The highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus is now the dominant variant in the United States, according to new estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency calculates that Delta accounts for 51.7 percent of coronavirus infections.
As expected by health officials, Delta, which was first identified in India, has rapidly overtaken Alpha, the variant that spread through the United States this spring. Alpha, first detected in Britain, now makes up just 28.7 percent of infections, according to the C.D.C. Still, overall, the average numbers of new virus cases and deaths across the country, as well as hospitalizations, are significantly down from the devastating peaks during previous national surges.
Although Delta is highly contagious, research suggests that most vaccines still provide good protection against it — and remain highly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths. In England, for instance, where the variant now causes almost all infections, case numbers have risen sharply in recent weeks, but hospitalization rates have increased more slowly and remain low. Next week, a final decision will be made about whether to lift most remaining restrictions in England, including mask rules, on July 19.
In the United States, 67.1 percent of adults have had at least one vaccine dose as of Tuesday, and 58.3 percent are fully vaccinated. Studies suggest that a single shot of a two-dose regimen provides only weak protection against Delta, and public health experts have been encouraging Americans to get fully vaccinated as soon as possible.
Vaccination coverage remains highly uneven, however, both in the United States and globally, and public health experts say Delta poses a serious threat to unvaccinated populations. On Tuesday, President Biden again urged Americans to get their shots, citing concerns about Delta.
“It works. It’s free. And it’s never been easier, and it’s never been more important,” he said. “Do it now — for yourself and the people you care about, for your neighborhood, for your country. It sounds corny, but it’s a patriotic thing to do.”
Health experts say the Biden administration may need to take more aggressive action to encourage vaccination, including urging employers and schools to adopt vaccine mandates. As of Tuesday, providers were administering about 0.87 million doses per day on average, about a 74 percent decrease from the peak of 3.38 million reported on April 13, according to federal data.
As for the virus itself, the country has been averaging fewer than 15,000 new cases a day for nearly a month, the lowest levels since testing became widely available and a fraction of what was reported in January, when the nation routinely identified more than 200,000 cases in a day. In recent days, however, the average number of new cases nationally has started to trend slightly upward, driven largely by localized outbreaks in places with low vaccination rates, including parts of Missouri, Arkansas and Nevada.
As the Delta variant spreads across the globe, the World Health Organization recently reiterated longstanding guidance that everyone, vaccinated or not, wear masks as a precaution, but the C.D.C. has not changed its advice that those who are fully vaccinated can skip masks in most situations. U.S. health officials have suggested that the W.H.O.’s blanket suggestion was informed by its global purview, since many countries have had far less access to vaccines than the United States.
In New York City, efforts to monitor the spread of the virus have been scaled back, reflecting a steadily low caseload and a sense held by many that the virus is less of a wide threat. More than 51 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, according to city data, though large parts of the city still have lower rates. Coupled with concerns about Delta, some public health experts and elected officials are worried that the city may be pulling back on its surveillance measures too soon.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that the Biden administration was unlikely to impose new national mitigation measures, even if cases rise.
“The states are going to have to make evaluations and local communities are going to have to make evaluations about what’s in their interests,” she said.
Mitch Smith and Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.
As the Delta variant sweeps the world, researchers are tracking how well vaccines protect against it — and getting different answers.
In Britain, researchers reported in May that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had an effectiveness of 88 percent protecting against symptomatic disease from Delta. A June study from Scotland concluded that the vaccine was 79 percent effective against the variant. On Saturday, a team of researchers in Canada pegged its effectiveness at 87 percent.
And on Monday, Israel’s Ministry of Health announced that the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 64 percent against all coronavirus infections, down from about 95 percent in May, before the Delta variant began its climb to near-total dominance in Israel.
Although the range of these numbers may seem confusing, vaccine experts say it should be expected, because it’s hard for a single study to accurately pinpoint the effectiveness of a vaccine.
“We just have to take everything together as little pieces of a puzzle, and not put too much weight on any one number,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University.
In clinical trials, it’s (relatively) easy to measure how well vaccines work. Researchers randomly assign thousands of volunteers to get either a vaccine or a placebo. If the vaccinated group has a lower risk of getting sick, scientists can be confident that it’s the vaccine that protected them.
