Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey plans to announce on Friday that public school students, from kindergartners to seniors in high school, will have to wear masks when school resumes, because of a recent surge of new cases of the coronavirus, the governor’s spokesman, Mahen Gunaratna, said.
The decision is a sharp reversal for Governor Murphy, a Democrat, who had previously said that mask-wearing policies would be left up to each district.
Whether to require students to wear masks in schools has become a contentious debate across the country, often dividing people along partisan lines.
As in most of the country, new cases of the virus have surged in the state, with the daily average doubling over the last two weeks, to 1,104, according to The New York Times’s database. Hospitalizations are up 54 percent over the same period. The rise is being driven by the highly contagious Delta variant.
The mandate from Mr. Murphy, a Democrat seeking re-election this year, comes as some Republicans have fought against mask requirements, raising questions about the effect of face coverings on the physical and mental health of children.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, issued an executive order threatening to cut off aid to any district that imposed a mask rule on students, though four large districts say they will defy him. A similar battle is playing out in Arizona.
New laws or executive orders in a number of states across the United States ban school officials from imposing mask mandates, leaving it up to parents to decide whether their children will wear masks in class.
But with coronavirus cases rising sharply across the country, and new federal guidance that everyone, vaccinated or not, should wear masks in schools, some school districts in those states are imposing mask mandates anyway, despite the risk of financial penalties for defying the state orders.
“I think school administrators realize that the benefit outweighs the risk,” said Rachel Graham, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “And I would honestly really hope a governor wouldn’t pull funding from a school.”
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said in an executive order last Friday that the state would take away funding from any district that infringed on “the fundamental right of parents to make health and educational decisions for their children” by requiring students to wear masks.
“We have a lot of push from the C.D.C. and others to make every single person, kids and staff, have to wear masks all day,” Mr. DeSantis said as he announced the move. “That would be a huge mistake.”
But four Florida school systems — in Broward, Leon, Duval and Alachua Counties — have said they would retain or seek to impose mask mandates.
The Leon school superintendent, Rocky Hanna, said in a letter to the governor that the district was asking for “the flexibility and the autonomy to make the decisions for our schools that best fit our local data and information in Leon County.” Ms. Hanna wrote that four school-aged children in the county and two pre-K teachers had been hospitalized with Covid-19.
In Arizona, a state law forbidding mask mandates in schools goes into effect in late September, though it was written to apply retroactively. Even so, several school systems, including districts in Phoenix and Tucson, have decided to require masks on campus when the school year begins.
The issue is being tested in court. A science teacher at a high school in Phoenix is suing the Phoenix Union school district over its mask mandate, saying that it violates state law; the district has countered that it cannot violate a law that has not yet taken effect, The Associated Press reported.
The state bans have drawn fire from the Biden administration. On Tuesday, President Biden singled out Mr. DeSantis and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican who has barred mask and vaccination mandates. The president said the governors should “at least get out of the way of people who are trying to do the right thing.”
On Thursday, the secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, said the White House was expecting educators to follow the health practices that worked last year.
The opposite dynamic is playing out in Illinois, where Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, said this week that all school districts must impose full mask mandates, and not the mask-optional policies that many had adopted. Some districts have changed their policies to comply, but at least one said that it would only evaluate the new order, according to The Daily Herald, a newspaper serving the Chicago suburbs.
Mask-wearing policies take on added importance in schools because, while students aged 12 to 17 are now eligible for inoculation, no vaccine has yet been authorized for use in children under 12. And while children are less likely than adults to become ill from the virus themselves, they can transmit it to others.
“You can’t control how they interact and touch each other,” Ms. Graham said. “If there’s a virus, kids will take it to home.”
Novavax, the Maryland company that won $1.6 billion from the U.S. government last year to develop a Covid vaccine, on Thursday announced that continued production problems would delay the vaccine’s use in the United States until the end of the year.
But the two-shot vaccine, which performed well against the virus in clinical trials, might soon be used in other parts of the world. In partnership with the Serum Institute of India, Novavax has applied for emergency authorization in India, Indonesia and the Philippines, the company announced on an earnings call.
“This is a big step for us,” Dr. Gregory Glenn, the president of Novavax, said in an interview.
