Covid-19 Global News: Live Updates on Variant, Vaccine and Booster Shots

At Pennsylvania State University, the faculty senate passed a resolution expressing “no confidence” in the school’s plan to bring back students without requiring them to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

At Mississippi’s public universities, the pleas of hundreds of professors to require vaccinations have been drowned out by a politically conservative drumbeat against mandates.

And at Clemson University, the faculty plans to stage a protest on Wednesday, the first day of classes, to call for mandatory masks.

As thousands of students begin returning to campuses around the United States for the fall, more than 500 universities have said they will require coronavirus vaccination this year.

But at dozens of universities with less stringent health requirements, from Ohio to Iowa to North Carolina, professors are using protests, petitions and even resignations to press their demands for tighter coronavirus prevention methods. Much of the protest is coming in states where politicians, virtually all Republicans, have fiercely opposed vaccine or mask requirements, leaving universities with few tools to combat the spread of the virus.

A vast majority of counties across the United States are experiencing either “substantial” or “high” transmission rates that call for indoor mask-wearing even among the vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Orientation at Clemson University prompted the faculty protest. The university asked students to protect themselves from the Delta variant by wearing masks, but few students did so at a convocation for freshmen last week, judging by a photo of the event that circulated online.

“When I see hundreds of students packed together, and you can’t find a mask, I thought, ‘we are in trouble,’” said Kim Paul, a biologist at Clemson, a public land-grant university in South Carolina with about 20,000 undergraduates.

“We had a mask mandate spring semester,” Dr. Paul said. “I would like to see that reinstated. That’s what we need to do.”

A spokesman for Clemson, Joe Galbraith, said that after seeing unmasked students at the last freshman convocation on Friday, the university placed masks at every seat on Monday during a similar meeting of transfer students. “Participation was quite different,” Mr. Galbraith noted.

South Carolina bans both vaccine and mask mandates. “I think the university needs to show real leadership and push back against the governor and say, ‘No, we are an institution of higher learning,’” Dr. Paul said. “We need to follow the science.”

In Mississippi, hundreds of faculty members signed a petition demanding that the university system require vaccination.

The petition was started at Mississippi State University, where classes are set to begin this week. Professors there are also pressing the school to move to remote learning until the pandemic is brought under control.

Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, has encouraged the state’s residents to get vaccinated, but the state has declined to require vaccines on university campuses.

A spokesman for Mississippi State, Sid Salter, said that about 52 percent of the student body has reported being vaccinated, a rate higher than the state population as a whole.

Penn State, with 40,000 undergraduates at its main campus in State College, Pa., decided not to require vaccination, even though Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would have banned vaccine requirements. The school has imposed a mask mandate.

In a letter to the Penn State community last week, Eric J. Barron, the university’s president, blamed the decision on “political realities.”

“State funding of our university requires a two-thirds vote of the Pennsylvania legislature, meaning that our funding relies on strong bipartisan support,” Dr. Barron wrote.

As if to reinforce that concern, the president pro tempore of the Pennsylvania State Senate, Jake Corman, a Republican whose district includes State College, expressed concern on Monday that state lawmakers might retaliate against the university if it mandated vaccines. Mr. Corman said he would not support funding cuts.

A survey of Penn State undergraduates in State College found that 83 percent were fully vaccinated, a rate the university called “promising.”

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New Zealand Shuts Down After Coronavirus Case Is Found

New Zealand will participate in a three-day lockdown in parts of the county and a seven-day lockdown in one particular area after the country’s first possible reported case of the Delta variant.

We have a positive case of Covid-19 in the community. We will not be in a position to identify if this is a case of the Delta variant of Covid-19 until genome sequencing is returned tomorrow. I want to assure New Zealand that we have planned for this eventuality, and that we will now be putting in place that plan to contain and stamp out Covid-19, once again. Going hard and early has worked for us before. We have seen what can happen elsewhere if we fail to get on top of it, we only get one chance. That’s why cabinet has met this afternoon and made the decision that New Zealand will move to Alert Level 4 from 11:59 p.m. tonight. Level 4 will be for initial period of three days, except for Auckland and the Coromandel Peninsula, who we anticipate will likely be at Level 4 for seven days due to them being most closely linked to our current case. We’ve seen the dire consequences of taking too long to act in other countries, not least our neighbors. Just as we successfully stayed home and saved lives last year, I’m asking the team of five million to unite once more to defeat what is likely to be this more dangerous and transmissible variant of the virus.

