Live updates: Pfizer, Moderna vaccines have reduced effectiveness against South African variant, studies show

The District announced Thursday that it will offer coronavirus vaccines to people 16 or older with serious health problems, beginning March 1.

Residents who have conditions such as cancer, diabetes or kidney or liver disease can seek a vaccine through their doctor or through the city’s public registration system. Doses remain in short supply, and this new group of patients — representing more than a quarter of adults in the city — will compete for appointments with seniors and an increasingly large pool of eligible essential workers.

The announcement from Health Director LaQuandra Nesbitt represents a change in the city’s plans for vaccinating people whose health puts them at additional risk from the virus, following criticism from the public.

Two travelers visiting Hawaii from Louisiana were arrested on Friday for offering a Honolulu airport screener $3,000 to let them pass without quarantining or providing the negative coronavirus tests required for entry, officials say.

Johntrell White, 29, and Nadia Bailey, 28, were charged with bribery and flown back to the mainland. The two allegedly flew to Daniel K. Inouye International Airport without any coronavirus test results and told an airport screener not to alert officials in exchange for money.

White is accused of offering the screener $2,000 to avoid quarantine, and Bailey offered the same screener an additional $1,000, the Hawaii Attorney General’s Office and Department of Public Safety reported in a covid-19 update from the governor’s office.

The coronavirus vaccine is so coveted that two women in Florida went to extremes Wednesday to get inoculated: They dressed as if they were elderly, health officials said.

The women, both younger than 45, wore bonnets, gloves and glasses to disguise themselves as older than 65, the age cut-off to be prioritized to get the coronavirus vaccine in Florida, according to Raul Pino, the director of the health department in Orange County, where Orlando is located. He said there has been a “few” cases of people trying to trick health workers into getting vaccinated, including a man who had the same name as his elderly father.

“This is the hottest commodity that is out there right now so we have to be very careful,” Pino said at a press briefing Thursday.

International travel declined by around 90 percent after the pandemic hit — but those still crossing borders may have begun to encounter a novel concept: “covid-19 passports,” or a mobile platform that proves a traveler meets a country’s requirements, like a negative coronavirus test or, in a few cases, having received the coronavirus vaccine.

Also called health passports, these are not official documents granted by governments; rather, they are digital passes issued by apps, and accepted by some companies and countries, that have arisen to meet demands by airlines and governments that travelers have a negative coronavirus status.

These platforms, however, also give rise to privacy and equity concerns — such as how to ensure personal data is protected and how to address the needs of billions of people without access to a digital device or digitized health care, yet alone the vaccine, if they seek to travel.

University of Virginia officials said Thursday that widespread noncompliance of campus health guidelines is driving an explosion of coronavirus cases at the school.

There are 779 active cases of the virus — including 18 among employees — on and around the Charlottesville campus, more than half of which were reported this week, according to university data.

On Tuesday, 229 new cases were reported, the highest single-day count for the school. That number fell slightly Wednesday, to 174 cases.

The campus is also dealing with a variant of the virus first identified in the United Kingdom, but officials have not yet said how many cases are tied to the new strain.

The increase in cases at the university comes as coronavirus cases have been falling across the greater Washington region in recent weeks. In Virginia, the seven-day average number of new infections statewide Thursday stood at 2,411 — less than half the highs that were recorded in January.

Vice President Harris on Thursday called the exodus of women from the workforce during the coronavirus pandemic a “national emergency” as she made the Biden administration’s latest pitch for passage of a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill.

Harris spoke at the start of a virtual event that included female members of Congress and leaders advocacy organizations.

About 2.5 million women have dropped out of the labor force during the pandemic, compared with 1.8 million men, according to data from the Labor Department released this month.

“This is a national emergency. Women leaving the workforce in these numbers is a national emergency which needs a national solution,” Harris said.

She spoke of a “perfect storm” for women who have stopped working to take care of children at home during the school day.

“The longer we wait to act, the harder it will be to bring these millions of women back into the workforce,” Harris said.

PARIS — France is weighing whether to give people previously infected with the coronavirus only one vaccine dose instead of two, a practice that if enacted here and followed by other countries could free up tens of millions of doses.

“It’s likely that we’ll see similar moves elsewhere, given that we’re facing a shortage of vaccine doses,” said Tobias Kurth, the director of the Institute of Public Health at Berlin’s Charité hospital.

