Last Updated March 9, 2021
The C.D.C. says vaccinated people may meet indoors in small, private groups but warns they still need masks in public. New York City public high schools are scheduled to reopen on March 22.
Here’s what you need to know:
Teachers in all U.S. states are now eligible for vaccination, though there is confusion in some states.
Vaccinated Americans may gather indoors in small groups but should still wear masks in public, the C.D.C. said.
San Francisco, trailing other big cities in reopening schools, plans to resume in-person teaching in April.
The dangerous variant first seen in South Africa surfaces in a U.S. prison.
Many ‘long Covid’ patients had no symptoms from their initial infection.
N.Y.C.’s public high schools will reopen on March 22, a key milestone.
The White House is monitoring Russian disinformation efforts about vaccines.
Cuomo’s publisher halted promotion of his book because of the nursing home inquiry.
A nurse administering a dose of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine on Monday at a clinic for Catholic school educators in Los Angeles.Credit...Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
As of Monday, all K-12 educators nationwide are officially eligible to be vaccinated against Covid-19, though the situation is more straightforward in some states than others.
President Biden had urged states last week to make vaccinating teachers a priority, with a goal of “every educator, school staff member, child-care worker to receive at least one shot by the end of the month of March.” Mr. Biden said all teachers should be able to get vaccinated starting March 8.
Most places didn’t wait that long to start. At least 38 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico were already vaccinating school workers to some extent by the end of last week. Some had opened up eligibility to educators weeks earlier, while others — Texas, for instance — did so immediately following the president’s announcement. Still others, including Massachusetts, were planning to open up vaccine eligibility to all teachers later this week.
A handful of states chose not to deviate from their rollout schedules, in most cases preferring an age-based approach to who gets the vaccine first. State-run sites in those places have not yet opened up to all educators. But state-run sites are not the only option: Teachers in those states are now eligible for vaccine appointments at pharmacies participating in the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program.
Some drugstore chains that are part of that program, CVS among them, began vaccinating teachers right after the president’s announcement, without waiting for the March 8 start date.
Still, the different federal and state approaches have led to some confusion.
“It has been frustrating,” said Keith Gambill, the president of the teachers association in Indiana, where state officials have not yet set a date when vaccines would be available to all teachers. Some pharmacies in the state have begun vaccinating teachers, and a grocery chain, Meijer, has announced plans to set up pop-up clinics around the state, but Mr. Gambill said the barriers facing teachers, from scheduling to geography, remain steep.
“The simplest version would have been to say all sites in Indiana will now be accepting educators as well,” he said.
The frustration has been shared by officials and teachers alike. Dr. Randall Williams, the director of the state health department in Missouri, where teachers will become eligible at state sites on March 15, expressed some irritation last week with the Biden administration’s announcement. In talks with the federal government, he said, he had hoped “that the prioritization of states would be kind of respected, because you can imagine, it creates a little bit of confusion.”
That confusion has already been evident at some sites. Some educators showed up last week at a federal site in Jacksonville, Fla., only to be told they were not eligible under state guidelines, which restrict eligibility to teachers over age 50 (an official later clarified that vaccines were in fact available to all teachers at that site).
And over the past few days in Rhode Island, where teachers are not yet universally eligible under state rules, Walgreens pharmacies opened up slots to teachers, then closed them, then opened them again.
Data Source: New York Times
March 9, 2021
Comentarios