But once vaccines hit the real world, it becomes much harder to measure their effectiveness. Scientists can no longer control who receives a vaccine and who does not. If they compare a group of vaccinated people with a group of unvaccinated people, other differences between the groups could influence their risks of getting sick.
It’s possible, for example, that people who choose not to get vaccinated may be more likely to put themselves in situations where they could get exposed to the virus. On the other hand, older people may be more likely to be vaccinated but also have a harder time fending off an aggressive variant. Or an outbreak may hit part of a country where most people are vaccinated, leaving under-vaccinated regions unharmed.
One way to rule out these alternative explanations is to compare each vaccinated person in a study with a counterpart who did not get the vaccine. Researchers often go to great lengths to find an unvaccinated match, looking for people who are of a similar age and health. They can even match people within the same neighborhood.
“It takes a huge effort,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Health.
For its new study, Israel’s Ministry of Health did not go to such great lengths to rule out other factors. “I am afraid that the current Israeli MoH analysis cannot be used to safely assess it, one way or another,” Uri Shalit, a senior lecturer at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, wrote on Twitter.
Israel’s numbers could also be different because of who is getting tested. Much of the country is vaccinated. During local bursts of new infections, the government requires testing for anyone — symptoms or not — who came into contact with a person diagnosed with Covid-19. In other countries, it’s more common for people to get tested because they’re already feeling sick. This could mean that Israel is spotting more asymptomatic cases in vaccinated people than other places are, bringing their reported effectiveness rate down.
Fortunately, all the studies so far agree that most Covid-19 vaccines are very effective at keeping people out of the hospital and have generally protected against the Delta variant. Israel’s Ministry of Health estimated that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is about 93 percent effective in preventing serious illness and hospitalization.
“Their overall implications are consistent: that protection against severe disease remains very high,” said Naor Bar-Zeev, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Because effectiveness studies are so tricky, it will take more work to determine how big a threat Delta poses to vaccines. Dr. Lipsitch said that studies from more countries would be required.
“If there are five studies with one outcome and one study with another, I think one can conclude that the five are probably more likely to be correct than the one,” Dr. Lipsitch said.
Richard Williamson, 86, was rushed from a Florida jail to a hospital last July. Within two weeks, he had died of Covid-19.
Hours after Cameron Melius, 26, was released from a Virginia jail in October, he was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he died. The coronavirus, the authorities said, was a contributing factor.
And in New York City, Juan Cruz, 57, who fell ill with Covid while in jail, was moved from a hospital’s jail ward into its regular unit before dying.
None of these deaths have been included in official Covid mortality tolls of the jails where the men had been detained. And these cases are not unique. The New York Times identified dozens of people around the country who died under similar circumstances but were not included in official counts.
In some cases, deaths were added to facilities’ virus tolls after The Times brought missing names to the attention of officials. In other cases, people infected with the coronavirus while incarcerated were granted legal releases because of the severity of their illnesses but were not included in the death tallies of the jails where they got sick. Still other inmates’ deaths were left off facilities’ list of virus deaths for reasons that are unexplained.
More than 2,700 people are reported to have died of Covid-19 in connection to U.S. prisons, jails and immigration detention centers, but the additional cases raise the prospect that the known toll on incarcerated people falls far short of providing the full picture.
Concerns about how coronavirus deaths are documented have emerged throughout the pandemic, including a finding that the toll among nursing home residents in New York State was far higher than known because thousands who died in hospitals had not been included.
Public health officials say the prospect of overlooked virus deaths tied to the nation’s prisons, jails and immigration detention centers carries particular risks. It is challenging, the experts say, to prepare prisons for future epidemics without knowing the accurate toll. For now, the publicly known death totals connected to incarceration largely come from the facilities themselves.
“You can’t make good public policy if you don’t know what’s actually going on on the ground,” said Sharon Dolovich, director of the Covid Behind Bars Data Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, which tracks coronavirus deaths in American prisons.