France’s health advisory body has recommended that one shot provides sufficient protection, acting like a booster shot, for previously infected people.

The White House is throwing its support behind a push to equitably distribute coronavirus vaccines, pledging $4 billion to a multilateral initiative the Trump administration chose not to back.

President Biden will on Friday announce an initial $2 billion in funding for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to be used by the Covax Facility, an initiative of the World Health Organization, senior administration officials said.

The U.S. will release an additional $2 billion over two years once other donors have made good on their pledges, and will use this week’s Group of 7 summit to rally countries to do more.

The money, which was appropriated by a bipartisan Congressional vote last year, will give a much-needed boost to a program jointly led by Gavi, the WHO and the Center for Preparedness Innovations.

Covax aims to get coronavirus vaccines to countries that have been cut out of a vaccine race that’s seen rich countries snap up the majority of doses, leaving everyone else to wait.

Although more than 190 countries have joined Covax, the Trump administration opted out, in part because of the former president’s feud with the WHO.

In remarks published Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said the United States and Europe should provide coronavirus vaccines to developing countries by donating up to 5 percent of the doses they have ordered.

Asked by journalists about whether the U.S. will share doses, administration officials stressed that the country remains focused on vaccinating all Americans, but may consider sharing down the line.

Securing an appointment for a first dose of the coronavirus vaccine might feel like a victory.

But then there is round two.

Scarce supply of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines has stirred anxiety about whether the required second dose will be available. Different protocols in different jurisdictions — as well as several mishaps in recent weeks — have added to the frustration and concern in the greater Washington region.

Officials in Prince George’s County are so worried about a shortage of second doses that they have held some first doses in reserve, slowing the pace of vaccinations — even though the federal government now automatically schedules its second-dose shipments. In Anne Arundel County, a data error temporarily disrupted shipments, forcing the abrupt cancellation of two second-dose clinics this month. In Harford County, a second-shot clinic was partially derailed by hundreds of residents trying to get their first shot.

It’s the first day back at work for Scott E. Lynn, the coroner of Montour County, Pa. He has been sick with covid-19. He was out for a month and lost 25 pounds. As he arrives at his office in a remote corner of the Geisinger Medical Center, he still feels weak.

Lynn doesn’t know how he contracted covid. Deceased people do not spread the virus under normal circumstances. And Lynn mostly handles corpses enclosed in two layers of body bags.

“I can only assume it was somewhere in the process of my death investigations,” he says. He wears a mask at work, but he still has to go into homes, motel rooms and hospital rooms, getting close not only to the dead person but also to witnesses and survivors.

The coroner is often the person who informs families that a loved one has died. There is an art to that, and Lynn says the coroner cannot wear a mask when telling someone news that will crush them.

A sprawling stimulus package may be the next shot in the arm for the economy, but the Federal Reserve is making clear that the recovery also hinges on literal shots in Americans’ arms.

Central bankers tend to talk about interest rates and asset purchases when it comes to policy. But in a downturn as unusual as this one, driven by the coronavirus pandemic, the Fed is increasingly leaning on a new vocabulary set — one that may seem drawn from a medical textbook instead of an economics one.

Whether talking about mask-wearing or social distancing, the Fed’s message increasingly is that healing the economy will require ending the public health crisis. And at their January policy meeting, Fed leaders discussed speedy vaccine delivery as a must-do to carry the economy through to the other side, according to meeting notes released Wednesday.

Europe and the United States should step up to provide coronavirus vaccines to developing countries by donating up to 5 percent of the doses they have ordered, as part of a “war of influence” with Russia and China over immunizations around the globe, French President Emmanuel Macron said in remarks published Thursday.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Macron said that global vaccine inequality is “politically unsustainable” and “paving the way for a war of influence over vaccines.” He referred to a situation in which Western nations have secured hundreds of millions of doses, while some countries have yet to administer a single shot.

“We are allowing the idea to take hold that hundreds of millions of vaccines are being given in rich countries and that we are not starting in poor countries,” he told the newspaper ahead of a virtual Group of Seven meeting Friday of leaders of the world’s largest economies.

The first study of a coronavirus vaccine in pregnant women launched today, part of an ongoing effort to assess the safety and effectiveness of the shots in groups of people that were excluded from the original trials.

