and the letter from the business leaders and ambassadors argued that such a waiver “would make little difference and could do harm.”

Global health activists, who are strongly in favor of the waiver, said they nonetheless welcomed the business approach. They see clear parallels to their work fighting the global AIDS epidemic.

“It shows an unprecedented willingness of pharma and its allies in the private sector to admit what all of us having been saying for months, the private sector alone cannot and will not ensure global vaccine access,” James Krellenstein, a founder of PrEP4All, a nonprofit aimed at ensuring universal access to H.I.V. prevention and treatment, wrote in an email message.

“It really shifts the burden to the Biden administration,” Mr. Krellenstein wrote, adding, “When will they act?”

A senior C.D.C. official is departing, the second such resignation this month.

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Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the C.D.C., at a news conference in Washington in February 2020.Credit...Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Dr. Anne Schuchat, the second-in-command at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the last six years, is leaving the agency, the second time this month that a top official has abruptly announced plans to depart.

Dr. Schuchat, a low-key career C.D.C. scientist, joined the agency as a young epidemiologist in 1988 and eventually helped lead its responses to a number of public health emergencies, including the anthrax attacks of 2001 and the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009. Deeply respected within the agency, she nonetheless was criticized along with other top officials there at times last year for not pushing back harder — at least publicly — against pressure from the Trump White House to downplay the coronavirus pandemic.

News of her departure, first reported by Politico, comes as the C.D.C. is facing fresh scrutiny for advising last week that fully vaccinated people could stop wearing masks in most settings. Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the C.D.C.’s new director, said the guidance was based on research showing that few vaccinated people become infected with or transmit the coronavirus, and that the vaccines appear to be effective against all known variants of the virus.

But the new guidance has caused widespread confusion, as well as concern about whether unvaccinated people would continue wearing masks when no proof of immunization is required.

Dr. Walensky said in a statement that Dr. Schuchat, the C.D.C.’s principal deputy director, would leave this summer. “I have enormous gratitude for Dr. Schuchat’s leadership and contributions over three decades, and during this very challenging period for our country,” the statement said. “I am especially thankful for her invaluable counsel, assistance and support in my transition into this role.”

“I will remain forever grateful that our paths crossed, even for just a short while,” she added.

The announcement came less than two weeks after another top C.D.C. official, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, resigned after many years and roles at the agency, including as its initial lead in responding to the coronavirus.

But while Dr. Messonnier, 55, left to take a job as an executive director at the Skoll Foundation, a philanthropic organization in Palo Alto, Calif., Dr. Schuchat, 61, said she is retiring.

One longtime C.D.C. official, who requested anonymity to discuss personnel issues, said that Dr. Schuchat’s resignation did not immediately appear to result from any internal disagreement and that she seemed ready after 33 years to step back. But the announcement came as a surprise to many who work there.

In a statement of her own on Monday, Dr. Schuchat — who was reported to be the model for Kate Winslet’s disease detective character in the 2011 movie “Contagion” — said she would be leaving “for a retirement that I hope will allow more time for creative passions.”

“I will be leaving with the greatest respect and confidence in C.D.C.’s leadership and staff, and the important work we do,” Dr. Schuchat said. “I could not be more optimistic about the future of our agency and the prospects for our public health system.”

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‘It’s the vaccinations’: Virus cases drop significantly in the Northeast.

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A vaccination site at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island in February. Rhode Island is one of several northeastern states with significantly decreased infection rates and hospitalizations.Credit...Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

States in the U.S. Northeast, after experiencing spikes in coronavirus infections earlier this year, are reporting significant drops in cases and hospitalizations.

Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have all reported many fewer cases in recent weeks as more people receive vaccinations. New York and New Jersey have also seen steady declines in cases after struggling to contain the virus earlier this spring.