Maura Turcotte, Rachel Sherman, Rebecca Griesbach, Ann Hinga Klein, Brendon Derr and
School may still seem blissfully far off for American students in the midst of summer. But for many who are eligible, time may be running out for a back-to-school necessity: getting fully vaccinated against the coronavirus before classes resume.
Many of the country’s more than 13,000 districts, especially in the South and Southwest, plan to start the 2021-22 school year well before Labor Day. Completing a course of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine, the only vaccine now federally authorized for 12- to 17-year-olds, takes at least five weeks for the two shots to be administered and full protection to be reached. In many of those early-starting districts, students would need to get their first dose in the next few days to be fully immune in time.
In the Hamilton County School District in Tennessee, the first day of school is scheduled for Aug. 12. Counting back from then, students would have to get their first shot no later than Thursday to be fully protected by opening day.
Cody Patterson, a spokesman for the district, which encompasses Chattanooga and serves 45,000 students, said that while vaccinations are not mandatory for the new school year, the district was making clear to parents “that we believe vaccination is a key strategy to keeping school open.”
Mr. Patterson said that individual schools in the district would probably accommodate students case by case if they are worried about finishing their vaccinations.
Schools across the country closed and switched to online instruction when the pandemic took hold last year. But as the pandemic wore on, research showed that elementary and secondary schools were not major drivers of infection.
Colleges are another matter, with a number of outbreaks seen on campuses. Many colleges (along with some private secondary schools) are requiring vaccinations for students to attend in person this fall. It’s harder for public middle and high schools to do that, for legal and other reasons, and a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers said the union was not aware of any U.S. school district that is mandating vaccinations.
It has only been since May that any vaccine was available for 12- to 15-year-olds in the United States. In many states, teenagers need parental consent to be vaccinated. No vaccine has yet been authorized for children under 12.
Michael Poore, the superintendent of the Little Rock School District in Arkansas, said that the district had contacted parents, worked with local health authorities and done extensive outreach on local and social media to persuade students and their parents to get a vaccine.
The district also ran vaccination events at its 11 middle and high schools, he said, but only 300 to 400 of the district’s roughly 11,000 eligible students got shots at the events.
School in Little Rock starts on Aug. 16, so to be fully protected by then, students would have to get their first dose by Monday.
“We’re really going to push the vaccines in August,” Mr. Poore said, “because if you haven’t had the shot and you’re in close proximity to someone who has the virus, you’re going to have to be quarantined.”
It is already too late for not-yet-vaccinated students to get fully protected before school starts in some places, like the Chandler Unified School District in Arizona, which reopens July 21.
Kimberly Guevara, a district spokeswoman, said the district had informed parents when the vaccine was authorized for teenagers and told them how to get a shot, but “we’re not going to force vaccinations on students.”
Ms. Guevara said she and the eligible members of her family got vaccinated as soon as they could.
Fiji, which got through the first year of the pandemic almost untouched, is now battling one of the fastest-growing Covid-19 outbreaks in the world.
The number of new coronavirus cases reported daily in the Pacific island nation of 900,000 people has soared into the hundreds over the past month, after never exceeding single digits before late May.
As of Wednesday, the country was averaging 383 new cases a day, or 43 for every 100,000 people, according to a New York Times database. The 636 new cases reported on Wednesday set a record.
The surge is swamping the country’s ability to cope. Fiji’s largest hospital is now exclusively treating Covid-19 patients, and its mortuary is filled to capacity, the health ministry said on Monday. More than 1,000 Covid patients have been sent home from medical facilities to isolate themselves because the facilities had no space. The government is working to turn a sports arena outside Suva, the capital, into a makeshift clinic.
The country, which is using the AstraZeneca vaccine, depends on Australia and New Zealand to supply it with doses, but New Zealand’s medical regulatory body has not yet authorized the AstraZeneca vaccine, complicating the rollout. About 31 percent of Fijians have had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, but fewer than 5 percent are fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database.
Instead, New Zealand has provided the country with 40 million New Zealand dollars, or $28 million, worth of aid and support. “We have provided support in the form of PPE and of course the commitment we’ve made around AstraZeneca vaccines, which is what Fiji are using for their roll-out,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.