The company also presented data showing that a single dose of its protein-based vaccine acts as a powerful booster shot against Covid-19. In clinical trials, the Novavax booster produced higher levels of antibodies against the coronavirus than its original two-dose vaccination did, the company said. Those antibodies were also potent against the highly contagious Delta variant.
The announcement came hot on the heels of similar results on boosters from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.
Although Novavax has lagged behind its competitors, its vaccine offers impressive protection. In June the company reported that it has an efficacy of 90 percent against symptomatic Covid-19, and 100 percent against severe disease.
That trial ended, however, before the Delta variant surged to dominance across the world, making it impossible to directly measure the vaccine’s efficacy against that highly contagious version of the virus.
Novavax has carried out studies with vaccine antibodies in the laboratory suggesting that two doses of its vaccine provided fairly strong protection against the Delta variant.
What’s more, volunteers who got a booster shot ended up with antibody levels many times higher than with the original two doses. Antibodies that worked against Delta and other variants also rose to very high levels, the company reported.
British researchers are also testing the use of Novavax boosters in people who received two doses of other vaccines and are expecting results next month.
The Novavax vaccine has some advantages over other types. It can remain stable in a refrigerator, for example.
But its development has been dogged by supply shortages, a fire at one of the company’s factories and other mishaps. As a result, Novavax has repeatedly delayed its plans to seek authorization from U.S. regulators.
Today’s applications to India, Indonesia, and the Philippines suggest that the company is starting to overcome these hurdles at last.
Stanley Erck, the chief executive of Novavax, said during the earnings call that he was confident the company would apply for F.D.A. authorization in the fourth quarter of the year.
“It’s a matter of the mechanics of getting all the final data assembled and submitted,” he said. “We’re talking weeks here, we’re not talking months.”
Mr. Erck said Novavax would have 100 million doses ready to ship by the end of the month. By the end of the year, they plan to make 150 million doses per month.
John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine who participated in the Novavax clinical trial, has been impressed by the vaccine’s performance in trials, but disappointed by the company’s struggle to mass-produce the shots.
“I’m sure it all works just fine, but it’s irrelevant until they get their act together with regulatory filings,” he said.
Virginia will soon require state employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or be tested every week, joining a few other states that have imposed similar mandates, Gov. Ralph Northam said on Thursday.
And Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States, will also require its employees to show proof of vaccination, beginning in the fall.
States, cities, employers and the federal government have all turned to mandates to accelerate the pace of vaccinations as cases have jumped across the country and the Delta variant has spread. Fully vaccinated people are protected against the worst outcomes of Covid-19, including those caused by the Delta variant.
New York, California and Puerto Rico have announced similar mandates, and last week President Biden said that federal employees would have to be vaccinated or regularly tested for the coronavirus. Major employers like Tyson Foods, Microsoft, ViacomCBS, Google and Disney have all instituted vaccine requirements of their own.
Virginia’s 122,000 state employees and contractors will need to be vaccinated by Sept. 1, or be tested every week, Mr. Northam said. Unvaccinated employees will also need to wear masks indoors and while conducting public business.
On Wednesday night, Hilda Solis, chair of the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, announced that she was signing an executive order directing the county’s 110,000 employees to show proof of a coronavirus vaccination by Oct. 1. While exemptions will be made for medical and religious reasons, the executive order did not provide for a testing option as some other local governments have done.
Her authority to issue the regulation stems from Los Angeles County’s declaration of a local emergency in March 2020, the order said.
Ms. Solis said in a statement that since the city reopened on June 15 the average number of daily cases has shot up eighteen-fold and hospitalizations have gone up fivefold. “As vaccinations continue at a pace slower than what is necessary to slow the spread, the need for immediate action is great,” she said.
The spike in cases has been driven by unvaccinated residents, according to health officials.
At the same time, the city of Los Angeles and the state of California have issued mandates that ask government employees to get vaccinated, or agree to regular testing.
In Virginia, nearly 66 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, according to federal data, and the state has seen its daily average of coronavirus cases increase from a low of 129 on June 20 to 1,279 on Wednesday, according to a New York Times database.
“The arrival of the Delta variant, combined with the number of people who are not vaccinated, is driving our case counts back up,” Mr. Northam said at a news conference.
“The way that we’re going to win this war is to roll up our sleeve and get vaccinated,” he added.
Mr. Northam called for companies and local governments in Virginia to institute vaccine mandates of their own, and said he supported other mitigation measures, like masking, but that he was more focused on getting his state vaccinated than imposing a statewide mask mandate.