Reported cases across the United States reached a high in January, and then, as vaccinations accelerated, fell through February and most of March. A much smaller overall surge peaked in mid-April, but has dropped about 32 percent over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database. Hospitalizations and deaths are also ticking down, even as the pace of vaccinations has slowed in recent weeks.

In Rhode Island, confirmed cases have dropped 48 percent and hospitalizations have dropped 23 percent in the past two weeks. State officials attribute the fall in cases to increased vaccinations.

“It’s the vaccinations,” Gov. Daniel McKee of Rhode Island said, adding that “the vaccinations are really our focus right now.”

The state announced on Friday that it would adopt the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new guidelines eliminating most mask requirements for fully vaccinated people starting on Tuesday. Although Mr. McKee expressed concerns that unvaccinated people might stop wearing masks too, he said he hoped the C.D.C.’s new guidance would encourage more people to get vaccinated and that it was “not a pass for people who have not been vaccinated.”

State officials are still worried about the threat of more contagious variants of the virus, he said. And even though Rhode Island’s vaccination campaign is ahead of most states’, Mr. McKee said that convincing people who were hesitant was still a challenge. About 57 percent of Rhode Island’s population has received at least one dose, and 46 percent have been fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times vaccine tracker.

In Pennsylvania, reported cases have dropped 44 percent and hospitalizations have dropped 28 percent in the past two weeks. Cases in the state started to rise in mid-March and continued to climb for weeks before reversing course in late April.

Alison Beam, Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of health, said the state’s vaccination effort had “made great strides,” which had led to the decreases. About 55 percent of the state’s population has received at least one shot, and 39 percent have been fully inoculated.

“One of our greatest hesitancy strategies is making it really convenient for folks and we’ve been able to do that by spreading out the vaccine to more of our provider networks more recently because the supply has increased as well,” Ms. Beam said.

With the pace of vaccinations falling, the Biden administration has been focused on door-to-door and person-by-person efforts. The Department of Health and Human Services recently started a “Covid-19 community corps,” a loose group of volunteers, corporations, advocacy groups and local organizations working to vaccinate Americans who may prefer to get their shots by or around people they know.

Ms. Beam cautioned, however, that coronavirus testing had also decreased in the state and she urged people to continue getting tested if they showed symptoms.

Although reported cases are continuing to drop nationwide, public health experts warn that the United States will have to continue aggressively vaccinating its population over the next few months. It is possible that the virus could surge again more widely in fall and winter, when viruses like the flu are typically dominant.

“That would be a terrible shame because that will include serious cases and deaths, and that’s preventable,” said Dr. Sten Vermund, the dean of the Yale School of Public Health.

A vaccine from Sanofi and GSK is said to produce strong immune responses in a midstage study.

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Sanofi’s headquarters in Paris.Credit...Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Sanofi, the French pharmaceutical company, said on Monday that it would move the experimental Covid-19 vaccine it is developing with GlaxoSmithKline into a late-stage trial after the shot produced strong immune responses in volunteers in a midstage study.

The findings are encouraging for a vaccine that has fallen behind in development and has so far disappointed those expecting that it would be crucial in combating the pandemic. If the vaccine can become available in the last three months of this year, as its developers hope, it could still play a central role as a booster shot as well as an initial inoculation in the developing world, where the pace of vaccination is lagging.

The vaccine hit a major setback in December, when its developers announced that it did not appear to work well in older adults and that they would have to delay plans to test it in a Phase 3 trial, the crucial test that will assess the vaccine’s effectiveness.

But the companies modified the vaccine and in February began testing it in a Phase 2 study that included more than 700 volunteers in the United States and Honduras between 18 and 95 years old. Sanofi said the vaccine did not raise any safety concerns and produced a strong immune response across age groups, a finding suggesting it has been successfully tweaked.

Sanofi announced the findings in a statement and said it plans to soon publish the results in a medical journal.