Pfizer-BioNTech announced Thursday that the first of 4,000 pregnant women received shots in a trial designed to assess the safety and tolerability of their vaccine, and how well it provoked an immune response. The women, between 24 to 34 weeks pregnant, will receive either the real vaccine or a placebo. Their babies will be followed for six months after birth, and a key question to be tested is whether protective immunity is transferred to infants after birth.

A recent study of pregnant women who had antibodies in their blood showing they had been previously infected found that those disease-fighting antibodies were also present in their newborns.

Until now, pregnant women eligible for a shot have been left to decide, with their doctors, whether to get the vaccine. The data has been sparse, based on animal studies and data collected from a few dozen women who became pregnant over the course of various vaccine trials.

The hesitance to include pregnant women in therapeutic trials has been a long-standing problem in medicine.

“Pregnant and lactating persons should not be protected from participating in research, but rather should be protected through research,” Diana Bianchi, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, wrote in a recent JAMA viewpoint.

Pfizer and BioNTech plan to submit results to regulators from a study of children ages 12 to 15 in the second quarter of 2021 and to launch a study in children ages 5 to 11 in “the next couple of months,” according to a company statement. Tests in children younger than 5 are expected later in 2021. There are also plans to test the vaccine in immunocompromised people.

Workers at a Kroger-owned supermarket near Seattle breathed a sigh of relief last fall when they learned that a coronavirus vaccine was around the corner.

Months later, they’re still waiting. Although more than 100 vaccinations a week are given at Quality Food Centers’ in-house pharmacy, most store employees have yet to schedule theirs. Some workers, including baggers and produce clerks, say they have been pulled into the distribution effort and told to monitor newly inoculated customers for side effects without proper training, protection or extra pay.

“Once again, grocery workers have been put on the back burner and forgotten about,” said one QFC clerk, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears losing his job. “People are frustrated, to say the least. We have a vaccine program, but nobody knows what’s going on.”

Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker told reporters Thursday that he has been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus for two weeks now and that he urges others to do the same.

But Baker, one of just two African American managers in Major League Baseball, said he shared concerns many Black Americans have expressed about the safety of the shot.

“I know it’s a touchy situation. A lot of people don’t trust the vaccine,” said Baker, who added that he was watching CNN when he saw an African American doctor speaking to its safety.

“He guaranteed that this would not be another Tuskegee experiment,” Baker said, referring to the infamous study that began in the 1930s that tracked the progress of untreated syphilis in hundreds of Black men.

“That’s what convinced me to go get the vaccine because I was very aware of the experiment,” he said. “So was my mom and dad, so I was a little leery about getting the vaccine until I saw the number of deaths and the number of people that had gotten sick all over the world.”

Biden’s vaccine push runs into distrust in the Black community

Baker said that he recorded a few public service announcements near his home in California and that his wife, Melissa, has had the first of her two shots, too.

But he said his mother, who is almost 90, will not get the vaccine because she is concerned about her safety. He admitted that until this winter, he had never gotten a flu vaccine for similar reasons.

“It’s up to the individual. I’m not going to try to convince those who are staunchly against it. But those who are on the fence and on the bubble, hopefully my words might sway them one way or another,” Baker said.

“I wasn’t for the flu vaccine until the Houston doctors gave it to me right before I left. They said my underlying conditions, it was dangerous for me to get the flu, then possibly to get the coronavirus,” he said.

“You do what you’ve got to do,” he added. “But my suggestion to those who are on the fence is to get the vaccine.”

The deputy governor of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, told reporters Thursday that residents who refuse coronavirus vaccines could face steep fines of up to $356.89, Reuters reported.

Polling has shown high rates of skepticism around coronavirus vaccines in Indonesia, the world’s fourth-largest country, where more than 1 million people have been infected and nearly 34,000 covid-19 deaths have been confirmed. Jakarta, a city of more than 10 million, has been hit so hard that it is running out of graveyard space.

The country aims to inoculate more than two-thirds of its population over 15 months.

The penalties in Jakarta are part of a national policy that allows fines and denial of social services to those who do not accept coronavirus vaccines.

Many rights advocates oppose mandatory vaccinations. “A blanket mandate on vaccination, especially one that includes criminal penalties, is a clear violation of human rights,” Usman Hamid, a director at Amnesty International Indonesia, told Reuters.

