New York City Schools Reopen Fully After 18 Months

New York City’s classrooms reopened on Monday to roughly a million children, most of whom were returning for the first time since the United States’ largest school system closed in March 2020.

While the city reopened schools last fall for part-time learning, the vast majority of students chose to keep learning remotely. But with no remote option now available to almost all parents, classrooms will be full for the first time in a year and a half.

For months, Mayor Bill de Blasio has forecast the first day of school to be a triumphant coda in New York City’s long recovery from the pandemic. But the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant has complicated the city’s push to fully reopen schools and left many families and educators anxious about what the next few months will hold.

On Monday morning, Neriyah and Khyree Smith boarded a subway car with broken air conditioning and headed back to their East New York, Brooklyn, school for the first time since they left exactly 18 months ago.

Neriyah, who is 8, said she was nervous and excited about seeing her classmates again.

“I made a lot of friends before I was on computers,” she said. Khyree, 4, showed off his matching SpongeBob SquarePants backpack and lunchbox. Their mother, Tiffany Smith, chose to keep her children learning from home last year.

But she said they both struggled to focus, and that she now felt safe with them back in classrooms. “They have a lot of safety protocols,” Ms. Smith said of city schools.

Across the city in Queens, incoming freshmen lined up outside Bayside High School to get a first glimpse inside their new school.

Nate Hernandez, 14, a freshman from Jamaica, Queens, boarded the Q31 bus at 6 a.m. on Monday with his mother to make sure he wouldn’t be late. Nate, who learned fully remotely during his last year of middle school, said online classes made him feel “a little sad and kind of lonely as well,” he said of learning remotely. “It was hard to get to know people.”

He hopes that the new school will offer a fresh start.

“I can’t believe I made it to ninth grade, to high school,” he said. “I’m like, ‘I’m going to high school now.’ It’s crazy.”

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The first day of school in a system as large as New York’s can be chaotic even during normal times. This year is anything but. Even before schools opened their doors on Monday morning, the city was scrambling to fix the first problem of the new school year. The online health screenings that families are required to fill out each morning had crashed by about 8 a.m., as hundreds of thousands of parents attempted to log on at the same time.

That led to long lines outside some schools across the city, as educators were forced to complete their own screenings of how each child was feeling that morning.

Monday’s reopening capped months of planning and anticipation for the third consecutive school year disrupted by the pandemic.

In May, amid a brisk vaccine rollout and rapidly declining virus case counts, Mr. de Blasio announced that the city would no longer offer remote instruction to most students. (A few thousand children whom the city considers medically vulnerable will still be able to learn from home.) His announcement triggered little political resistance in the spring, but his administration has faced growing pressure from parents and politicians to reconsider.

About 600,000 families, most of them Black and Latino, kept their children learning from home last year. This year, while parents are much more receptive to reopening schools, some say they would like to wait at least until their young children are eligible for the vaccine. Only children 12 and older are currently eligible, and younger children may not be until later in the year, at the earliest.

The mayor has remained resolute that the school year will proceed normally, albeit with safety measures in place. But it is still possible that significant in-school transmission this fall could force many school buildings — or even the entire system — to shut down temporarily.

City schools saw remarkably low virus transmission in their buildings last year, but most schools were at significantly reduced capacity. Even with a transmission rate of 0.03 percent as of the end of last year, quarantines were still a regular occurrence.

This year, at least some level of disruption is inevitable, as positive cases in classrooms will force some other students to quarantine.

Mr. de Blasio has acknowledged that he does not expect all children to actually return to school this week, since some parents have informed their principals that they want to wait a few days or even weeks to see how reopening goes.

Emma Goldberg and Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.

China has logged its highest number of coronavirus cases in nearly a month, prompting one county to shut down public transportation and test hundreds of thousands of people.

On Sunday, the Chinese authorities reported 22 new locally transmitted infections, all in the southern province of Fujian and caused by the Delta variant. The number was the highest since Aug. 14, when 24 cases were recorded.