Sanofi and GSK are much more experienced in vaccine development than a number of their rivals that have already won authorization. The two companies used a more established approach than those deployed in other, more swiftly developed Covid vaccines. Their shot is based on viral proteins produced with engineered viruses that grow inside insect cells. GSK is supplying the Sanofi vaccine with an adjuvant, an ingredient used in many vaccines meant to boost the immune response.

Sanofi and GSK’s vaccine was one of six selected for funding from Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s effort to accelerate vaccine development. Last summer, the federal government agreed to give the companies $2.1 billion to develop and manufacture the vaccine, in exchange for 100 million doses once the shot was ready.

Sanofi also has supply deals with the European Union and Canada. It has also agreed to supply 200 million doses to Covax, the program to deliver vaccines to middle- and lower-income countries that has been struggling with a shortfall in expected doses. Sanofi has also announced plans to help manufacture the authorized vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.

Sanofi said its Phase 3 trial of its vaccine would begin in the coming weeks and enroll more than 35,000 adult volunteers around the world. It will test two formulations of the vaccine, one aimed at preventing the original strain of the virus and the other aimed at the B.1.351 variant first seen in South Africa that some vaccines appear to be less effective against.

Su-Peing Ng, Sanofi’s global head of medical for vaccines, told journalists on Monday that the company expected it to be “operationally quite challenging” to enroll unvaccinated participants in the Phase 3 trial as vaccination coverage increases in many nations. Still, she said, vaccine doses were still scarce in many parts of the world, pointing to Latin America and Asia as places where the company may look to enroll volunteers.

The company said that soon after starting the Phase 3 trial it planned to assess whether its vaccine could boost immune responses in people who had been vaccinated months before with authorized vaccines. Those booster studies are expected to enroll volunteers in well-vaccinated parts of the world, including the United States and Europe.

Sanofi and GSK said last year they were preparing to be able to make 1 billion doses annually. Thomas Triomphe, Sanofi’s global head of vaccines, said on Monday that the company’s production this year, if its vaccine were shown to work, would depend on the world’s needs.

The vaccine, he said, has “potential to be a booster of choice for many nations and many different platforms.”

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South Africa opens vaccines to people 60 and older.

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South Africa opened vaccinations to everyone 60 and older on Monday.  Credit...Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

CAPE TOWN — Facing a resurgent coronavirus and plagued by delays with vaccine supply, South Africa began the second phase of its public vaccination campaign on Monday, opening appointments for people aged 60 or older.

Only about 500,000 people in the country have been vaccinated to date, and most doses have gone to health care workers in a trial involving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. South Africa is aiming to open vaccinations for people aged 40 or older in July, followed by the rest of the adult population in November.

South Africa has obtained nearly a million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and anticipates receiving around 4.5 million doses by the end of June.

The country has also ordered 3 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but only plans to begin using these in the public rollout following a verification process by international regulatory agencies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“It’s going to change my life,” said Zola Bisholo, who was hospitalized with Covid-19 in January, after receiving her first shot of the Pfizer vaccine at a government hospital in the Cape Town suburb of Brooklyn.

With more than 55,000 deaths and some 1.6 million confirmed cases, South Africa has been hit harder by the pandemic than any other nation in Africa. Its most recent wave of infections, in December and January, was driven by a more contagious virus variant, known as B.1.351.

The government has set a goal to vaccinate 5 million people by the end of June, South Africa’s health minister, Zweli Mkhize, said Sunday. Just over 4,000 people were scheduled to receive vaccines on Monday.

The expanded eligibility comes at a critical phase: South Africa is experiencing a sustained rise in cases, and officials have warned of a third wave in the coming weeks, as the southern hemisphere heads into winter.

The slow rollout has underscored global problems of vaccine inequality, especially in Africa, where fewer than 23 million vaccines have been administered, according to the Africa C.D.C. Even vaccines manufactured in South Africa have been disproportionately exported to wealthier nations.