New Zealand has begun a three-day nationwide lockdown after reporting its first coronavirus case in six months.

The snap lockdown, which started at 11:59 p.m. local time on Tuesday, was set off by the discovery of an infection in Auckland, New Zealand’s most populous city, that was believed to be the country’s first case of the more contagious Delta variant outside its strict quarantine system. Auckland and the nearby Coromandel Peninsula, which the infected person recently visited, entered a longer, seven-day lockdown.

Under the lockdown rules, New Zealand’s toughest, residents must stay at home and all schools, public facilities and nonessential businesses are closed.

Ahead of the lockdown announcement by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, New Zealanders flocked to supermarkets to stock up, leaving toilet paper aisles bare, in scenes reminiscent of the earliest days of the pandemic. Roads out of Auckland were packed as people left the city for holiday homes in other parts of the country.

“I want to assure New Zealand that we have planned for this eventuality and that we will now be putting in place that plan to contain and stamp out Covid-19 once again,” Ms. Ardern said at a news conference.

“Going hard and early has worked for us before,” she added.

It is not yet known how the individual who tested positive contracted the virus. He does not have any links to the country’s quarantine facilities at the border.

Ms. Ardern warned that if New Zealand failed to act swiftly, it could end up in the same situation as the Australian state of New South Wales, which is reporting hundreds of new cases each day, more than at any other time during the pandemic. A lockdown now in its eighth week in Sydney, where the Delta-driven outbreak began, was extended to the entire state on Saturday.

“We are one of the last countries in the world to have the Delta variant in our community,” Ms. Ardern said. “This has given us the chance to learn from others.”

The New Zealand government had previously indicated that it would respond to any cases of the Delta variant in the community with stringent lockdowns, in line with the country’s Covid-zero strategy. New Zealand has had among the fewest virus cases in the world, with a total of 2,927 cases and 26 deaths, according to a New York Times database.

Fears of a Delta outbreak in New Zealand have been heightened by the country’s relatively low vaccination rate. According to a New York Times database, 29 percent of New Zealand’s population has received at least one dose of a vaccine, and 17 percent is fully vaccinated. The person whose infection led to the three-day lockdown was unvaccinated.

The campaign is expected to accelerate in the final months of this year, with officials saying last week that all residents over the age of 16 would be able to book appointments starting Sept. 1.

The Biden administration has decided that most Americans should get a booster vaccination eight months after they received their second shot, and could begin offering third shots as early as mid-September, according to administration officials familiar with the discussions.

Officials are planning to announce the decision as early as this week. Their goal is to let Americans who received the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines know now that they will need additional protection against the Delta variant that is causing caseloads to surge across much of the nation. The new policy will depend on the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of additional shots.

Officials said that they expect that recipients of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was authorized as a one-dose regimen, will also need an additional dose. But they are waiting for the results of that firm’s two-dose clinical trial, expected later this month.

The first boosters are likely to go to nursing home residents, health care workers and emergency workers. They would probably be followed by older people who were near the front of the line when vaccinations began late last year and then by the general population. Officials envision giving people the same vaccine they originally received.

The decision comes as the Biden administration is struggling to regain control of a pandemic that it had claimed to have tamed little more than a month ago. Covid-19 patients are again overwhelming hospitals in some states, and federal officials are worried about an increase in the number of children hospitalized just as the school year is set to begin.

The World Health Organization has called for a moratorium on booster shots until the end of September, saying available doses should be used to help countries that are far behind in vaccinations. But Israel is already offering third shots to those at least 50 years old. France and Germany have said that they plan to offer additional shots to vulnerable segments of their populations next month. Britain has a plan to do so, but is holding off for now.

The summer surge in cases in the United States, led by the domination of the more contagious Delta variant, is well into its second month, and the number of those hospitalized with Covid-19 has reached heights last seen during the overwhelming winter wave.

The number of those patients who are critically ill, requiring treatment in an intensive care unit, has risen, too. Data from the Department of Health and Human Services shows that the number of hospitals with very full I.C.U.s doubled in recent weeks. Now, one in five I.C.U.s have reached or exceeded 95 percent of beds occupied, a level experts say makes it difficult or impossible for health professionals to maintain standards of care for the very sick.

