COVID mask disputes make for rocky start of school year
The summer surge of the highly infectious delta variant of the coronavirus made for a disruptive start of the school year in many parts of the country Monday as hundreds of thousands of children returned to classrooms and parents, administrators and governors clashed over whether masks should be required. Confusion reigned in several Texas school districts after the state Supreme Court stopped mask mandates in two of the state’s largest districts, the day before the first day of school in Dallas. An Arizona judge upheld, at least temporarily, a mask mandate in a Phoenix district despite a new state law prohibiting such mandates. One Colorado county posted sheriff’s deputies in schools on the first day of classes as a precaution after parents protested a last-minute mask mandate. Public school authorities are committed to making up lost ground after frequent disruptions, including on-and-off remote learning, in the pandemic’s first year left millions of children behind in their studies, especially those of communities of color. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends masks in schools for students, staff, and teachers. Nowhere did Monday’s battles play out greater than in Texas, where some counties and school districts kept in place mask mandates and others rescinded them as schools reopened after Sunday’s court ruling. The order by the state’s highest court — entirely comprised of elected Republican justices — halts mask requirements that county leaders in Dallas and San Antonio, which are run by Democrats, put in place as new infections soared. Dallas school officials said Monday that masks were still required on district property and that visitors weren’t allowed in schools. The Austin school district and Harris County, which includes Houston, also said their mask mandates for schools remained in place. The top elected official in Dallas County said in a tweet that the Supreme Court ruling did not strike down his mask order and that it remained in effect. “We’re at war on behalf of moms and dads and kids against a deadly virus. I sure wish the Governor would join our side in the battle,” said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott strongly opposes public school mask mandates, and students and parents gathered outside the governor’s mansion in Austin to urge him to drop that opposition. The start of the school year comes as the country is averaging more than 130,000 new infections a day and the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 has soared to levels last seen in mid-February. The death toll has also risen to nearly 700 a day. Hospitals in several virus hotspots say they are seeing an increase in infections and hospitalizations in children, bringing anxiety to families starting school. A handful of Republican-led states ban schools from requiring masks but many have defied the laws and are fighting them in the courts. At least 11 Arizona districts accounting for 140,000 students and more than 200 schools have defied a mask mandate ban by imposing their own requirements for face coverings. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner on Monday allowed the Phoenix Union High School District to keep its mask mandate despite a new state law that he says does not take effect until Sept. 29. Warner said state law grants school boards authority to protect their students. Yellow school buses and parents snapping back-to-school pictures made the first day of school seem almost normal in Los Angeles, where many schools reopened Monday in the nation’s second-largest school district. In Los Angeles, like the rest of the state, students and teachers are required to wear masks in indoor settings, and teachers must show proof of vaccination or submit to weekly COVID-19 testing. Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves about 600,000 K-12 students, is also requiring students and staff to get tested weekly for COVID-19, regardless of vaccination status, and is conducting daily health checks. “There is no substitute for in-person learning, friendship, and physical activity, which is why we have committed to putting into place the highest safety standards,” LAUSD interim Superintendent Megan Reilly said. San Francisco schools also reopened Monday to more than 50,000 students — many for the first time in 17 months. San Francisco Unified is recommending that students and staff get tested if they have symptoms but is not requiring tests. “It’s been a long time coming,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said Monday morning as she joined city leaders on a tour of schools to welcome children back. At one elementary school, students walked along a red carpet into the school building as school staff cheered. In South Carolina, one district has already moved to all virtual classes after a rash of cases led to hundreds of students quarantined within the first two weeks of the fall semester. That decision has led to protests among parents in Pickens County. In other South Carolina counties, officials considered joining Columbia, the capital, in requiring masks in schools despite a state budget requirement that bans districts from doing so without risking funding. The Palmetto State Teachers Association, representing the state’s public teachers, urged Gov. Henry McMaster on Monday to suspend the requirement. The Republican governor has repeatedly insisted mask-wearing should be left for parents to decide. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed an executive order Monday allowing parents to opt their children out of coronavirus-related school mask mandates after a few school districts issued mask requirements for students. In Eagle County, Colorado, sheriff’s deputies were posted to elementary and middle schools on the first day of class Monday after parents objected to a last-minute decision Friday by the county school district to require universal masking. No problems were immediately reported. The delta surge and rising COVID hospitalizations stressed health facilities and prompted new restrictions in several states. The University of Mississippi Medical Center was setting up a second emergency field hospital in a parking garage to handle some of the sickest COVID-19 patients. Mississippi’s coronavirus numbers have doubled in the past two weeks and hospitalizations are the highest since