But South Africa has also fallen behind many poorer African countries, including Zimbabwe, Angola and Ethiopia. The country’s vaccination efforts were dealt a severe blow in February, when officials suspended use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine after ordering more than one million doses, and again in April, following safety concerns surrounding the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

“For now, we can go on and protect the most vulnerable,” said Dr. Keith Cloete, the head of the health department in the Western Cape province.

England is lifting many of its Covid rules, but a spike in cases of a variant is also taking place.

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Filmgoers at a matinee in the BFI Southbank cinema on Monday in London.Credit...Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LONDON — Pubs opened for drinks indoors, lights went on in theaters and airports buzzed with a steady stream of travelers on Monday, but the latest easing of Covid-19 restrictions in England was accompanied by growing fears that a variant of the virus could delay a full return to normality.

The lifting of a wide range of coronavirus rules Monday coincided with a small but worrying spike in cases of a variant, first identified in India, that threatens a lockdown-lifting road map frequently described by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as “cautious but irreversible.”

Already, the second part of that pledge is sounding less secure than it once seemed. In recent days, the authorities have scrambled to ramp up testing and inoculation in parts of the country seeing a sharp rise in cases of the more transmissible variant. More than 6,200 people were vaccinated over the weekend in Bolton, a badly hit town near Manchester in the northwest of England.

The opposition Labour Party has accused Mr. Johnson of bringing on the trouble by delaying a decision to close borders to flights from India last month, while government scientific advisers have expressed their concerns about moving too fast to remove curbs.

Even Mr. Johnson, who is normally only too keen to ridicule pessimists as “doomsters and gloomsters,” urged Britons to be cautious in the face of the threat from the new variant, saying that there was a risk of “significant disruption” to plans for easing rules.

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Global Roundup

A cyclone is diverting scarce resources in India away from Covid, and other virus news from around the globe.

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Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from western India as a powerful cyclone approached. The severe weather threatened to divert resources from combating a deadly wave of coronavirus.CreditCredit...Sujit Jaiswal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A powerful cyclone that is heading up India’s western coast has forced many regional governments, which were already dealing with a virulent wave of the coronavirus, to divert resources to evacuating people and trying to minimize storm damage.

The storm, Cyclone Tauktae, which is traveling north, is likely to make a landfall in Gujarat, a state struggling with a devastating second coronavirus wave. The storm swept through three southern states on Sunday, wiping out hundreds of homes, uprooting power transmission infrastructure and drenching low-lying areas, officials said on Monday.

India’s National Disaster Response Force said it had deployed more than 100 teams across six coastal states to help with evacuations, relief and rescue measures.

The storm has killed at least 16 people and left a trail of destruction.

“This is another piece of bad news,” said Dr. Abhijeet Patel, a resident doctor at a public hospital in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. “The cyclone will not only impact vaccination drives, but it will also wreak havoc with the already exhausted health care infrastructure.”

Officials there said on Monday that they were shifting Covid-19 patients from the areas likely to be most affected by the cyclone. Hospitals were sealing windows and doors, and more than 170 mobile intensive care unit vans were being deployed, according to local media.

In other developments around the globe:

  • Taiwan, which is facing its worst outbreak of the pandemic, added 333 locally transmitted cases on Monday, mostly in Taipei, the capital, and the adjoining New Taipei City, health officials said. It also added two imported cases. The authorities announced a series of measures to restrict travel and curb the spread. Transit passengers will be barred from the island’s airports for the next month and foreigners without residence cards cannot enter beginning Wednesday, officials from the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control said.

  • Hong Kong said that it was tightening quarantine restrictions for residents traveling from Taiwan and denying entry from there to nonresidents. The Hong Kong government also announced another deferral of a quarantine-free travel bubble with Singapore, where the number of new cases without a known source has been climbing. Plans for a travel bubble were suspended previously in November because of a high caseload in Hong Kong.

