U.S. Education Department Investigates 5 States Over Mask Mandate Bans

The Education Department has launched investigations into five states whose prohibitions on universal mask mandates in schools may run afoul of civil rights laws protecting students with disabilities, federal officials announced Monday.

The department’s civil rights head wrote to state education leaders in Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah,, notifying them the department’s Office for Civil Rights would determine whether the prohibitions are restricting access for students who are protected under federal law from discrimination based on their disabilities, and are entitled to a free appropriate public education.

The investigations make good on the Biden administration’s promise to use the federal government’s muscle — from civil rights investigations to legal action — to intervene in states where governors have come out against mask mandates in public schools. 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.

In letters to state leaders, civil rights officials said the department would explore whether the prohibitions “may be preventing schools from meeting their legal obligations not to discriminate based on disability and from providing an equal educational opportunity to students with disabilities who are at heightened risk of severe illness from Covid-19.”

The department said it has not opened investigations in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, or Arizona because those states’ bans on universal indoor masking are not being enforced in schools due to litigation or other state action. The office would continue to closely monitor those states, officials said.

On Friday, a Florida court rejected an effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and other state officials to prevent mask mandates in schools.

Earlier this month, President Biden announced he had directed his Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to use the agency’s broad power to intervene in states where governors have blocked mask mandates. “We are not going to sit by as governors try to block and intimidate educators protecting our children,” he said.

Dr. Cardona has said he was particularly perturbed by prohibitions in places where the Delta variant of the coronavirus has sent cases surging. He said that he has heard from desperate parents who fear sending their immunocompromised and medically vulnerable children into schools that do not have universal masking. This month, parents of young children with disabilities sued Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, over his ban on mask mandates in public schools, arguing that his order prevented their medically at-risk children from being able to attend school safely.

“The department has heard from parents from across the country — particularly parents of students with disabilities and with underlying medical conditions — about how state bans on universal indoor masking are putting their children at risk and preventing them from accessing in-person learning equally,” Dr. Cardona said in a statement announcing the investigations.

Millions of public school children qualify for special education services that often require hands-on instruction and other services and therapies. And the population has been a priority to get back into classrooms after experiencing steep academic and social setbacks as a result of school closures during the pandemic.

The department will specifically look at whether the state bans violate Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which includes “the right of students with disabilities to receive their education in the regular educational environment, alongside their peers without disabilities, to the maximum extent appropriate to their needs,” the department said.

It will also look at whether statewide prohibitions violate Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which prohibits disability discrimination by public entities, including public education systems and institutions.

The department said that the investigations are not indicative of a violation, which could result in a state losing federal funding. Most investigations result in resolution agreements where the agency and the district or state being investigated agree to reforms in lieu of penalties.

BRUSSELS — The European Union on Monday recommended that its member countries reintroduce travel restrictions for visitors from the United States who are unvaccinated against the coronavirus, a fresh blow to the continent’s ailing tourism sector and a sign that potential measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus might remain in place for months.

The European Council of the European Union, which represents governments of the bloc’s 27 countries, removed the United States from a “safe list” of countries whose residents can travel without requirements such as quarantine and testing.

The change is not mandatory. Each E.U. member state imposes its own travel rules and can decide whether to follow the guidelines or not, so it was not immediately clear which countries, if any, would reintroduce restrictions or when they might begin.

If enforced, the new restrictions would only apply to unvaccinated travelers — the European Council already recommends that all visitors who have been fully inoculated with an E.U.-approved vaccine be allowed to travel. That includes the three vaccines available in the United States.

With more than 52 percent of Americans fully vaccinated, most were able to travel to Europe without hurdles this summer and can continue to do so. Yet the decision to remove the United States from the safe list could still create confusion among American tourists, and that is likely hurt the European travel industry, officials with trade groups said.

Most countries in the bloc do not require Americans to isolate upon arrival, but a few have kept quarantine requirements in place this summer, including, in some cases, for inoculated visitors.

Still, most vaccinated American tourists have been able to enjoy the beaches of Greece, Spain or Portugal, the Italian countryside or the streets of Amsterdam or Paris without hurdles, boosting a tourism industry that was closed to them last year.

In countries such as France, Greece and Spain, U.S. visitors make up the largest contingent of tourists from non-European countries. In others, such as Portugal, total spending by Americans is among the highest of any nationality.