That approach is similar to that of Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, who called this week for proof of at least one vaccination before people can participate in indoor activities, like going inside a restaurant, gym or theater. He has strongly recommended that people wear masks indoors, but he has so far opted not to impose a mask mandate.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week recommended that even vaccinated people wear masks indoors in virus hot spots.
Mr. Northam said he had witnessed the ravages of fatal illness firsthand while working as a doctor.
“I have watched individuals fight for every breath, and I have also watched individuals take their last breath,” Mr. Northam said. “And so I want you to know that as your governor I will do everything that I can to keep you from that scenario.”
The White House, worried that coronavirus vaccination rates among young people are lagging as the new school year approaches, unveiled on Thursday a new push to get students their shots, including enlisting pediatricians to incorporate vaccination into back-to-school sports physicals and encouraging schools to host their own vaccination clinics.
The initiative was announced by Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona as part of a broader “return to school roadmap,” aimed at getting students back to the classroom for in-person learning — and keeping them there.
Addressing reporters from the White House briefing room, Mr. Cardona issued a pointed message to Republican governors, including Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, about the steps they have taken to prevent local officials from requiring face coverings, despite federal guidance calling for people to wear masks indoors where the virus is spreading rapidly, and for universal mask wearing in schools.
“Don’t be the reason why schools are interrupted,” Mr. Cardona said. “Kids have suffered enough.”
The vaccination push comes as schools around the country are beginning to open, and will include a “week of action” starting on Saturday, with text chains and phone banks aimed at encouraging vaccination. Experts and school superintendents said in interviews that increasing vaccination among students may be a slow and uphill battle.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was authorized for people aged 12 and older in May, but young people remain far less likely than older adults to have gotten their shots. Though the nation passed President Biden’s goal of having at least 70 percent of adults at least partially vaccinated, only 40.2 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds and 50.6 percent of 16- to 17- year olds have received at least one dose, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Last week the C.D.C. said it wanted in-person schooling to resume across the country, and updated its mask guidance to call for universal mask use by students, staff and visitors in schools, regardless of their vaccination status or the rate of community transmission of the virus.
“Children should return to full-time, in-person learning in the fall, with proper prevention strategies in place,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the C.D.C., said at a news briefing.
A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity to preview Mr. Cardona’s announcement, said the administration is focusing on school athletics as an important path to vaccination. Millions of American students play organized sports, and some school officials are making the case that if student athletes get vaccinated, they will be able to avoid quarantining — and forfeiting their games — if they are exposed to an infected person.
To that end, the White House official said, the administration has enlisted the help of various groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine, to put out guidance for doctors and to update the forms required for school physicals. Mr. Cardona and Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, are expected to visit a school vaccination clinic in Kansas next week.
But some school officials are finding that persuading parents to get their students vaccinated is a difficult task.
“For people who are for it, it’s an easy one — they support vaccination as a strong strategy to fight Covid, and they don’t see any issue with the use of public space,” said Kristi Wilson, the superintendent of the Buckeye Elementary School District, just outside Phoenix, who recently completed a term as president of AASA: The School Superintendents Association, which represents 13,000 school superintendents across the country.
“But the other side I’m hearing is that, ‘Where do you draw the line? Who’s going to administer it? Even if public health does it, is it an appropriate use of space?’ If you have a community that is very anti-vaccination, how do you manage that?” she said.
Boston’s acting mayor, Kim Janey, made waves this week by comparing vaccine passports to racist policies that required Black people to show their identification papers. Her unscripted comments drew sharp criticism from her political rivals and from Mayor Bill DeBlasio of New York.
Asked on Tuesday whether she supported requiring people to show proof of vaccination when they enter restaurants, gyms, movie theaters and other indoor public spaces — a measure being introduced in New York City — Ms. Janey warned that such policies would disproportionately affect communities of color.
“There’s a long history in this country of people needing to show their papers — whether we are talking about this from the standpoint of, you know, during slavery, post-slavery, as recent as, you know, what the immigrant population has to go through,” she said. “We’ve heard Trump, with the birth-certificate nonsense.”
Ms. Janey tried to walk back that comparison on Thursday.
“I wish I had not used those analogies, because they took away from the important issue of ensuring our vaccination and public health policies,” she said.
