Biden said he will meet goal of 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days on Friday

Over each of the past five days, the most important conversation for Virginia men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett has had nothing to do with strategy, even with the fourth-seeded Cavaliers scheduled to open the NCAA tournament Saturday night.

Bennett instead has waited impatiently to hear from head athletic trainer Ethan Saliba, who provides him with the results of players’ coronavirus tests. The days have been marked by unease and then relief, with no new positives since one undisclosed player tested positive the morning after Virginia won in Thursday’s ACC quarterfinals.

That left some doubt as to whether participating in the NCAA tournament was even viable, but after consulting with NCAA officials, the Cavaliers (18-6) learned that if at least five players tested negative for seven consecutive days, then they would be cleared to face 13th-seeded Ohio in the West Region.

Google will spend billions this year on new offices, doubling down on a return to in-person work as other companies consider a future where working from home is the norm.

The tech giant will spend $7 billion on new offices and expanding data centers, including adding offices in Texas, North Carolina and Minnesota. In its home state of California, the company will spend $1 billion, and plans to complete and open a giant new campus in Silicon Valley that’s been under construction for years.

Google was one of the first major U.S. companies to send its workers home in March 2020 as covid-19 began to spread rapidly across the U.S. It now plans to bringing employees back to the office in September 2021, but unlike Facebook and Twitter, it hasn’t given workers the option of working remotely permanently.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, 13-year-old Madilyn “Maddie” Dayton played volleyball and basketball and ran track. She attended in-person school — and still had plenty of energy left over to race around her small town of Cokeville, Wyo., with friends.

Today, more than six months after being infected with the virus, she’s struggling with lingering effects of her illness.

While doctors recently cleared her for limited physical activity, Maddie estimates she can do only about half of what she used to do. Even Zoom school can be too much some days.

Cases of children with persistent symptoms after covid-19 are rare but growing, doctors say, unnerving parents and physicians who are tracking the often strange and fluctuating constellation of symptoms. On Facebook support groups and other social media, families describe their struggles to be taken seriously and express frustration that basic scientific knowledge is lacking about what is going on.

Daniel Stokes breathed a sigh of relief when he got his first coronavirus vaccine. Then he panicked: After a year in loungewear and pajamas, what would he wear when life resumed?

He went online and spent $450 on jeans, shirts, cardigans and boots to tide him over until he figures out what else he’ll need. Aside from a few pandemic splurges — it was his first shopping spree in more than a year. “It was like a switch went off and I realized, oh my goodness, I have to go back into the world,” said Stokes, 31, a senior manager for an upscale luggage company, who has been working out of his Brooklyn apartment for the past year.

Consumers are buying — or at least browsing for — clothing and shoes again, signaling growing optimism as life begins inching toward normal. Madewell and Anthropologie are seeing a resurgence in dress sales, while Bonobos reports rising demand for suits, dress shirts and tuxedos. Other retailers say they’ve noticed growing interest in trendy tops, wide-leg jeans, even resort wear and swimsuits, as Americans prepare to head back to the office, book summer vacations and make other post-vaccination plans.

The revived interest in apparel could be an early hint of the burst of spending that many economists expect to take hold as the country approaches herd immunity more quickly than anticipated and savings rates surge to new highs.

The Prime Ministers of France and Britain, Jean Castex and Boris Johnson, said they will get the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot on Friday, as European governments are seeking to boost trust in the vaccine following its week-long suspension across many parts of the continent. Speaking at a press conference, Castex said his vaccination with the AstraZeneca product is intended to "show that we can have complete confidence.

”Denmark and Norway were among the first countries to suspend the vaccine last week after reports of blood clots as possible side effects. Larger nations like France and Germany followed this week, even as British authorities saw no reason to suspend vaccinations.

Europe’s medical regulator EMA analyzed the reports and concluded Thursday that the AstraZeneca vaccine is “safe and effective. ”Several European countries that had suspended vaccinations are now set to resume them, including France and Italy on Friday. But health officials worry that the abrupt halt in vaccinations may have disrupted public confidence in the shot at a critical time when Europe faces a worsening third wave of the virus.

”The Oxford jab is safe and the Pfizer jab is safe – the thing that isn’t safe is catching covid – which is why it’s so important that we all get our jabs as soon as our turn comes,” Johnson said Thursday, as he announced that he would get the AstraZeneca shot on Friday.

When a Bahraini prince flew to Nepal to climb Mount Everest this week, he didn’t show up empty-handed: Among his cargo were some 2,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine, according posts on his climbing team’s Instagram account.

It quickly became evident that the gesture, intended as a munificent gift for a remote mountain village, would turn out to be more of an international faux pas.

Nepal bans drug imports without permission, and health officials there said they had no idea that Sheikh Mohamed Hamad Mohamed al-Khalifa planned to carry out his own small-scale vaccination campaign. Taken by surprise, regulators are now investigating the breach of protocols, and have yet to make a decision on whether the doses can be used.

Pressing the case for immunization as the best way to fend off new variants of the coronavirus, President Biden said Thursday the nation would surpass his goal of administering 100 million shots in his first 100 days on Friday — more than 40 days early.

The goal, which seemed ambitious when it was announced before distribution had begun in December, quickly became mismatched with the pace of inoculations. Already in January a million shots were reliably being administered each day. The daily average has reached about 2.5 million, Biden said in brief remarks delivered from the East Room.

The president said he would announce a new goal for vaccine administration next week. All told, more than 115 million shots have been administered since distribution began last year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Data. More than 65 percent of people 65 and older have received at least one dose.

The accelerating pace of inoculations suggests most states will have no trouble meeting a May 1 deadline set last week by Biden for all adults to become eligible for immunization. Two states, Alaska and Mississippi, have already made everyone 16 and older eligible, and officials in numerous other places have said they will remove eligibility requirements sooner than May 1.

As supply ramps up of all three authorized vaccines, the Biden administration has promised enough doses to cover everyone by the end of May. Actually carrying out the immunizations, especially with two-dose protocols, will likely take longer.

But Biden sounded a note of urgency, saying several states were seeing increased caseloads and warning that the spread of more transmissible variants threatened to undo progress. “Getting vaccinated is the best thing we can do to fight back against these variants,” he said.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex on Thursday announced that Paris and several other parts of the country will enter a new lockdown Friday night, as the more transmissible coronavirus variant first identified in Britain is prompting a surge in hospitalizations.

The lockdown measures are expected to be in place for four weeks, Castex said during a news conference. During that time, travel from regions under lockdown will be restricted, and nonessential businesses will be closed in the impacted areas.

But the regional measures are not as far-reaching as during the country’s first nationwide lockdown last spring: Schools will remain open, and there will be no limits on how much time people can spend outdoors. A nighttime curfew will remain in place, however.

The number of new coronavirus cases in the French capital region has surged sharply in recent weeks to now over 400 new cases per 100,000 people over seven days — more than three times higher than the current U.S. rate.

Still, the French government long resisted another lockdown. As the country prepares for a presidential election next year, President Emmanuel Macron increasingly signaled empathy for the adverse impacts on mental health and the economy.

To avoid having to impose another lockdown, France sought to speed up vaccinations in recent weeks, deploying additional vaccine doses to hot spots, including to the Paris region — the economic heart of the country where almost a fifth of the French population lives.

But France’s efforts to ramp up vaccinations — still hampered by a supply crunch and public weariness of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine — may have been too little, too late. France has administered only around 11 vaccine doses per 100 people, compared with over 34 in the United States.