The outbreak over the weekend bucked a downward trend of cases, which had fallen for more than a month since Aug. 9, when China reported 109 infections. While Sunday’s case count is far below many other countries, the number reflects what health experts have long warned: that it is probably nearly impossible to completely eradicate the Delta variant, and that Beijing needs to rethink its zero-Covid strategy.

The government said that the outbreak started on Sept. 10 in a primary school in Xianyou, a county in Fujian. An initial analysis showed that the infections had been imported by an adult who had returned from Singapore.

The authorities in Fujian have ordered mass testing of all students and teachers to be completed within a week. The city of Xiamen has closed off two districts and a hospital after identifying coronavirus patients. In Xianyou, buses and taxi services have been suspended. More than 900,000 residents in the county have been called up for testing, with threats of criminal punishment for anyone who does not cooperate.

The local authorities said that most of the infected were young children.

A team from the National Health Commission that has been sent to Fujian said that it would probably detect more cases, but added that the outbreak could be controlled before the weeklong National Day holiday, according to CCTV, the state broadcaster.

Beijing is likely to be nervous about the approaching holidays, a time when Chinese people travel and gather, which could heighten the risk of infection. The three-day Mid-Autumn Festival starts this month, and the National Day “golden week” holiday starts the first week of October.

Last month, China stamped out multiple Delta outbreaks that swept across half the country through mass testing, contact tracing, and targeted lockdowns. But health experts have warned that the measures come at a punishing economic and social cost and may exacerbate weariness among the public.

Australia has opened up Covid-19 vaccinations to children as young as 12 as it races to inoculate the population amid an outbreak of the Delta variant.

Children ages 12 to 15 started receiving Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines on Monday. Appointments for the Moderna vaccine can be booked now for sessions starting next week.

Australia’s vaccine campaign is gaining speed after a sluggish first few months. Millions of doses that were ordered earlier this year are arriving, and the country will have enough supply by mid-October to vaccinate every eligible person, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said last week.

Currently, 55 percent of the population of 26 million has had at least one vaccine dose, and 34 percent are fully inoculated, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. The number of new cases increased by 36 percent over the past two weeks to 1,493 cases, based on the seven-day average.

Australia will also receive its first shipments of the Moderna vaccine this week, with 11 million total doses expected to be delivered by the end of the year. The government also signed an agreement with other nations to swap vaccines, which will allow it to get 500,000 doses of the Pfizer shot from Singapore and four million from Britain. In return, Australia promised to ship the same numbers of doses to the two countries later this year.

Fully vaccinated people living in Sydney, the epicenter of the Delta outbreak in Australia, had some restrictions eased on Monday. Those who live outside 12 government areas “of concern” are now allowed to have outdoor picnics with up to four other people.

Schools in Sydney will reopen on Oct. 25, while pubs and gyms are expected to open in mid-October when the state fully vaccinates 70 percent of its population.

Thailand and Vietnam, two countries whose economies rely largely on tourism, are pushing to reopen their travel industries despite surges in coronavirus cases and outbreaks of the Delta variant.

Late last week, the Vietnamese government announced a reopening of the island of Phu Quoc to fully vaccinated overseas tourists, with the goal of attracting two to three million international visitors to the island by the end of the year. Alongside that move, the chairman of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, Nguyen Trung Khanh, said that efforts to vaccinate residents on the island would be a priority.

In 2019, Vietnam saw more than 18 million international tourists. But in a sign of the profound effect of the pandemic, overseas arrivals in the month of March 2020, as the coronavirus began to hit hard, dropped steeply, to only about 32 percent of the number in the same month a year earlier, according to Vietnamese tourism statistics.

While Vietnam did a good job of containing the virus in the initial stages of the pandemic, like many other countries it has struggled to contain the Delta variant this year. The country is recording a daily average of 12,724 new cases, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Only 4.9 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, according to Our World in Data figures.