But she did not withdraw her critique of the policies requiring proof of vaccination.
If the credentials were required to enter businesses today, she said, “that would shut out nearly 40 percent of East Boston and 60 percent of Mattapan,” neighborhoods with large Black and Latino populations. “Instead of shutting people out, shutting out our neighbors who are disproportionately poor people of color, we are knocking on their doors to build trust and to expand access to the lifesaving vaccines.”
She added that Boston has a mask mandate for its schools, and is working with labor unions toward mandating vaccination for city workers.
Her remarks on Tuesday, five weeks before Boston’s preliminary mayoral election, had already drawn fire from several directions. City Councilor Andrea Campbell, a rival candidate in the race who, like Ms. Janey, is Black, called the acting mayor’s comparison “absolutely ridiculous” and said it “put people’s health at risk, plain and simple.”
“There is already too much misinformation directed at our residents about this pandemic, particularly our Black and brown residents in Boston and in the commonwealth, and it is incumbent upon us as leaders not to give these conspiracies any oxygen,” she said at a news conference.
Ms. Campbell added, “This is not the time to be stoking fears.”
Mr. DeBlasio was scathing when asked on Thursday about Ms. Janey’s comments.
“I am hoping and praying she hasn’t heard the details and has been improperly briefed, because those statements are absolutely inappropriate,” he said. “I am assuming the interim mayor hasn’t heard the whole story, because I can’t believe she would say it’s OK to leave so many people unvaccinated and in danger.”
Mr. DeBlasio said New York had embraced a “voluntary approach” for seven months, and “it’s time for something more muscular.”
A federal judge on Thursday once again ordered New York City to temporarily stop moving thousands of homeless people from hotel rooms to barracks-style group shelters, a policy that has drawn fire from critics who argue it may increase the transmission of the coronavirus.
The judge, Valerie E. Caproni, halted the operation for two weeks after finding the city had failed to abide by conditions put in place last month to safeguard the health of the shelter residents.
The relocation of over 8,000 homeless people from hotels, where they had been placed to stem the spread of Covid-19 early in the pandemic, back to shelters — where 20 people often share a bedroom — comes amid a citywide surge in the Delta variant of the virus. It has been the subject of weeks of protests.
The court battle has centered on how the city treats people with health problems and disabilities, some of whom qualify for exemption from the transfer to group shelters and are eligible to continue to stay in private rooms or receive other accommodations.
Judge Caproni, of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, ordered the city to stop the transfers until Aug. 19, and to come up with a more detailed plan that addresses the needs of disabled people who are still in the hotels or have already been moved.
On July 13, another judge temporarily halted the transfers after the Legal Aid Society filed court papers arguing the city was improperly refusing to grant exemptions from the transfers to some people with disabilities.
The judge ordered the city to meet with every person who might qualify for an exemption to determine whether they qualify, and to give at least seven days’ notice before transferring anyone.
Legal Aid said in papers filed this week that the city had failed to comply with the order, and that it had continued to send some people who qualified for waivers to group shelters, and had moved others to different hotels that were not accessible or otherwise inappropriate.
Isaac McGinn, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Homeless services, said of the ruling, “We will work to codify our existing plans, protocols, and recent adjustments to ensure that when we resume this process this month we are aligned on the path forward.”
WASHINGTON — The commander of the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has decided to increase coronavirus testing of fully vaccinated people coming to the isolated base, rather than put them in a weeklong quarantine, following the discovery of seven virus cases at a time of heightened concern over the highly contagious Delta variant.
Since July 20, base officials said, seven people who traveled to the base following negative virus tests were later found to be infected. One of the seven, a base resident, was evacuated to a health care facility in the United States, said Dawn C. Grimes, a spokeswoman for the base hospital.
The base commander, Navy Capt. Samuel White, ordered a seven-day quarantine for all vaccinated visitors and returning residents on Monday, but then lifted the order again shortly afterward. The order was a significant departure from the Pentagon’s wider practice, which permits installation commanders to quarantine unvaccinated people for up to 14 days as a precaution.
Now, Navy health workers at the base will test all vaccinated passengers for the virus on arrival, and will immediately quarantine those who test positive, Nikki L. Maxwell, a spokeswoman for Captain White, said on Thursday. All unvaccinated visitors will also be quarantined, and tested later. Fully vaccinated people are protected against the worst outcomes of Covid-19, including those caused by the Delta variant.