But as the United States returns to a daily average of 100,000 Covid hospitalizations over the last week, the European Council has advised E.U. countries to keep their borders shut to nonessential travel by unvaccinated Americans, in the hope of containing the spread of the Delta variant. The seven-day average of U.S. Covid hospitalizations peaked in mid-January with nearly 140,000 people hospitalized, according to federal data.

One of the council’s criteria for lifting restrictions is that a country should have fewer than 75 coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants over the past 14-day period, but the United States has a reported infection rate well above that threshold, according to data provided by the European Center for Disease Control. The United States is also classified as a red zone by the agency, the second-most risky color, after dark red.

Other criteria outlined by the European Council include a stable or decreasing trend in Covid cases. While reported coronavirus infections in the United States have surged this month, that figure has remained relatively steady across the European Union.

A European official with knowledge of discussions around the announcement, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the amendment to the list, said that the update had been made based on the latest scientific data available. Other countries removed from the “safe list” include Israel, Kosovo, Lebanon, Montenegro and North Macedonia.

The European Union recommended that its member countries reopen their borders to American travelers in June, but there has been growing frustration and incomprehension about the lack of reciprocity from the United States.

The daily average for hospitalized Covid-19 patients in the United States is now more than 100,000 over the last week. That average is higher than in any previous surge except last winter’s, before most Americans were eligible to get vaccinated.

The influx of patients is straining hospitals and pushing health care workers to the brink as deaths have risen to an average of more than 1,000 a day for the first time since March. The seven-day average of Covid hospitalizations peaked in mid-January with nearly 140,000 people hospitalized.

Hospitalizations nationwide have increased by nearly 500 percent in the past two months, particularly across Southern states, where I.C.U. beds are filling up, a crisis fueled by some of the country’s lowest vaccination rates and widespread political opposition to public health measures like mask requirements.

In Florida, 16,457 people are hospitalized, the most of any state, followed by Texas, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

With the surge pummeling the nation and overwhelming hospitals, a shortage of bedside nurses has complicated efforts to treat hospitalized coronavirus patients, leading to longer emergency room waiting times and rushed or inadequate care.

This month, one in five American I.C.U.s had reached or exceeded 95 percent of beds full. Alabama was one of the first states to run out, and the crisis is concentrated in the South, with small pockets of high occupancy elsewhere in the country. As cases and hospitalizations surged, the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville on Thursday requested assistance from the National Guard.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Dr. Shannon Byrd, a pulmonologist in Knoxville, who described local hospitals filled to capacity, noting that the vast majority of I.C.U. patients in the region were unvaccinated. “It’s bringing whole families down and tearing families apart. They’re dying in droves and leaving surviving loved ones with a lot of funerals to go to.”

As in previous surges, hospitals have been forced to expand capacity by creating makeshift I.C.U.s in areas typically reserved for other types of care, and even in hallways or spare rooms. Experts say maintaining existing standards of care for the sickest patients may be difficult or impossible at hospitals with more than 95 percent I.C.U. occupancy.

Hard-hit communities in Oregon and elsewhere are asking for mobile morgues to store the dead.

Dr. Ijlal Babar, the director of pulmonary critical care for the Singing River Health System in coastal Mississippi, said the influx of mostly unvaccinated, younger Covid-19 patients was hampering care across the system’s hospitals.

“Because a lot of these patients are lingering on, the ventilators are occupied, the beds are occupied,” he said. “And a lot of other patients who need health care, we can’t do those things, because we don’t have the I.C.U. beds, we don’t have the nurses, we don’t have the ventilators.”

Like many health care workers, Dr. Babar voiced frustration at the refusal of many residents to get inoculated, even after they had lost an unvaccinated family member to the virus.

“The families, you don’t see them going out and talking about the benefits of vaccine,” he said. “Nobody brings it up, nobody expresses any remorse. It’s just something that they absolutely do not believe in.”

GENEVA — The coronavirus has caused “the most catastrophic disruption of education in history,” and it is vital for children’s learning and mental health that schools take the necessary measures to open and to continue classroom-based lessons, the World Health Organization’s top European official said on Monday.

“We encourage all countries to keep schools open and urge all schools to put in place measures to minimize the risk of Covid-19 and the spread of different variants,” the official, Hans Kluge, said in a statement released jointly with the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF.

The statement came as millions of children prepare for the start of a new school year against a backdrop of concern over the spread of the Delta variant.

Children have suffered greatly over the past 20 months, particularly those who were already vulnerable or could not participate in digital learning, Dr. Kluge, the W.H.O.’s European director, said at a news briefing on Monday.

But, he said, “Unlike a year ago, we are in a position to keep them safe,” referring to a range of measures that could minimize the risk of infection.