In many states, hospital workers are seeing admission numbers that resemble what they saw at the height of the pandemic over the winter. Some are struggling to find enough beds, while others have employees working overtime and are relying on contract nurses and emergency medical technicians. Outside some hospitals, officials are erecting large tents to house everyone.

Dr. David De La Zerda, who has spent more than a year treating patients in the I.C.U. at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, thought early this summer that a drop in cases meant the crisis phase of the pandemic was near its end. That feeling lasted just four weeks. According to federal data, there were over 300 patients hospitalized with Covid in the Jackson Memorial Hospital system in the week ending Aug. 12, up from around 70 at the beginning of July.

For health care providers like Dr. De La Zerda, the rise in cases feels like déjà vu — but the emergence of vaccines is worsening the blow.

“This virus is becoming a more preventable disease than before, when this was all new, because now we know that there’s something that we can do,” he said, referring to vaccines, which are highly effective at preventing severe illness and death from Covid-19. “There’s this sense of a lack of concern, but we all know this isn’t true because we’re working in the hospitals.”

Americans have entered a new, disheartening phase of the pandemic: the realization that the virus is not disappearing anytime soon.

Even as the highly contagious Delta variant has flooded the nation with a surge of recent infections, mayors, governors and public health officials have treaded lightly when considering whether to reimpose restrictions. With more than twice as many new cases being reported nationally compared with last August, baseball games, music festivals and state fairs have forged ahead, and restaurants, gyms and movie theaters have stayed open.

In many places, people have been largely left to decide for themselves whether to start wearing masks again or change the ways they work, socialize and vacation.

At the beginning of summer, the United States was reporting the lowest case totals since the pandemic’s start. But now, hospitalizations have reached their highest levels since winter. Only about half of Americans are fully vaccinated, and daily vaccination rates have risen only modestly, to about 700,000 doses a day, since the Delta surge began.

The worst surges have so far been concentrated in Southern states with underwhelming vaccination numbers, but reported cases have also been rising in places with far better vaccine uptake. Oregon and Hawaii, both of which have relatively high vaccination rates, have set weekly case records in recent days, and daily case rates have more than doubled in recent weeks in highly vaccinated parts of New England.

Most of the country remains fully open, and aside from Hawaii, where the governor recently imposed restrictions on social gatherings and restaurants, most officials have so far steered away from restricting or closing businesses, leaning instead on mask rules or vaccine requirements or, more commonly, nothing at all. Louisiana and Oregon have reinstated mask mandates. San Francisco will require proof of vaccination to patronize restaurants, bars and gyms. Several school districts and cities have returned to universal masking, while more employers and colleges have announced plans to require vaccines.

But other officials have been hostile to new restrictions or have worried that rules could further politicize the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that some vaccinated Americans wear masks in public again, but has not suggested shutting down businesses.

Those who are 12 and older will be required to show proof of having received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine in order to participate in New York City’s indoor dining, fitness or entertainment venues starting Tuesday. Enforcement will not start until Sept. 13.

The requirement is intended to spur vaccinations, which have lagged in the city even as the extremely transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus has driven up new cases.

“I am absolutely certain this is going to motivate a lot of people to get vaccinated,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday.

Businesses will be required to hang posters describing the mandate near their entrances and those that do not comply will be subject to fines. Customers are allowed to enter the premises for a few minutes to use the bathroom, or for other reasons, without proving that they have been vaccinated.

The city has hired 570 people to go out and canvass small businesses in every ZIP code with information about the vaccination requirement, Mr. de Blasio said. The goal is to canvass all businesses across the city within the next three weeks. A $10 million advertising campaign will also spread the word about the new mandate.

Starting Sept. 13, agencies such as the Department of Health will be able to start issuing fines and other penalties against indoor venues that do not check vaccination status. The sheriff’s office may also get involved if customers use fake vaccine cards, the mayor said.

There are two official apps, NYC Covid Safe and the Excelsior Pass, but showing your paper vaccine card is fine too. For those who were vaccinated outside of the United States, paperwork from abroad showing that people received any of the eight vaccines cleared for emergency use by the World Health Organization is also acceptable.

In the state of Maharashtra, one of the first places struck by India’s devastating second wave of Covid-19 this year, scientists are anxiously looking for signs of a third.

New laboratories in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, and in the city of Pune are searching for dangerous new variants. They have stepped up testing, to over 3,600 samples per month, from 134 in December last year, as they search for versions of the virus that could make the pandemic even harder to stop.