The change in course means that the military judge, lawyers and other court personnel who will travel to the base for the arraignment of three Southeast Asian prisoners, scheduled for Aug. 30, will not have to arrive a week early, as long as they are vaccinated. The arraignment is the first consequential hearing to be held by the military commissions at the base since the coronavirus pandemic began.
The three prisoners, who have been held in United States custody for 18 years, are scheduled to go before a judge for the first time, on charges that they conspired in two deadly terrorist bombings in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003. They were captured in Thailand in 2003; one of them, an Indonesian man known as Hambali, was once a leader of the extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah.
The arraignment was originally scheduled for Feb. 22, but was postponed because of the pandemic.
The base has already been requiring arriving passengers to show a negative result on a P.C.R. test for the virus performed less than 72 hours before flying to Guantánamo Bay. The new policy requires fully vaccinated people to take what is known as a rapid antigen virus test, and if found to be positive, to be quarantined and retested with a P.C.R. test. Military officials were also considering adding yet another test, to be taken at Joint Base Andrews outside of Washington, D.C., before boarding a flight to Guantánamo.
The naval base in Cuba, with about 6,000 residents and a small hospital, has so far been able to avoid a major coronavirus outbreak through isolation, testing and quarantines. It disclosed two cases in the spring of 2020 before the Pentagon adopted a policy of not reporting case tallies base by base.
According to base spokesmen, the seven recent cases connected with Guantánamo Bay included three unvaccinated residents who were quarantined on arrival and later tested positive; two vaccinated residents who tested positive within a week of arrival; and two vaccinated foreign journalists who visited the base from July 26 to July 29 and later tested positive.
Ms. Maxwell also said on Thursday that since March of last year, 12 people had been found to test positive at the base. That figure excluded the journalists, who began experiencing symptoms and discovered they were infected later when they returned to the mainland.
She said the base’s remote location and limited access points — through the seaport and airstrip — “contributed to the base community’s public health success during the pandemic.”
It was not immediately known whether any of the recent cases were linked to the Delta variant of the virus.
As of this week, 63 percent of the adults on base were fully vaccinated, including at least 33 of the 39 long-held prisoners, Ms. Maxwell said. The others have declined. The base cannot vaccinate people younger than 18 years of age because the vaccine that the Pentagon is providing — the Moderna vaccine — is not authorized for children.
France and Germany on Thursday reiterated plans to administer booster doses of Covid-19 vaccines to older and more vulnerable people, despite calls from the World Health Organization to halt such shots and send more doses to poorer nations instead.
President Emmanuel Macron of France, speaking in an Instagram video, said on Thursday that “in all likelihood a third dose will be necessary, not for everyone immediately, but in any case for the most vulnerable and the most elderly.” He said his government was preparing to administer those shots starting in September.
Mr. Macron, who has used social media over the past few days to promote vaccines and address resistance to his government’s health pass strategy, said that the French government was following scientific findings that the level of antibodies in those populations declined more rapidly.
Germany had made a similar announcement earlier this week, as Western countries try to ramp up their vaccination campaigns to keep infections in check and avoid the return of lockdown measures.
But there is no consensus among scientists on the need for booster shots, and some officials have said that administering a new round of doses in richer nations will only widen the gap with poorer countries.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, said on Wednesday that while he understood richer nations’ concerns that they needed to protect their citizens, the world could not “accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it.”
German authorities rejected those accusations on Thursday.
“We want to provide the vulnerable groups in Germany with a preventative third vaccination and at the same time support the vaccination of as many people in the world as possible,” Germany’s health ministry said in a statement.
The ministry said those eligible for boosters would include patients with weakened immune systems, older peopley, and nursing home residents, adding that Germany was also donating at least 30 million doses to countries where vaccination campaigns have been lagging.
While the European Union has bought vaccine doses in bulk for all its members, national governments plan their own vaccination strategies.
Emer Cooke, the head of the European Medicines Agency, told Politico Europe on Tuesday that there was not enough data to prove that a booster shot was necessary, and that approved coronavirus vaccines remained effective against the Delta variant.
Some populations might require an extra dose of the coronavirus vaccine, she said, but that “does not mean that there’s a need universally across the population.” Although member nations might have “very legitimate reasons” to divert from the agency’s guidance, Ms. Cooke said, doing so would “create confusion.”