Dr. Kluge recommended actions such as vaccinating teachers, other school staff and children over the age of 12, and regular testing. He also urged schools to keep classrooms clean, improve ventilation, reduce class sizes where possible and maintain social distancing. Mask wearing would depend on the local risk assessment, he added.

But Dr. Kluge also warned that the Delta variant, together with the “exaggerated easing” of public health measures and increased travel in the summer months had led to a worrying rise in Covid-19 cases, particularly in the Balkans, the Caucasus region and Central Asia.

One reliable projection pointed to 236,000 more deaths in the European region alone by Christmas, he added.

Vaccine skepticism is stalling progress in stabilizing the pandemic, Dr. Kluge said, noting that the numbers of people receiving shots had slowed in recent weeks.

“Vaccination is a right, but it’s also a responsibility,” he said, adding that vaccine skepticism and denial of science “serves no purpose and is good for no one.”

Prescriptions for ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms that has repeatedly failed in clinical trials to help people infected with the coronavirus, have risen sharply in recent weeks, jumping to more than 88,000 per week in mid-August from a prepandemic average of 3,600 per week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ivermectin was introduced as a veterinary drug in the late 1970s, and the discovery of its effectiveness in combating certain parasitic diseases in humans won the 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine.

Though it has not been shown to be effective in treating Covid-19, people are now clamoring to get the drug, trading tips in Facebook groups and on Reddit. Some physicians have compared the phenomenon to last year’s surge of interest in hydroxychloroquine, though there are more clinical trials evaluating ivermectin.

While sometimes given to humans in small doses for head lice, scabies and other parasites, ivermectin is more commonly used in animals. Physicians are raising alarms about a growing number of people getting the drug from livestock supply centers, where it can come in highly concentrated paste or liquid forms.

Calls to poison control centers about ivermectin exposures have risen significantly, jumping fivefold over their baseline in July, according to C.D.C. researchers, who cited data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Mississippi’s health department said this month that 70 percent of recent calls to the state poison control center had come from people who ingested ivermectin from livestock supply stores.

BATON ROUGE, La. — After a powerful storm blows through Baton Rouge, the emergency room at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center generally fills with patients suffering from burns and injuries from falls and power tool accidents.

But as Hurricane Ida strafed Baton Rouge, hospital officials were grappling with an extra challenge. They were bracing for an influx of patients at a time when they are already strained by the coronavirus pandemic, which has swept across Louisiana with a renewed fury in recent weeks. On Saturday, for example, nine patients in the hospital died, and eight of those were Covid-19 patients.

Some patients were being kept on stretchers, and the ratio of nurses to patients has expanded.

“Our people are stretched, our devices are stretched,” said Catherine O’Neal, the hospital’s chief medical officer. “It’s not the level of care that we expect from our team or this hospital, but it is the level of care that we have been presented with and we’ll do our best.”

The hospital has received reinforcements from the state and from the U.S. Department of Defense, all supplementing a staff that has been worn thin as the pandemic flared.

Hospital officials are expecting patients to be brought in from other facilities in the region that have been severely damaged by the storm. “We can take on more, we will take on more,” said Stephanie Manson, the hospital’s chief operating officer.

Conditions may be less than perfect, she said, but “it’s still a much better situation than where they were.”

Public health officials are also worried about how the hurricane will ultimately affect the pandemic in Louisiana, as people fleeing their homes pack in with relatives or into shelters with conditions conducive to the spread of the virus. Dr. O’Neal said that similar concerns were raised last year after Hurricane Laura hit Southwest Louisiana, but those fears were not realized. “We were on the downswing when it hit,” she said, “and there was a great deal of testing that went on in those shelters.”

But the outcome might be different this time. “We know that Delta is different and it’s far more contagious,” Dr. O’Neal said. “But we have learned to be patient.”

Global Roundup

The Australian state of New South Wales on Monday reported its highest daily number of coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, as infections driven by the Delta variant continued to surge and millions remained in lockdown.

New South Wales, the country’s most populous state, reported 1,290 cases, and the authorities said that they expected infections and intensive-care hospitalizations to continue to rise until peaking in October.

“Our hospital system is under pressure,” Gladys Berejiklian, the premier of New South Wales, told reporters in Sydney, the state capital and a city of more than five million people. “We will need to manage things differently.”

Ms. Berejiklian added that vaccination was the key to increasing freedoms and reducing the spread of the virus.