India is still far short of its goal to increase genome sequencing nationwide. While coronavirus cases and deaths have plunged, according to official numbers, the virus is continuing to spread in some parts of the country. A low vaccination rate and other factors have left India especially vulnerable to variants like Delta, which helped power India’s second wave this spring.

The second wave, which exploded across the country in April and May, exposed both the Delta variant’s increased communicability and India’s inability to cope. Official figures show that about 430,000 people have died since the virus hit early last year, though the numbers are widely considered unreliable and experts say the true toll may be in the millions. The second wave pushed the country’s medical system past its limits and led to anger over the government’s inability to handle the crisis.

A week after France introduced a coronavirus health pass that is required for entry to restaurants and other venues, the police around the country are investigating incidents of fraudulent documentation.

The French health authorities said 46 cases of false certificates are under investigation.

The passes show that the holder is vaccinated against Covid-19, has tested negative within the past 72 hours or has a certificate of recovery. The documents are needed to gain access to many public spaces and services in France, including restaurants, bars, museums, cinemas, major shopping centers and even nonemergency hospital treatment.

Last month, a contractor at a vaccination center in a suburb of Paris was sentenced to a year in prison for trafficking 200 false vaccination certificates. Her sentence was later reduced to home detention.

In Bordeaux, two employees of a vaccination center are facing charges of forgery after having been accused of selling false certificates. Using a forged Covid-19 pass is punishable by up to three years in prison and a fine of up to 45,000 euros, about $53,000.

A similar phenomenon has been observed in the United States, where sellers have offered counterfeit or stolen vaccine cards on Etsy, eBay, Facebook and Twitter.

In France, fraudsters have also tried to create false certificates by hacking doctors’ computer systems. In one case, hackers infiltrated the account that a doctor outside Bordeaux used to register vaccination certificates. In another example, public prosecutors in Marseille are investigating reports that another doctor’s computer was hacked to create 178 fraudulent passes.

As the Delta variant fuels a new coronavirus wave, particularly in areas with underwhelming vaccination rates, Tennessee on Monday became the latest state where a governor has undermined efforts by local school districts to require students to wear masks as the new school year approaches.

Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, signed an executive order on Monday essentially gutting any school district’s effort to require its students to wear masks.

According to the order, a student’s parent or guardian “shall have the right to opt out of any order or requirement” that the student “wear a face covering” at school, on school buses or at school functions.

The number of new coronavirus cases in Tennessee has been steadily rising since July, according to a New York Times database. As of Sunday, Tennessee recorded its highest weekly average of coronavirus cases since late January.

Mr. Lee’s executive order comes days after video surfaced last week showing anti-mask protesters threatening doctors who expressed support for requiring face coverings during a local school board meeting in Williamson County.

Tennessee is one of several battlegrounds with a Republican governor who opposes mask mandates and local school officials who want them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone in schools wears masks, regardless of vaccination status, so that schools can more safely resume in-person instruction.

About two weeks ago, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican and an ardent opponent of public health mandates, signed an executive order directing state officials to ensure that parents have the final say on whether their children wear masks in school this fall.

On Sunday, the chairwoman of the Broward County School Board said the district had no choice but to defy Mr. DeSantis’s ban.

“We’re living out the nightmare of the Covid pandemic, where so many people in our county, including members of our staff and others, are being impacted,” the chairwoman, Rosalind Osgood, said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “We believe that we have a constitutional obligation to protect the lives of our students and staff.”

Recently, Mr. DeSantis and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas both blocked local school districts from requiring masks or taking other measures to protect students from the coronavirus in the coming school year.

But several school districts have taken their fight to the courts.

The Texas State Supreme Court ruled on Sunday that the state’s governor could ban mask mandates, at least temporarily. Some districts, though, vowed to maintain the requirements. On Monday, a judge in Bexar County ruled in favor of officials in the county and the city of San Antonio who had already put in place a mask requirement in schools, as well as at county and city facilities, according to a reporter at KENS5 and a spokesman for the county.

The escalating battles come as schools around the country open, or prepare to do so, with tens of millions of children under 12 ineligible for vaccination. Hospitalizations of young people have been increasing as the highly transmissible Delta variant of the virus has spread.

As of last week, more than half of the nation’s largest 100 school districts are requiring that all students wear masks, according to data collected by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

Some Republicans have condemned mask rules as an infringement on parental rights, while many Democrats hold that they are a matter of public health.