  • For the first time since last October, Italy has reported fewer than 100 daily coronavirus deaths. For a country that was the first in Europe to be hit by the pandemic and then endured a brutal second and a third wave, the new low on Sunday of 93 daily deaths comes as a much-awaited glimmer of hope as the vaccination campaign speeds up.

  • The Netherlands will ease some lockdown measures on Wednesday, the health minister said, citing the country’s vaccination drive. Amusement parks, zoos and other outdoor venues are allowed to reopen with social distance, but indoor activities will stay shut for now. Outdoor dining will be allowed until 8 p.m.

  • Four nations’ delegations for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest missed the opening ceremony on Sunday after positive tests for the virus. Two virus cases were identified this weekend among the Icelandic and Polish entrants, forcing them to miss the event, and the contestants for Malta and Romania also skipped the ceremony as a precaution because they are staying at the same hotel. Eurovision was canceled last year because of the pandemic and the competition has been brought back with virus safety guidelines. The final will take place on Saturday in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in front of a live audience of around 3,500 and all the contestants have made backup recordings in case they are unable to compete.

Emma Bubola Tiffany May, Austin Ramzy, and Anna Schaverien contributed reporting.

Some fully vaccinated people in the U.S. plan to keep wearing masks, possibly forever.

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Joe Glickman, wearing two masks and goggles, grocery shopping at Price Chopper.Credit...Cindy Schultz for The New York Times

Even as a combination of evolving public health recommendations and pandemic fatigue lead more Americans to toss the masks they have worn for more than a year, some say they plan to keep their faces covered in public indefinitely.

Whether made of bedazzled cloth or polypropylene, masks have emerged as a dystopian point of political contention during the pandemic. A map of states that enforced mask mandates corresponds closely with how people in those states voted for president.

Last year, protesters staged rallies against official requirements to wear masks, built pyres to burn them in protest and touched off wild screaming matches when confronted about not wearing them inside supermarkets.

But as more Americans become vaccinated and virus restrictions loosen, masks are at the center of a second round in the country’s culture brawl. This time, people who choose to continue to cover their faces have become targets of public ire.

In interviews, vaccinated people who continued to wear masks said they were increasingly under pressure, especially in recent days; friends and family have urged them to relax, or even have suggested that they are paranoid.

Following the latest C.D.C. guidance, at least 20 states repealed mask mandates or issued orders that gave vaccinated people exemptions from wearing masks. Other states, including New York, said they were reviewing their rules.

But for some people, no newfound freedom will persuade them to reveal their faces just yet.

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In the desert of Colorado, one university campus became a pandemic laboratory.

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Engineering students at Colorado Mesa University collect wastewater samples to test for Covid-19 around campus. They meet three times a week to do the sampling rounds, where they rides bikes carrying carts of their testing gear.Credit...Eliza Earle for The New York Times

One weekend last August, Shynell Moore woke up with a headache and a sore throat. Ms. Moore, then just a few weeks into her junior year at Colorado Mesa University, pulled out her phone and fired up a symptom-tracking app called Scout.

Within seconds of reporting her symptoms, the screen turned red: She might have Covid-19, the app said. Before the day was out, she had moved into quarantine housing. Her Covid-19 test soon came back positive.

Each time she reported a symptom, the information was transmitted to Lookout, the university’s digital Covid-19 dashboard. Over the months that followed, Lookout evolved into a sophisticated system for tracking symptoms and cases across campus, recording students’ contacts, mapping case clusters, untangling chains of viral transmission and monitoring the spread of new variants.

Lookout is the product of a partnership between C.M.U. — a school in the high desert of Western Colorado that prides itself on serving disadvantaged students — and the Broad Institute, a cutting-edge genomic research center in Cambridge, Mass.

Together, they have turned C.M.U.’s campus of more than 10,000 students into a real-world, real-time epidemiological laboratory.

Not everything has gone perfectly — college students will be college students, after all, and a university cannot be cordoned off from the wider world. But the tools they have developed could help institutions around the world better manage future outbreaks.