Alabama National Guard to begin vaccinations at rural sites
National Guard members will begin immunizing rural residents against COVID-19 this week as Alabama tries to improve a vaccination rate that’s trailing most of the nation. Mobile vaccination clinics will be held Tuesday in the cities of Andalusia and Livingston, according to a news release by the state, followed by clinics in Enterprise and Eutaw on Wednesday. Guard teams will provide shots later in the week in Ozark, Greensboro, Abbeville and Marion, and additional clinics are planned elsewhere into April. The National Guard has two teams that are capable of providing at least 1,000 vaccinations per day. It plans to administer about 8,000 doses per week. Appointments aren’t required, and the shots are free. Gov. Kay Ivey said the effort will help as the state looks to get past the coronavirus pandemic. “I encourage everyone eligible to take advantage of this great resource, and please remain patient as we continue working to get our hands on as many doses as we are able from the federal government,” she said in a statement. While more than 1.3 million doses have been administered in the state, statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show Alabama and neighboring Georgia are trailing the rest of the United States in the percentage of its adult population that has received at least one dose. The state is expanding the eligibility rules for vaccinations on Monday to include more frontline workers, residents with certain chronic health conditions, and people 55 and older. The move will add more than 2 million people to the groups who can receive a COVID-19 vaccination in Alabama, roughly doubling the number of people who are eligible. More than 10,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the state, and more than 510,000 have tested positive for the virus. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Beyond 100M: Joe Biden team aiming for bigger vaccine numbers
It sounded so ambitious at first blush: 100 million vaccination shots in 100 days. Now, one month into his presidency, Joe Biden is on a glide path to attain that goal and pitching well beyond it to the far more ambitious and daunting mission of vaccinating all eligible adults against the coronavirus by the end of the summer. Limited supply of the two approved COVID-19 vaccines has hampered the pace of vaccinations — and that was before extreme winter weather delayed the delivery of about 6 million doses this past week. But the United States is on the verge of a supply breakthrough as manufacturing ramps up and with the expectation of a third vaccine becoming available in the coming weeks. That means the act of delivering injections will soon be the dominant constraint, and it’s prompting the Biden administration to push to dramatically expand the universe of those who will deliver injections and where Americans will meet them to get their shots. “It’s one thing to have the vaccine, and it’s very different to get it in someone’s arms,” Biden said Friday as he toured Pfizer’s manufacturing plant in Portage, Michigan. The company is set to double its pace of vaccine deliveries in the coming weeks. Since their approval in December, more than 75 million doses of the two-shot-regimen Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been distributed, of which 63 million have been injected, reaching 13% of Americans. Nearly 45 million of those doses have been administered since Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. The pace of deliveries of those vaccines is about to take off. About 145 million doses are set for delivery in the next 5 1/2 weeks, with an additional 200 million expected by the end of May and a further 200 million by the end of July. That’s before the anticipated approval by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use of a third vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson. The single-dose J&J vaccine is expected to help speed the path to immunity and requires half the vaccination resources of the two-shot regimens. But there is no massive stockpile of J&J doses ready to roll out on Day One. “We’re going to be starting with only a few million in inventory,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said this past week. Still, when combined with the anticipated increases in the other vaccines, the J&J doses could prove the pivotal advance in delivering enough shots for nearly all American adults by the end of June, at least a month earlier than currently anticipated. The daily inoculation average climbed to 1.7 million shots per day last week, but as many as double that number of doses are soon expected to be available on average each day. The focus of Biden’s team is now quickly shifting to ensuring those doses can get used, though the administration has resisted the calls of some health experts to publicly set a “moonshot” target for how many daily doses it hopes to deliver. Biden first set his target of 100 million doses in 100 days on Dec. 8, days before the first vaccines received emergency use authorization. By Inauguration Day, it was clear the U.S. was on course to attain that goal. Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, said she would like to see the administration commit to a more ambitious 3 million shot-per-day target. “I want to see them put that stake in the ground and ask everyone to help them achieve that goal,” she said. The current pace of vaccination dipped markedly in recent days as winter weather shuttered administration sites in Texas and across the South, and icy conditions stranded supplies at shipping hubs in Louisville, Kentucky and Memphis, Tennessee. One-third of the delayed doses have already been delivered, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, announced Sunday. The White House anticipates that remaining delayed doses will be injected by March 1 and that the daily pace of vaccinations will continue to climb. Much of the increase, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comes from people receiving their second dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. The pace of first-dose vaccinations, meanwhile, has been largely steady over the past several weeks, hovering around an average of 900,000 shots per day. Increasing both the rate of first-dose administrations and the rate of overall vaccinations will be key to achieving herd immunity — estimated to require vaccination of about 80% of the population — in hopes of ending the pandemic and curtailing the emergence of potentially even more dangerous “mutant” strains of the coronavirus. That means keeping demand high. The administration has expressed concerns about public surveys showing that tens of millions of Americans are reluctant to get the vaccine and it is stepping up public outreach to overcome that hesitancy as the U.S. death toll nears 500,000 — “a terribly historic milestone in the history of this country,” as Fauci put it, and “we’re still not out of it.” Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, the White House COVID-19 data director, said in an interview that the administration is “focused on going out to communities and making sure people know these vaccines are safe and how they can get them, with a goal of vaccinating nearly all Americans,.” The administration has also turned its focus toward identifying new delivery paths for the vaccines beyond those already used by states, including federally-run mass vaccination sites, smaller community health centers and retail pharmacies. The White House’s goal is to stand up the sites now so that they will be ready to handle the influx of vaccine in the coming weeks. “They can push a lot more volume through those channels, through those big box stores, through the community health centers,” Scott Gottlieb, a former Trump administration FDA commissioner, told MSNBC on Friday. He praised the Biden administration for setting up those sites in advance. The Pentagon, at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has started deploying thousands of active-duty troops to open mass vaccination centers
Martha Roby: Highlighting national breast cancer awareness month
October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an annual international campaign aimed at increasing awareness of the second most common cancer in women, with the goal of someday ending it entirely. Although deaths from breast cancer continue to fall, they’re declining at a slower rate than in previous years, and the number of cases we’re seeing is rising. It is very important that we take this valuable opportunity to talk about this dreaded disease and increase our knowledge on the topic. The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be more than 271,000 new cases of breast cancer this year alone, 99 percent of which will be diagnosed in women. Of course, risk factors like age and genetics cannot be avoided, but there are steps you can take to lower your own breast cancer risk, and most of them are related to maintaining good health in general. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) recommends maintaining a healthy weight, exercising regularly, and getting regular screenings if you are older than 40. Unfortunately, most of us have either faced a cancer diagnosis personally or been close to a friend or family member who has. Until we eradicate this terrible disease altogether, it is important to know about the resources available to those in the fight. Throughout my time in Congress, I have considered it a privilege to play in the Congressional Women’s Softball Game, a charity event benefiting the Young Survival Coalition (YSC). YSC aims to improve the quality of life for young adults affected by breast cancer. My team didn’t quite pull off a win during this year’s game, but I could not be prouder of what we accomplished. We raised more than $365,000 – a new record – to benefit YSC and their important mission supporting individuals battling breast cancer. A cancer diagnosis is certainly never easy, but organizations like YSC make it possible to navigate these challenging circumstances, and I am grateful for their work. During the month of October, I encourage you to increase your own awareness about breast cancer and the risks associated with the disease and tell your loved ones to do the same. As with many other forms of cancer, early detection is critical and saves lives. If you are currently battling breast cancer, please know that my prayers are with you. You can access valuable information by visiting www.cancer.org/cancer/breast-cancer.html. Martha Roby represents Alabama’s Second Congressional District. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama, with her husband Riley and their two children.