Still, the European Commission, the E.U. administrative arm that has taken on the task of vaccine ordering, is already gearing up for a change in approach. In May, it signed a third contract with Pfizer-BioNTech for 1.8 billion doses, and ordered an additional 150 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine in June.
On Thursday, Moderna said that while its vaccine remained effective six months after the second dose, a third one would likely be needed because of the Delta variant.
Monika Pronczuk and Katrin Bennhold contributed reporting.
The president of the most powerful U.S. teachers’ union signaled a growing openness to coronavirus vaccine mandates for teachers on Thursday, as the highly contagious Delta variant rips through the country and millions of unvaccinated children are about to return to the classroom.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has 1.7 million members across the country, said that she had not ruled out support for a vaccine mandate.
“Things have changed with Delta raging, and with the proximity of the full approval of the vaccines,” she told The New York Times on Thursday. “Because of those two facts, we are considering all alternatives, including looking at vaccine mandates.”
“It’s all about the North Star being, how do we make sure we keep our communities, ourselves, our families and our students safe?” she said.
The three vaccines are being administered under emergency use authorization, but the Food and Drug Administration is planning to fully approve one of the vaccines — by Pfizer-BioNTech — by the start of next month. Fully vaccinated people are protected against the worst outcomes of Covid-19, including those caused by the Delta variant. Children under 12 are not yet eligible to be vaccinated.
Nearly 90 percent of teachers and school employees nationwide are already vaccinated, and Ms. Weingarten said she had been focused on persuading the remaining holdouts amid a push to get children back in the classroom.
“Up until the last few weeks, we have thought the way to do it is through persuasion,” Ms. Weingarten said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe earlier on Thursday. But she said she was now considering “all options.”
Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has similarly expressed a commitment to returning to in-person instruction, and has said that any vaccine mandates should be negotiated at a local level.
“Everyone who can be vaccinated should be vaccinated and if they can’t they should be tested on a regular basis,” she said in a statement on Thursday.
Employers generally have the right to require vaccination, and a growing number — from Walmart to the federal government — have begun asking at least some workers to get vaccinated.
Teachers’ unions had been seen as a potential complicating factor to requiring vaccinations in schools, in part because some local contracts may require such a mandate to be negotiated.
But the Delta variant is increasingly creating new urgency around the issue.
This week, the city of Denver imposed a vaccine mandate on many workers, including school employees.
In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that the state was considering mandating vaccines for teachers if virus numbers continued to worsen. The United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s powerful union, has told its members to prepare for the possibility of mandates, even before the vaccine is fully approved by the F.D.A.
Mandates for teachers do not necessarily extend to students. Though schools have long required children to be vaccinated for certain diseases, the youngest children are not yet eligible for the coronavirus vaccine and for now, conversations have centered on whether or not students will be required to wear masks.
Eliza Shapiro contributed reporting
Demand for coronavirus vaccines has nearly quadrupled in recent weeks in Louisiana, providing a promising glimmer that the deadly reality of the virus might be breaking through a logjam of misunderstanding and misinformation.
But the new rush for vaccinations has been driven by an explosion in new coronavirus cases — the state is averaging more than 4,300 a day, according to New York Times data. It takes time for vaccines to bolster immune systems, and the state — which now leads the country in new cases per capita — could still be weeks away from relief.
Hospitals are overflowing with more Covid-19 patients than ever before. Even children’s hospitals have packed intensive care units. And the Delta variant has alarmed doctors, who described seeing patients in their 20s and 30s rapidly declining and dying.
“These are the darkest days of our pandemic,” said Catherine O’Neal, the chief medical officer at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge.
The Delta variant has unleashed a rush of diagnoses across the United States, but Louisiana has emerged as a troublesome hot spot, with the highest per capita rate of cases in the country and a beleaguered health care system straining to keep up.
“That’s a miserable place to be, I know it,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said, describing the swirl of frustration and shame expressed by government officials, epidemiologists and frontline medical workers as their state suffers the catastrophic consequences of a failure to vaccinate more people.
Resources have been taxed — especially in the state’s southeastern corner — as cases have surged from the Gulf Coast into the northern reaches of the state. In Baton Rouge, one hospital called in the kind of federal emergency support staff usually reserved for the aftermath of a hurricane. In Hammond, a city of some 21,000 people in the toe of Louisiana’s boot, nurses were ordered to pick up extra shifts.