Earlier this month, Indonesia approved the CoronaVac vaccine, developed by Chinese company Sinovac, for the elderly, which could mean a change in the country’s approach, which has prioritized adults under 60.

While few countries are likely to make coronavirus vaccines mandatory in the near term, and penalties for refusal are not widespread, some governments and employers have begun to offer vaccine incentives. The Vatican, the world’s smallest state, issued a decree Thursday warning that Vatican employees who refuse vaccination without legitimate medical grounds could face dismissal.

Andy Slavitt, White House senior adviser on the coronavirus response, said vaccine-producing companies plan to update their shots to address variants of the virus.

During a Washington Post live interview Thursday, he said the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines “work well for” the most prominent variant spreading throughout the United States, which is the one first identified in Britain.

He said that while the vaccines appear less effective against the variants first identified in Brazil and South Africa, they do produce some antibodies.

“The vaccines are less effective but, importantly, above a threshold — and the threshold is, does it work or does it not. It does work,” he said. “It creates fewer antibodies, but this is mostly good news because they still continue to work.”

He said the vaccine-developing companies are set to continue to “update” the shots.

“Each of the vaccine companies — and I’ve talked to all of them, both the ones approved and the candidates — have plans to continue to update their vaccines, and if need be, create boosters down the road if there continue to be additional mutants, as there likely will be,” Slavitt said.

“This is a matter of science adapting its processes and keeping up and keeping track,” he added.

Walmart pledged to raise average wages for 425,000 front-line employees, following a profitable holiday season that produced a surge in e-commerce sales, the company said Thursday.

The retailer brought in a record $152.1 billion in revenue for the three months ending Jan. 31, a jump of more than 7 percent from a year ago, according to its fourth-quarter earnings report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company’s comparable sales, which come from stores and online purchases operating for at least the last year, jumped 8.6 percent, and e-commerce sales soared 69 percent, in response to the coronavirus pandemic’s push for online orders.

“We completed a strong year and a strong Q4 thanks to our amazing associates. They stepped up to serve our customers and members exceptionally well during a busy holiday period in the midst of a pandemic,” Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon said in a news release. “Change in retail accelerated in 2020. The capabilities we’ve built in previous years put us ahead, and we’re going to stay ahead.”

Walmart said it had already raised wages for 165,000 employees in fall 2020. The new raise will boost average wages for employees in U.S. stores to more than $15 per hour. The company’s minimum starting wage will stay at $11 per hour, trailing other retailers with more competitive pay, such as Target and Amazon.

Despite months of record-breaking profits, the nation’s largest private employer of 1.5 million workers stopped covering hazard pay before the holiday season. The company does offer paid sick leave and emergency leave for workers who test positive for the novel coronavirus. During the same quarter, Sam’s Club e-commerce sales jumped 42 percent, and comparable sales increased by nearly 11 percent, with membership income recording the strongest growth in six years.

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) unveiled a “pop-up” clinic offering coveted coronavirus vaccines in an affluent, mostly White part of Manatee County, Fla., lawmakers on both sides of the aisle slammed the plan for excluding residents in the rest of the county.

But on Wednesday, the governor offered no apologies, warning that he could instead take the doses elsewhere.

“If Manatee County doesn’t like us doing this, then we are totally fine with putting this in counties that want it,” DeSantis said at a news conference. “We’re totally happy to do that.”

As wealthy individuals in Florida and around the country snap up a disproportionate number of vaccination appointments, critics say DeSantis’s plan for the “pop-up” clinic near Tampa is only bound to widen disparities.

Leaders in Maryland and Virginia eased up on some pandemic-related restrictions Wednesday as the rate of new coronavirus infections continued to fall from its winter peak.

Caseloads across the Washington region have steadily declined for weeks alongside a wobbly vaccine rollout. In the past week, the seven-day average number of new cases has fallen by nearly a quarter in Virginia, with steeper drops in D.C. and Maryland.

Despite the decline, numbers continue to hover at levels that are much higher than in the summer and that alarmed health experts in the fall ahead of the winter surge. Still, the recent trend was enough to prompt some leaders in the region Wednesday to slightly loosen the reins on winter’s tougher restrictions for the first time.

LIMA, Peru — When interim president Francisco Sagasti finally unveiled Peru’s first coronavirus vaccine deal last month, Peruvians wearied by nearly a year of health and economic crises compounded by the country’s recent political turmoil glimpsed a light at the end of the tunnel.