Thailand is also set to welcome back fully vaccinated tourists, to Bangkok and other major tourism destinations, starting in October, according to Reuters. It is the second phase of a reopening plan that began over the past two months, with the reopening of places including the island of Phuket.

Thailand had nearly 40 million international visitors in 2019. Tourism accounts for about a fifth of the country’s economic activity, according to the International Monetary Fund, and the pandemic contributed to a drop of 6.1 percent in the country’s G.D.P. in 2020.

Thailand is reporting about 14,000 new daily cases, according to the country’s tourism authority, and there have been public protests about the government’s handling of the pandemic. In 2020, Thailand registered fewer than 100 Covid-related deaths, but the toll in 2021 already exceeds 12,000.

South Africa is easing some of its coronavirus restrictions, with new infections dropping across all provinces, President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Sunday.

“While the third wave is not yet over, we have seen a sustained decline in infections across the country over the last few weeks,” Mr. Ramaphosa said. The seven-day average of daily new cases has decreased by 48 percent in the past 14 days, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

When the latest wave of cases surged in June, South Africa introduced some tough restrictions, then relaxed them as cases fell in July. For about a month, restaurants could only sell food by takeout or delivery, alcohol sales were banned and schools were closed.

New rules introduced on Monday further eased those restrictions. The nationwide curfew has been shortened by an hour, operating hours at restaurants, bars and fitness centers have been expanded and hours of alcohol sales have been extended. As many as 250 people may now meet indoors, and as many as 500 outdoors — changes that areexpected to make political campaigning easier ahead of local elections in November.

While the easing of restrictions in other parts of the world has been driven by the accelerating pace of vaccinations, South Africa’s vaccination drive has been slow. But the government has secured enough doses to vaccinate the entire adult population, Mr. Ramaphosa said. About 18 percent of the country’s population has been partially vaccinated and 12 percent has been fully vaccinated, according to figures from Our World in Data.

Across Africa, new cases are falling. The continent recently recorded the sharpest seven-day decline in two months, the World Health Organization said this month. But the shortage of doses has left the continent vulnerable to surges, especially of more contagious variants.

Earlier this year, as Covid-19 vaccines became more widely available, some women and girls went on social media to describe changes in their menstrual cycles after receiving the shots, including irregular cycles, painful periods and heavy bleeding.

Some postmenopausal women shared stories about getting their periods for the first time in years. Many wondered whether the vaccines might be the reason.

Now researchers at five institutions, backed by funding from the National Institutes of Health, will be conducting yearlong studies to examine any possible connections between vaccination and irregular menstruation, and to help allay concerns that might prevent women from getting their shots.

The evidence around abnormal periods is so far purely anecdotal. There is no known link between vaccination and changes in menstruation, and public health experts reiterate that vaccines are safe, effective and necessary to end the pandemic.

But the stories underpin a persistent data gap about reproductive health and women’s menstrual cycles that is not collected during clinical trials, including during trials of the Covid vaccines. There have also been no scientific studies published examining a potential relationship between the two.

“This is an important, overlooked issue,” said Dr. Hugh Taylor, chair of the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine, who added that he has heard from his own patients about differences in their periods after receiving the vaccine.

“A lot of people have irregular menstruation for all sorts of reasons, so is this really different in people with the vaccine, or is it just that when people have it, they are linking it to the vaccine?”

The research will be undertaken by teams at Boston University, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University and Oregon Health and Science University. The studies will include participants of all ages and backgrounds who have not yet been vaccinated, including those who plan to get the shots and those who do not, in order to study their menstrual cycles before and afterward.

Menstrual health can be a reflection of women’s overall health, doctors say. But they point out that a number of different factors can temporarily affect a woman’s period, including stress, illness or lifestyle changes. Periods, including length and flow of a menstrual cycle, also vary widely from person to person.