James Fong, Fiji’s health secretary, said that some in the country were putting off seeking treatment for Covid symptoms, sometimes with deadly results.
“We are also sadly seeing people with severe disease die at home, or on the way to hospital, before our medical teams have a chance to administer what could potentially be lifesaving treatment,” Mr. Fong said.
Thirty-seven of the 39 Covid deaths reported in Fiji throughout the pandemic have occurred since the latest outbreak began.
Officials say the outbreak appeared to be driven by one case of the highly contagious Delta variant that escaped the country’s isolation facilities and spread rapidly in the community.
Repeated breaches of local health restrictions have further increased the spread. More than 1,000 people have been arrested over breaches of a national curfew, and 48 people were arrested in a 24-hour period this week over breaches of mask requirements, according to the police. The government has declined to impose a lockdown to contain the outbreak.
Nevada’s governor asked for help from the federal government last week to deal with a recent rise in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in the state, highlighting the challenges facing states with largely unvaccinated populations now that the pace of inoculations has slackened.
The Biden administration said on Thursday that it would dispatch “surge response teams” to work with states struggling to contain rising cases of the virus. Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, asked for help the same day.
More than two-thirds of the country’s adult population has been at least partly vaccinated, and the virus has receded in much of the United States. The seven-day average of new reported cases has held steady at about 12,000 a day, the lowest totals since testing became widely available. It’s a drastic drop from the worst days of the pandemic last winter, when new cases sometimes averaged more than 250,000 a day, according to a New York Times database.
But the speed of vaccination has also flagged around the country and reported cases are on the rise in several states, including Nevada, where nearly 40 percent of the adult population has not gotten a shot.
The situation in Nevada is nowhere near the worst of the pandemic last winter, but the Times database shows that the seven-day average of cases there is about double what it was a month ago when Mr. Sisolak relaxed most of the state’s coronavirus restrictions.
Nevada had the third-highest count of new coronavirus cases per capita of any state as of Tuesday, with 14 per 100,000 people, trailing only Missouri and Arkansas. The seven-day average of hospitalizations in Nevada nearly doubled in the last weeks of June.
Most of the state’s surge is in Clark County, home to Las Vegas and the lion’s share of the state’s population, which rejoiced when revelers could return to the casinos, theaters and other entertainments on the strip without limitations last month after more than a year of economic stagnation.
Brian Labus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said he thought the rise had been caused by a combination of factors, not just partygoers inundating the city.
“It’s not necessarily reopening the strip to tourists — it’s that our entire community is open 100 percent,” Dr. Labus said. “It’s not just the resort hotels. It’s every restaurant, store and business in Southern Nevada.”
In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Sisolak connected the state’s rise in infections to the emergence of the highly contagious Delta variant and the low rate of vaccination in Clark County, where only 39 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, according to federal data.
The statement said that Mr. Sisolak had sought federal help with the state’s “Get Out the Vaccine” campaign, which has relied on expanding access with mobile vaccine clinics, outreach through text messages and incentives like a vaccine lottery that will distribute $5 million in cash and prizes.
Persuading unvaccinated people to get inoculated is a critical challenge, both in Nevada and nationally. President Biden on Tuesday renewed his call to the nation to get vaccinated, pressing employers to give employees paid time off to get inoculated and to offer vaccines at work, after the country failed to meet his goal of at least partly vaccinating 70 percent of American adults by July 4.
Dr. Fermin Leguen, the district health officer for Nevada’s southern district, which includes Clark County, said that younger, unvaccinated people appeared to be driving the increase in new cases there. He also said that about 95 percent of those hospitalized with Covid-19 in the past three months had not been vaccinated.
New York City has been scaling back its efforts to monitor the spread of the coronavirus, reflecting not only a steadily low caseload, but also a growing sense that the city, along with the entire country, is starting to leave the pandemic behind.
But some public health experts and elected officials worry that the de Blasio administration may be pulling back on its surveillance measures too soon, potentially leaving the city ill prepared should more contagious forms of the virus cause new outbreaks.