Victoria, the country’s second-most populous state, reported 73 new cases of the virus. Melbourne, the state capital, is now in its sixth lockdown, making it among the most locked-down places in the world. Combined, the lockdowns have lasted more than 200 days.

“We’re in a very challenging position right now,” Victoria’s chief health officer, Brett Sutton, told reporters in Melbourne on Monday.

As the outbreak has grown, so, too, have concerns that Australia’s vulnerable Indigenous population could be disproportionately affected.

An Aboriginal man in his 50s became the first Indigenous person to die of Covid-19, in Western New South Wales, a spokeswoman for the local health district confirmed on Monday.

Though Australia is battling its most severe outbreak so far, daily cases are still relatively low compared with those in many other countries. Four people per 100,000 are becoming sickened per day with the coronavirus in Australia. In the United States, that figure is 47, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

For now, international borders and some state borders in Australia remain closed, but some airlines have begun preparing to reopen. On Monday, Virgin Australia announced that it planned to require all its staff to be vaccinated by March.

In other developments around the globe:

• The Zhangjiajie Hehua International Airport, in Hunan Province, China, resumed flights on Monday after being shut down for a month to contain an outbreak of the Delta variant. As cases spread over the country in the past two months, the authorities locked down several cities, requiring several million residents to stay home and participate in rounds of testing.

• The government of South Korea announced on Monday plans to hand out a fifth round of Covid-19 emergency relief funds, this time to people in the bottom 88 percent of the nation’s income bracket. The packages of up to $215 per person will be distributed starting early next week and must be used by the end of this year. Recipients can use the money for food or other necessities, but not at department stores or entertainment facilities or on delivery apps.

• The authorities in New Zealand reported what could be the country’s first Pfizer vaccine-related death: A woman died of myocarditis, an inflammation in the heart muscle, shortly after receiving her shot. According to New Zealand’s Covid-19 Vaccine Independent Safety Monitoring Board, myocarditis is a rare side effect of the Pfizer vaccine. Although the cause of death has not been confirmed by the coroner, a news release by officials stated that this “is the first case in New Zealand where a death in the days following vaccination has been linked to the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.”

• The health authorities in Denmark recommended on Monday that people with severe immune deficiency get a booster dose of a coronavirus vaccine. The authorities have also announced that, because of the high rate of inoculation in the country, the digital Covid pass that is currently required to enter places such as restaurants will be phased out, starting on Sept. 10. More than 80 percent of people over the age of 12 in Denmark are fully vaccinated, and the country aims to reach 90 percent by Oct. 1.

• The Czech Republic will offer a booster Covid-19 vaccine shot from Sept. 20 to any previously vaccinated person, the country’s health minister, Adam Vojtech, said on Monday, according to Reuters. The country of 10.7 million, has been one of the countries worst hit by the pandemic as measured by deaths per population, with over 30,400 victims. Nearly 1.68 million Czechs have contracted the virus, and many more are estimated to have caught it without being tested.

Tiffany Mayand Jin Yu Young contributed reporting.

BERLIN — In an effort to convince holdouts to get inoculated against the coronavirus, a train of the S-Bahn, the iconic red-and-orange line in Berlin, was converted into a mobile vaccination center on Monday.

“I think it’s really super,” said Max Kietzmann, 18, who was one of the first to get a shot — the one-and-done Johnson & Johnson vaccine — on the train on Monday morning. “It’s so easy — it literally comes to you,” he added.

The German authorities are working to persuade unvaccinated residents to get the shots to try to flatten a fourth wave of the pandemic. Despite a relatively successful vaccination campaign in the early summer months, when daily inoculations reached more than a million, the number of new vaccinations has flattened in Germany recently. About 60 percent of the population is now fully vaccinated, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.

Politicians and public figures have made direct appeals, and a system of free testing will be abandoned next month, meaning that people will have to pay to obtain proof of a negative result, which is needed for certain activities, such as indoor dining or visiting a hair salon. State and city officials are also trying to make it easier to get a shot, for example by setting up vaccination posts at dance clubs or malls.

In the case of the S-Bahn train, the mobile vaccination center traced a normal one-hour route around the city, with passengers seeking a shot allowed to board at four major stops. The initiative, which was scheduled for Monday only but may be repeated if demand proves high, was aimed at catching commuters who had simply not found the time to get inoculated since doses were made available to all in Germany in July.

Appropriately, Dr. Christian Gravert, the physician onboard, started his medical career on a ship. He noted that the train ride was relatively smooth. “I have performed an appendectomy on the high seas, I trust myself to inject here,” he said.