In Idaho, where unchecked virus transmission has pushed hospitals beyond their breaking point, the state is sending some Covid-19 patients to neighboring Washington State.

But Washington hospitals are struggling with their own high caseloads, and some leaders in the state see Idaho’s outsourcing of Covid patients as a troubling example of how the failure to aggressively confront the virus in one state can deepen a crisis in another.

On the Washington side of the border, residents must wear masks when gathering indoors, students who are exposed to Covid face quarantine requirements, and many workers are under vaccination orders. On the Idaho side, none of those precautions are in place.

Last week, Idaho took the extraordinary step of moving its hospitals in the northern part of the state to crisis standards of care — the threshold at which facilities facing overwhelming caseloads are authorized to ration their resources.

Idaho now has more than 600 patients hospitalized with Covid-19, about 20 percent higher than a previous peak in December. Only 40 percent of the state’s residents are fully vaccinated, one of the lowest rates in the nation, compared with 61 percent in Washington State, one of the highest.

The strain on health care facilities is particularly evident in northern Idaho, where the vaccination rate is even lower. The area just hosted the North Idaho State Fair, and in a region where there is deep wariness of government, no mask orders or other strategies were adopted to halt the spread of the virus.

With the Delta strain of the virus sweeping the nation, Washington State has faced its own challenges and record hospitalizations, especially in areas on the eastern side of the state where vaccination rates are lower. This week, that state, too, began talking openly about the possibility that crisis standards of care could become necessary.

Daily reports of new coronavirus cases grew tenfold in South Dakota in August, with the worst outbreaks concentrated in the western part of the state. Hospitalizations have increased swiftly in the last few weeks. National Guard soldiers were dispatched to aid with testing.

The increase came during and after the state’s annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which drew more than 550,000 people from all over the country to South Dakota — even more than last year’s, which forged ahead while most large events were canceled. This year’s happened during a broad spread of the Delta variant that drove a spike in all 50 states.

Uncertain, experts said, was the role the rally may have had in spreading the virus in South Dakota. And unanswered was a larger question: How safe are major gatherings held at least partly outdoors — events like Sturgis, Lollapalooza and college football games.

Cases in Meade County, which includes Sturgis, began to rise in mid-August, just as the motorcycle rally was winding down. By the end of August, more than 30 county residents were testing positive most days, up from about one a day before the rally. Case levels have since started to decline.

But the vast majority of people at the rally came from elsewhere and, if they became infected, would be counted in the data in their home states.

As the Delta variant spreads widely, and as Americans yearn to go back to normal, health experts have debated the public health risks of large outdoor events and music festivals.

Outdoor events are far safer than those held in indoor, poorly ventilated spaces. But even gatherings where the main event is outside can include indoor opportunities for Covid to spread.

Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, said it may be too early to link the Delta variant surge that’s overwhelming hospitals and increasing case level to large outdoor events, including the rally in Sturgis.

“I haven’t seen any data so far that says outdoor gatherings themselves are pretty risky,” said Dr. Jha. “And what I’ve said about Sturgis is, I don’t think it was the rally itself, I think it was all the bars and restaurants and all the stuff and night and evenings and all the indoor stuff.”

Dr. Shankar Kurra, the vice president for medical affairs at Monument Health, which is headquartered in Rapid City, S.D., said last month that the number of coronavirus cases in the area was much higher than at this time than they were following last year’s rally.

“It’s hard not to say these cases didn’t come from the rally,” Dr. Kurra. “The cases had to come from somewhere and we know these cases did not come from here.”

Local officials in Sturgis have pushed back against the scrutiny of the event, saying the rally has received unequal criticism compared to other large gatherings across the country.

“As the data illustrates, South Dakota’s current infection rate is mirroring the entire upper Midwest region,” said Dan Ainslie, the Sturgis city manager. “There was some spread of Covid from the rally, though the national media fixation on it is without merit given the fact that our experience is so similar to our neighbors.”