For the last few days, the daily average test positivity rate in New York City has begun to tick up slightly, to nearly 1 percent. Vaccination rates in a number of neighborhoods remain low. And the more contagious Delta variant is now the predominant variant in the city.
Last week, the city said that 44 percent of the positive virus cases it had sequenced most recently for variants were of the Delta variety. The variant was first detected in India, where it led to a surge of cases, and has increasingly spread across the United States.
That statistic was clouded by the fact that the city’s Pandemic Response Lab had sequenced only 54 cases, a tiny number compared with the 1,500 cases it was sequencing every week in March and April, and the lowest number of cases sequenced since the lab started tracking variants in January.
More than 125 children and adults who attended a religious camp in Texas last month have now tested positive for the coronavirus, camp officials said this week in a statement that also warned that many more people may have been exposed to the coronavirus.
In addition to the 125 people who tested positive, “hundreds more were exposed to Covid-19 at camp,” Bruce Wesley, senior pastor for Clear Creek Community Church, wrote on the church’s website. The church is in League City, about 30 miles southeast of Houston. “And hundreds of others were likely exposed when infected people returned home from camp.”
As of early May, masks were “optional in all areas,” according to the camp’s website. Telephone and email messages sent to the camp on Tuesday evening were not immediately returned.
“From the beginning of the pandemic, we have sought to love our neighbors by practicing strict safety protocols,” Mr. Wesley said in the statement. “We are surprised and saddened by this turn of events. Our hearts break for those infected with the virus.”
More than 400 people participated in the student ministry camp, according to the statement. The camp also said it had consulted with the Galveston County Health District and canceled services for now, but will resume activities on Sunday.
In a statement on Tuesday, Galveston health officials said the Delta variant of the virus had been detected in three test samples linked to “a church camp.” Dr. Philip Keiser, interim head of the Galveston County Local Health Authority, said, “In this outbreak, at least as of now, it appears most of the people who have tested positive are old enough to be vaccinated.” The camp served children in grades six through 12, it said.
News of the outbreak in Texas comes during the return of the traditional summer camp season, when day and sleep-away camps are about to welcome children who just completed a school year dramatically altered by Covid-19 health restrictions, and many children are looking for relief from the soaring summer temperatures.
In Illinois, 85 teenagers and adults tested positive for the virus after attending a camp that did not check the vaccination records of participants or require masks indoors, the Illinois Department of Public Health said last month. At least 25 workers at a Christian summer camp in Oklahoma tested positive for the virus in June, Public Radio Tulsa reported.
Officials across the country have rolled back face-covering and social distancing rules that were put in place more than a year ago, even as new variants of the virus have quickly spread in areas with low vaccination rates. In Galveston, 44 percent of residents have been vaccinated, slightly above the statewide vaccination rate of 41 percent.
In guidance for people attending or operating youth camps, the Centers for Disease Control said in late May that “everyone” aged 12 or older should get vaccinated and that camps “should be supportive of campers or staff who choose to wear a mask.”
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis will require employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus when they enter its office next month.
By the end of August, they must attest that they are fully vaccinated if they wish to remain employed, Neel Kashkari, the president of the Minneapolis Fed, wrote in a memo posted to its website on Wednesday. Only employees who cannot get vaccinated because of medical conditions or religious beliefs will receive accommodations.
“While some staff may be unhappy with this new requirement, we believe most will appreciate the actions we are taking on our collective behalf,” Mr. Kashkari wrote.
The requirement will affect the bank’s 1,100 workers, of which about 82 percent are already fully vaccinated, he wrote. The remaining 18 percent have not disclosed their vaccination plans or don’t plan to get vaccinated.
Mr. Kashkari said that the decision had been made out of a preference for face-to-face interactions in the office and that “there is no way for us to bring a critical mass of our staff back into our facilities and maintain social distancing.”
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has said companies can require those returning to offices to be vaccinated. Employers may also ask employees about their vaccination status, according to the ruling by the commission.
Other employers have announced vaccination requirements for their return-to-office plans. Morgan Stanley announced last month that it would also require vaccination for employees, contingent workers, clients and visitors at the bank’s buildings in New York City and Westchester County, N.Y.
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