The Delta variant of the coronavirus has disrupted back-to-office plans for some companies, while others are still expecting employees to be at their desks in September or sooner. And at some, like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, employees are already back at their desks.

The Times has compiled the latest information on when companies plan to return to the office, and whether they’ll require vaccines when they do.

Newly released data confirms that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are both associated with rare heart problems, and that this side effect is most common after the second shot in adolescent boys and young men. Still, the benefits of vaccination continued to outweigh the risks, scientists said.

The side effects tend to be mild, temporary, and uncommon. For every million doses of the second shot given to 12- to 39-year-olds, there were 14 to 20 extra cases of the heart problems, according to the new data, which was presented Monday at a meeting of an independent advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The data suggest an association of myocarditis with mRNA vaccination in adolescents and young adults,” Dr. Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford and chair of the committee, said at the meeting on Monday. “Further data are being compiled to understand potential risk factors, optimal management strategies and long-term outcomes.”

But the benefits of the vaccines are substantial, even for those in the highest risk groups. According to an analysis presented by a C.D.C. scientist on Monday, every million doses of the Pfizer vaccine administered to 16- and 17-year-old boys would be expected to cause 73 cases of the heart problems, while preventing more than 56,000 Covid-19 cases and 500 related hospitalizations.

The meeting comes as federal regulators wrestle with the risk-benefit calculations of vaccinating young Americans. In recent weeks, regulators have grown especially concerned about the risks of two heart conditions: myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis, an inflammation of the membrane that surrounds the heart.

The new data comes from two federal safety monitoring systems: the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or V.A.E.R.S., which collects unverified self-reports, and the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which contains vaccination and health records from nine health care organizations.

As of Aug. 18, V.A.E.R.S. had received more than 2,500 reports of the heart problems in newly vaccinated people. Overall, the risks appear to be elevated for male people between 12 and 49 and female people between 12 and 29, the data suggest.

The reports were far more common after the second dose of the vaccine than the first, and more common in men than women. For every million doses of the second Pfizer shot, for instance, there were 71.5 reported cases of myocarditis among 16- and 17-year-old boys, compared with just 8.1 for girls of the same age.

The findings aligned with data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink. Using this system, researchers confirmed 56 cases of the heart problems among 12- to 39-year-olds who had received an mRNA vaccine within the previous three weeks. The majority were male.

For every million doses administered to 12 to 39-year-olds, there were an extra 14.4 cases of the heart problems after the second Pfizer shot. There were 19.7 extra cases among 18- to 39-year-olds after the second Moderna shot, which is not yet authorized for children, the scientists calculated.

Most patients were hospitalized for the condition, but recovered quickly; 76 percent were discharged within two days. There have been no reported deaths.

The scientists also highlighted a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week that found that the risk of myocarditis was substantially higher after infection with the virus than after vaccination. “Covid-19 incidence and hospitalization rates are increasing rapidly,” Dr. Hannah Rosenblum, a C.D.C. scientist, said at the meeting.

When the United States Tennis Association announced on Friday that proof of coronavirus vaccination would be required for all spectators 12 and older to enter the grounds of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, it widened a gulf between the spectators and the players they’ll be watching at the U.S. Open.

Adults in the stands will now be roughly twice as likely to be vaccinated as the players on court: The WTA said “nearly 50 percent” of its players were vaccinated, while the ATP said its vaccination rates were “just above 50 percent.”

Despite the possible consequences of not being vaccinated — illness, of course, but also the inability to play and make money — tennis players have been stubbornly slow on the uptake, even as many have lost opportunities to play in major tournaments because of positive tests. While some players are openly skeptical of the need for a vaccine as a healthy young person, some simply haven’t prioritized it.

The French veteran Gilles Simon, who was disqualified from the U.S. Open on Friday for “medical reasons,” confirmed in an interview with L’Equipe that he was removed because he hadn’t been vaccinated. Simon’s coach, Etienne Laforgue, tested positive for the coronavirus after arriving in New York, and Simon was disqualified because he was deemed a “close contact.”

“I was not against it to the point of never being vaccinated, I’m just saying I didn’t feel the need or the urge,” Simon told L’Equipe.

Simon would have remained eligible to compete in the tournament, with increased testing, if he had been vaccinated.

“I’m not very scared of Covid, actually,” Simon said. “My basic philosophy is: ‘If you’re afraid of it, you get vaccinated; if not, no.’ It’s still a choice.”