As intensive care unit doctors and nurses this month began receiving their shots from the first batch — 300,000 doses from the Chinese company Sinopharm — cautious optimism began to spread. Sagasti said he hoped to have a third of Peru’s 32 million people vaccinated by the time he steps down on July 28.

But the mood in this Andean nation has now turned to uncontained fury. The government has acknowledged that hundreds of high officials and other well-connected VIPs jumped the vaccination queue beginning late last year to secretly get shots before the front-line health workers.

European teachers have generally been more willing than their U.S. counterparts to engage with students in classrooms during the coronavirus pandemic. But Belgian teachers who found themselves left off a priority list for vaccinations are threatening to strike unless they receive doses.

The dispute may foreshadow more disruptions to fragile pandemic-era arrangements, as some groups decide they are less willing to take risks now that society could choose to inoculate them — but won’t until vaccines are in greater supply.

In Belgium, teachers have been working in classrooms for most of the school year, including when their country’s infection rates were the worst in the world in October. Students up to age 13 are attending school full time, while older students have a mix of half in-person, half remote. So the decision to leave teachers off the priority list and vaccinate police officers and those in other professions ahead of them was a surprise to many educators.

Coronavirus infections have plummeted across England partly because of stringent lockdown measures, according to a new study released by Imperial College London.

The survey tested more than 85,000 volunteers over a week in February and is one of the largest so far to assess outbreak levels among the population.

According to the findings, coronavirus infections fell by more than two-thirds since January, with 1 in 196 people infected. Last month, 1 in 63 people were reported to have the virus. In London, cases dropped by 80 percent.

The reduction occurred in all ages and in most regions, suggesting the decline was the result of nationwide curbs on daily life, the study’s researchers said. Residents across England must stay at home and are allowed out only for activities such as exercise, medical appointments, religious worship or shopping for essentials.

While Britain has rolled out one of the fastest vaccination campaigns in the world, swiftly approving multiple injections to inoculate its population, the impact of the immunizations on the drop in infections so far remains unclear. The nation is also battling a highly transmissible variant of the virus, first identified in England’s southeast region.

“We do not yet know whether being vaccinated stops someone from passing the virus on to others,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in a statement Thursday. “It will also be some time before the impact of the vaccination program reduces pressure on hospitals.”

Both Hancock and the lead scientists warned that infection and hospitalization levels remained high and that residents should continue to practice social distancing and other public health protocols.

“These encouraging results show that lockdown measures are effectively bringing infections down. It’s reassuring that the reduction in numbers of infections occurred in all ages and in most regions across the country,” said Paul Elliott, director of the program at Imperial College.

“While the trends we’ve observed are good news, we need to all work to keep infections down by sticking to the measures which are designed to protect us and our health system,” he said.

Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, has said Americans can expect a return to normalcy by this fall. President Biden suggested on Tuesday that a better estimate for a return to the pre-pandemic normal would be Christmas.

Both goals come long after the end of July, when Biden promises there will be enough vaccine doses for every American, which is the benchmark that many people had believed would allow life to resume its normal course.

As the country approaches the one-year mark of the pandemic’s isolation and restrictions, the Biden administration is struggling to give precise, consistent answers to two key questions: When will the pandemic truly be behind us? And, short of that, when can children safely return to school?

Two of the most promising coronavirus vaccines recently showed reduced effectiveness against the more virulent virus strain first seen in South Africa, according to reports in the New England Journal of Medicine, but also appeared to mobilize enough of an antibody response to neutralize the pathogen.

Experts warned that it was still unclear what level of neutralization is required for protection against the variant, known as B.1.351, that is now the dominant strain in South Africa, and these studies were carried out in a lab setting rather than real life.

“These are in vitro studies and we don’t know if there is a threshold for neutralization that defines protection. In fact, we don’t even know that there is a quantitative correlation between antibodies levels and protection,” noted journal editor in chief, Eric Rubin, in a podcast commenting on the findings. “It is very concerning that we don’t know the clinical significance of these findings.”

The two reports posted Wednesday covered the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, drawing from studies using genetically engineered versions of the variant against blood samples from volunteers already inoculated against the virus.