Though the famed dance clubs in the Spanish island resort of Ibiza are officially shuttered as a pandemic precaution, that has not stopped the music. Revelers have been crowding into illegal dance parties in private residences and villas away from the island’s main thoroughfare.
But with coronavirus cases rising on the island, worried Spanish officials say they have a plan: using foreign undercover detectives to pose as partygoers out for a good time.
“We are looking for all possible ways to fight against this serious problem that has been accentuated by legal nightlife closing and a pandemic situation,” Mariano Juan, an Ibiza Council official, told reporters last week.
He said it wasn’t feasible to use the island’s own health inspectors or the police to infiltrate the parties, because they lacked the training, or were overwhelmed by other tasks. So officials turned to an external agency to recruit a team of foreigners aged between 30 and 40, who would hang out in bars in the hours before the island’s 1 a.m. curfew to try score invitations to the illegal late-night parties, gather evidence of breaches of pandemic regulations, and turn it over to the police, Mr. Juan said to La Cadena SER, a Spanish radio network.
Critics of the plan have called for more serious proposals to combat the problem.
The underground parties would not be hard for the undercover agents to find. On a recent July evening, tourists and residents in one of Ibiza’s busiest streets swapped gossip in bars and at taxi stands about the gatherings, some of which were said to charge admission fees of up to 50 euros (about $59).
Clubs on the tourism-dependent Mediterranean island, which is known for its vibrant nightlife, have largely remained closed, and bars and restaurants have been limited to table service. The authorities say the illegal dance parties that have taken the clubs’ place are to blame for spreading Covid-19 cases among tourists, residents and seasonal workers, and have reimposed a curfew that bans gatherings of people from more than one household between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. Organizers of illegal parties can face hefty fines.
Many of the illegal gatherings are held in secluded residences in rural areas, away from the main roads, Mr. Juan said. Of the 33 illegal parties that have recently been discovered by the authorities, he said, only three were hosted at the homes of tourists.
In Spain, the police generally do not have the authority to search private residences without a warrant, but have broken up illegal parties under the pandemic health regulations, a practice that has drawn criticism. Mr. Juan said that the goal now is to use the undercover agents to find out about the gatherings early enough to head them off.
“The idea is not to blow up the party from within but to notify the police, so that they can set up a control outside and prevent more people from going,” he said.
Mr. Juan told Periodico de Ibiza on Sunday that the undercover agents were a “necessity to safeguard the health situation in Ibiza.”
Over the past week, the Balearic Islands, which include Ibiza, reported an average of 843 new coronavirus cases a day, or 71 for every 100,000 residents, the most of any region in Spain, according to a New York Times database.
Cruise lines are imposing more stringent coronavirus measures as a precaution against the highly contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for more than 93 percent of cases in the United States.
Royal Caribbean announced last week that all guests aged 2 and older will be required to present a negative virus test before embarkation, after six guests tested positive on board its Adventure of the Seas cruise ship.
Four vaccinated adults and two unvaccinated minors tested positive during a routine end-of-trip screening last Thursday. No additional cases have been identified, the company said.
Most cruise lines are operating ships with at least 95 percent of passengers and crew vaccinated, but some cruises sailing out of Florida are accepting unvaccinated passengers after a recently enacted state law banned businesses from requiring proof of immunization from people seeking to use their services. Fully vaccinated people are protected against the worst outcomes of Covid-19, including those caused by the Delta variant.
The new guidance will apply to all passengers sailing on cruises for five nights or longer, regardless of their vaccination status. Unvaccinated guests will be required to take further tests at the terminal and onboard the ship, at their own expense.
Carnival Cruise Lines went a step further on Tuesday, requiring guests to wear masks in certain indoor areas of its ships as well as requiring pre-cruise testing. Norwegian Cruise Line also has a testing requirement for all passengers boarding its ships.
The new rules come after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged fully vaccinated Americans to wear masks indoors in places with high coronavirus transmission.
While most cruise lines have reduced the capacity of sailings, some areas such as elevators, casinos and entertainment spaces can get crowded, which led to Carnival’s mask mandate.
“These new requirements are being implemented to protect our guests and crew while on board and to continue to provide confidence to our homeports and destinations that we are doing our part to support their efforts to protect public health and safety,” said Christine Duffy, president of Carnival Cruise Line.