The U.S. has promised 80 million vaccine doses to other countries. Experts say it isn’t nearly enough.

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President Biden at the White House on Monday. The United States is under pressure to do more to vaccinate the world against Covid-19.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

If all goes according to plan, the United States will soon send 80 million doses of Covid vaccines to help countries beleaguered by the coronavirus, President Biden said on Monday.

But world leaders, experts and advocates warn much more is needed to stop the virus from running rampant in much of the world, which gives it time to mutate and possibly evolve until it can evade vaccines.

Activists, too, have joined the cohort of voices calling on the Biden administration to move boldly. “Donating 80 million doses of vaccines without a plan to scale up production worldwide is like putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a longtime AIDS activist.

Mr. Biden pledged on Monday that 20 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines — the three authorized for use in the United States — would be sent abroad by the end of June. In addition, the United States plans to send 60 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine when it is cleared for use by the Food and Drug Administration.

But the AstraZeneca doses were produced at a Baltimore plant that has had manufacturing issues, and a senior health adviser to Mr. Biden, Andy Slavitt, said on Tuesday that he had no information on when they would be released.

Mr. Biden said the 80 million doses were five times more than any other nation had donated and are just the next step in America’s efforts to supply more vaccine for the world. To that end, he named the White House coronavirus coordinator, Jeff Zients, to draft a global strategy that will be presented at the Group of 7 nations meeting next month.

The number of doses needed to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population is a staggering 11 billion, according to researchers at Duke University. According to an American official with knowledge of global supply, each month 400 million to 500 million doses of the vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson are now being produced. So far only about 1.7 billion have been produced, the analytics firm Airfinity estimated.

And 11 billion may be a conservative estimate, because the global need for vaccines could prove far greater if virus variants require booster shots. Raw materials and key equipment remain in short supply, and there are stark divisions among officials and experts about how best to broaden the international pool of vaccines.

The United States supports waiving patents so more countries can produce vaccines, but experts say technology transfers and expanded access to raw materials mean it would take about six months for more drug makers to start producing vaccines. European leaders say lifting export bans would provide help sooner.

On Monday, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization chief, called on vaccine manufacturers to speed up delivery of hundreds of millions of doses designated for Covax, the international effort to ensure equitable vaccine distribution. He asked for richer countries to share all they could.

“We need high- income countries, which have contracted much of the immediate global supply of vaccines, to share them now,” Dr. Tedros said. “I call on manufacturers to publicly commit to helping any country that wants to share their vaccines with Covax to lift contractual barriers within days, not months.”

Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, released a statement on Monday saying that Covax would soon complete delivering 65 million doses, but that it should have delivered at least 170 million and that the effort could be short by as much as 190 million doses by the time Group of 7 leaders gather in England in June.

“We have issued repeated warnings of the risks of letting down our guard and leaving low- and middle-income countries without equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics,” Ms. Fore wrote. “We are concerned that the deadly spike in India is a precursor to what will happen if those warnings remain unheeded.”

There is already a glut of vaccine in the United States, and Mr. Biden and his administration face a different problem: convincing those who remain unvaccinated to get the shot. As of Tuesday, the United States surpassed a total of more than 33 million virus cases, according to a New York Times database.

Mr. Biden’s announcement came after he was castigated in two open letters, one released last week and one on Monday, that pushed for him to do more to stop the coronavirus internationally by exporting more doses and scaling up manufacturing.

Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, said that the Biden administration’s commitment to send the doses was “a really good sign,” but that he was more pleased by Mr. Biden’s announcement on Monday that he had put Mr. Zients in charge of developing the global strategy.

“We will be judged by history,” Dr. Omer said. “People will remember how a country responded to a global pandemic not just within its borders but outside.”

Reporting was contributed by Bryan Pietsch, Peter S. Goodman, Apoorva Mandavilli, Rebecca Robbins and Matina Stevis-Gridneff.

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