The strain has been identified in multiple countries, along with a variant first identified in Britain that scientists say is also highly contagious.

In the case of Moderna, the company published a letter in the journal that included previously disclosed data showing a sixfold drop in antibody levels vs. the South Africa strain, Reuters reported. The shot’s efficacy against the variant has not yet been determined.

According to Pfizer, in testing its vaccine against the variant in a lab, the shot generated about a third of the antibodies that are normally mobilized with the original strain. The activity, however, appeared to be sufficient enough to neutralize the virus.

Still, Pfizer said in a statement Wednesday that it was “taking the necessary steps … to develop and seek authorization” for an updated vaccine or booster shot that could better combat the variant.

In Johannesburg, South African scientists planned to meet Thursday to discuss the Pfizer study, a Health Ministry spokesman told Reuters.

“I do know that our scientists will be meeting to discuss [the study] and they will advise the minister,” Reuters quoted spokesman Popo Maja as saying. “We are not going to be releasing a statement until advised by our scientists. We will also be guided by the regulator.”

Public schools in Prince George’s County will reopen for in-class learning in April, a month later than state officials had directed, under a plan announced Wednesday that could mean most employees who want the coronavirus vaccine will have it.

Students in Maryland’s second-largest school system will have been out of their classrooms more than a year amid a pandemic that hit the county particularly hard. Its cases — more than 71,400 since the crisis began — outnumber those in other Maryland counties.

When students go back, they will learn under a hybrid approach that combines in-person and virtual instruction, with two days a week on campus and three days online. Families may continue all-remote learning if they choose.

Monica E. Goldson, the school system’s chief executive, said in an interview that the plan comes as covid-19 trends are improving and that it makes student and staff safety a priority.

Bill Gates, 65, is an entrepreneur, philanthropist and self-described technologist. He co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with childhood friend Paul Allen and turned it into one of the largest companies in the world. With his wife, Melinda, he now co-chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on global health and development, and on education in the United States. One of the largest private charitable organizations in the world, their foundation has given out more than $50 billion in grants in 135 countries. Gates is also involved in a number of private-sector ventures to encourage innovation in the fields of health and climate change.

Released this month, his book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” details his own exploration of the causes and effects of climate change. In it, Gates offers a framework for avoiding climate catastrophe by attaining what he deems the necessary goal of moving from 51 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions released each year to net zero by 2050. Noting that the world “has never done anything quite this big,” Gates argues that breakthrough technologies must play a critical role in getting there.

Fran Goldman had spent weeks glued to her tablet and on the phone with her local health department before she was finally able to schedule a coronavirus vaccine appointment last weekend.

So when the 90-year-old woke up on Sunday to find 10 inches of snow covering the unplowed Seattle roads, she realized she had only two options: rescheduling her shot or trekking by foot for three miles.

She chose the latter.

“It absolutely had a happy ending,” Goldman told The Washington Post in an interview late Tuesday. “It was worth every soggy step.”

Although Goldman got a shot thanks to her persistence and a support network of family and friends, her case illustrates the significant hurdles that many seniors still face while searching for a dose of the coronavirus vaccine.

For months, school districts throughout the country have struggled with whether and how to reopen buildings that, in some cases, have been shuttered for nearly a year. With bullish talk and promised support, President Biden raised expectations that reopenings would accelerate this spring.

The stakes are enormous. Going back is frightening for many teachers and parents, especially with coronavirus rates remaining at high levels and new variants of the virus emerging. And yet the negative consequences of all-remote learning are significant, too. Children are forfeiting academic progress and struggling emotionally. Some parents are unable to work while their children are at home.

But sorting out the science of the matter has been complicated for administrators and parents. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weighed in last week with a detailed set of guidelines that answered many questions but raised others.

Life expectancy in the United States fell by a full year during the first half of 2020, a staggering decline that reflects the toll of the covid-19 pandemic as well as a rise in deaths from drug overdoses, heart attacks and diseases that accompanied the outbreak, according to government data released Thursday.

The last time life expectancy at birth dropped more dramatically was during World War II. Americans can now expect to live as long as they did in 2006, according to the provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics, a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Black and Latino Americans were hit harder than Whites, reflecting the racial disparities of the pandemic, according to the new analysis. Black Americans lost 2.7 years of life expectancy, and Latinos lost 1.9. White life expectancy fell 0.8 years.