“We expect these requirements will be temporary and appreciate the cooperation of our guests,” she added.
A bipartisan group of officials from the past five presidential administrations, as well as public health experts, are pressing private sector leaders to adopt a new set of recommendations to maximize coronavirus vaccination among their employees.
“You have a key role to play in our national quest to keep Americans safe, while respecting individual liberties,” an open letter from the group says, asking businesses to institute new workplace rules that would complement actions by federal and local governments to increase vaccinations against the surging Delta variant. Fully vaccinated people are protected against the worst outcomes of Covid-19, including those caused by the Delta variant.
The letter recommends that private companies, which employ 124 million Americans, require staff members to get vaccinated. Last year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said employers could require immunization, though companies that do could still face lawsuits.
But it also recommends steps for companies to take if they choose not to require vaccination for their workforces.
Those include an “infection screening protocol,” which would require twice-a-week screenings through rapid tests. Anyone with proof of vaccination would be allowed to bypass that routine testing. The letter also recommends that companies provide incentives for employees to get vaccinated, including cash payments and paid leave.
“We recognize that any protocols create some amount of burden and cost for businesses and your employees,” the letter says. “Still, these will be relatively modest compared to the significant cost of ongoing disruption and uncertainty in business productivity and in people’s lives.”
The private sector initiative comes a week after President Biden sought to revive the country’s stalled vaccination push with a new set of requirements for federal workers and a plea to local governments to offer cash incentives.
Some of the nation’s largest employers, like Disney and Tyson Foods, have mandated vaccines for their workers, while others like Google and Microsoft are requiring proof of vaccination to return to the office.
The letter is signed by Jerome Adams, the surgeon general under President Donald J. Trump; Richard Carmona, the surgeon general under President George W. Bush; Kathleen Sebelius, the health secretary in the Obama administration; Andy Slavitt, who served as a senior adviser to the Covid response coordinator in the Biden administration; and Rosalynn Carter, the former first lady, among others.
The new private sector push is being driven by the Covid Collaborative, a bipartisan group of political and scientific leaders working on vaccine education, which has worked closely with the White House on the issue of vaccine hesitancy. John Bridgeland, a co-founder of the Covid Collaborative, said the plan was to get 1,000 businesses or more to act.
Companies like Accenture, Baptist Health, Kaiser Permanente, Tyson Foods, Live Nation and the Ad Council have signed on to support what the group is calling #CovidSafeZones, with more big employers expected to join in the coming days.
“We recognize there is momentum for collective action, so no business feels disadvantaged and the impact of these steps is maximized,” the letter says. “We believe if you take visible action, many more will follow.”
The cartoon posted on the far-right discussion forum showed police officers wearing Biden-Harris campaign logos on bulletproof vests and battering down a door with a large syringe. A caption read in part, “In Biden’s America.”
The cartoon appears to be an example of the latest effort in Russian-aligned disinformation: a campaign that taps into skepticism and fears of coronavirus vaccination to not just undermine the effort to immunize people but also try to falsely link the Biden-Harris administration to the idea of forced inoculations. The image was one of several spotted by Graphika, a company tracking disinformation campaigns.
Both Russia and China have worked to promote their own vaccines through messaging that undermines American and European vaccination programs, according to the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. But Moscow has also spread conspiracy theories. Last year, the department began warning that Russia was using fringe websites to promote doubts around vaccinations.
The rise of the Delta variant of Covid-19 — and shifting scientific advice on how to defend against it — has created an atmosphere for misinformation to more easily spread, experts said.
“Disinformation thrives in an information vacuum,” said Lisa Kaplan, the chief executive of the Alethea Group, which helps corporations guard against misinformation. “That is when disinformation can really take hold. And knowing how the Russians typically play those situations, it wouldn’t surprise me they are trying to take advantage of it.”
The aim of various Russian groups continues to be to exacerbate tensions in Western societies, a key foreign policy goal of Moscow, according to American officials briefed on the disinformation efforts.
The campaign comes after President Biden warned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia last month to rein in ransomware attacks emanating out of Russia and aimed at critical American infrastructure. Though the ransomware attacks are separate from the disinformation campaigns, the warning was the latest effort by United States officials to prod Russia to rein in destructive digital incursions.
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