Simon must now isolate in his hotel room for 10 days, according to federal and New York City guidelines. Simon, 36 and ranked 103rd, rued that his hotel room, where he will stay during what he admitted might have been his last U.S. Open, lacks a nice view.

“If your last memory of a U.S. Open is 10 days in a room, it is not one you want to keep,” he said.

In tennis, where each player is an independent contractor, there is no player union to encourage unified behavior and no general manager or team owner to encourage vaccination for the team’s competitive benefit. Other individual sports are still ahead of tennis, however: The PGA said early this month that its player vaccination rate was “above 70 percent.”

AstraZeneca has mandated that its U.S.-based employees be vaccinated against the coronavirus if they are returning to the workplace or visiting customers, the company confirmed on Monday.

The drug maker, which has headquarters in Cambridge, England, said the mandate also applied to employees of its Alexion Pharmaceuticals subsidiary, which is based in Boston. Workers can request exemptions for medical, religious or other reasons but will be required to take weekly coronavirus tests.

“To safeguard the health and well-being of our employees and communities, we must follow the science,” an AstraZeneca spokesman said in a statement.

AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine has been authorized for use in 87 countries, according to the company’s website, and 913 million doses have been shipped. The vaccine has not been authorized for use in the United States.

Pfizer, an American competitor based in New York, is requiring all of its U.S. employees and contractors to be vaccinated or participate in weekly Covid-19 testing. Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, both of which have vaccines that are authorized for use in the United States, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

New Jersey will end special unemployment benefits put in place during the pandemic when they expire on Saturday, rather than using federal relief funds to extend them, the state’s governor announced on Monday.

The governor, Phil Murphy, said at a news conference that he had decided to let three federal assistance programs expire because it would cost the state millions of dollars to preserve them. At least 500,000 people will lose benefits. The programs set to expire are Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, and Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation.

President Biden had suggested earlier this month that states like New Jersey, which has an unemployment rate of 7.3 percent, could use federal Covid-19 relief funds to extend benefits beyond Sept. 4.

New Jersey received $6.2 billion from the American Rescue Plan, but Mr. Murphy said it would cost the state’s taxpayers $314 million a week to maintain the benefits. “In other words, we’re talking about well more than $1 billion per month to maintain this benefit at its current level,” he said during the news conference.

Mr. Murphy said that since the start of the pandemic last year, the state has spent $33.7 billion in various kinds of assistance funds to about 1.6 million people. As the federal benefits come to an end, Mr. Murphy said the state will use Covid relief funds to fund other programs, including those that provide people help with rent, food and child care.

“We must ensure that we are appropriating these funds judiciously for the greatest possible long term recovery,” he said.

In neighboring New York State, a host of pandemic-related unemployment benefits were also scheduled to expire in the coming days, even though its economic driver, New York City, has one of the highest unemployment rates among large cities in the country.

The benefits about to stop in New York include a $300 per week federal supplement, which has been paid on top of state unemployment benefits. Also expiring soon are unemployment payments for self-employed workers and contractors, who would not normally qualify for assistance.

More than 4.7 million New Yorkers have received unemployment benefits totaling more than $97 billion in the pandemic, the state said.

Most parts of New York State have an unemployment rate near the national average, around 5.4 percent. But the lagging economy in New York City has driven the overall state rate up to 7.6 percent, the second highest in the country. In the city, the unemployment rate is 10.5 percent.

Matthew Haag contributed reporting.

Delays, product shortages and rising costs tied to the pandemic continue to bedevil businesses large and small. And consumers are confronted with an experience once rare in modern times: no stock available, and no idea when it will come in.

In the face of an enduring shortage of computer chips, Toyota this month announced that it would slash its global production of cars by 40 percent. Factories around the world are limiting operations — despite powerful demand for their wares — because they cannot buy metal parts, plastics and other raw materials.

Construction companies are paying more for paint, lumber and hardware, while waiting weeks and sometimes months to receive what they need.

In Britain, the National Health Service recently advised that it must delay some blood tests because of a shortage of needed gear. A recent survey by the Confederation of British Industry found the worst shortages of parts in the history of the index, which started in 1977.

The Great Supply Chain Disruption is a central element of the extraordinary uncertainty that continues to frame economic prospects worldwide. If the shortages persist well into next year, that could advance rising prices on a range of commodities.

As central banks from the United States to Australia debate the appropriate level of concern about inflation, they must consider a question none can answer with full confidence: Are the shortages and delays merely temporary mishaps accompanying the resumption of business, or something more insidious that could last well into next year?