More Americans to become eligible for vaccines and FEMA sites to open

The District of Columbia will not receive extra vaccine doses or assistance setting up a mass vaccination site from the federal government, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Friday, because the agency is targeting the most populous states in setting up clinics in high poverty neighborhoods.

FEMA acting administrator Robert J. Fenton Jr. acknowledged on a call with reporters Friday that the District has “high social vulnerability,” the measure of race and poverty that the agency has used to select sites that need mass vaccination clinics.

But Fenton said FEMA’s selection process for the 21 sites it has set up so far, and the additional 15 it plans to open, was based not just on its “social vulnerability index” but on population.

The agency started with the most populous states, opening sites in California, then Texas and Florida, and will continue to proceed by state size, Fenton said. That means the District — with a population smaller than all but two states — will not get this federal assistance.

Coronavirus cases in Maryland have ticked back upward in recent weeks, with the state on Friday reporting its highest seven-day average for new daily cases since Feb. 13.

The increase has prompted warnings from public health experts who say it is too soon for members of the public to let their guard down, despite a growing number of vaccinated residents and a recent loosening of capacity restrictions.

Hospitalizations and the statewide positivity rate are also trending upward in Maryland, with 4.64 percent of tests coming back positive as of Friday — up from a recent low of 3.28 on March 3.

A 5-percent positivity rate could signal that not enough testing is happening and that new cases are likely going undetected, said Neil J. Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.

As states expand coronavirus vaccine eligibility to include younger adults, universities are planning to inoculate students to make it safer to reopen fully by the fall.

Some schools are opening vaccine sites, with the goal of giving shots to every student on campus. Others are waiting for guidance from local officials and, in the meantime, urging students to get their doses wherever they can.

The hope, college leaders say, is to open the door for more students to reconvene safely in classrooms, residence halls and cafeterias next school year.

“Fall 2021 is going to look much more like the fall of 2019 than it did 2020,” said David Lakey, vice chancellor for health affairs and chief medical officer at the University of Texas System. “I’m hoping that at that time all the students that want to be vaccinated and all the faculty that want to be vaccinated will have that opportunity.”

Texas on Monday will begin vaccinating people over the age of 16. Officials at the University of Texas in Austin told students who want to receive their vaccines through the school to register online so they can begin to schedule appointments.

The Justice Department has charged 474 people over the past year with trying to swipe more than $569 million by using criminal fraud schemes connected to the coronavirus pandemic and seized at least $580 million in civil proceedings, officials announced Friday, demonstrating how taxpayer-funded programs meant to ease the economic burden of the crisis have become susceptible to scammers.

The department said it has seen fraud attempts connected to several government aid programs. The Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, for example, has charged at least 120 people in connection with fraud of the Paycheck Protection Program, a taxpayer-subsidized loan program regulated by the Small Business Administration, which has long been of concern because of how program funds were disbursed with relatively little oversight.

The department said it had also seen immense fraud in connection with the Economic Injury Disaster Loans program, and, along with the Secret Service and U.S. attorney’s office in Colorado, had seized $580 million of possibly stolen money from that program through administrative procedures. That money, authorities said, is separate from the funds explicitly tied to criminal charges.

Maryland lawmakers on Friday called on former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Robert Redfield to step down as a medical adviser to Gov. Larry Hogan, hours after an interview aired in which Redfield said he believed the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Redfield said his “personal opinion” was that it’s unlikely one of the most infectious viruses for humans leaped from bats to people at a wet market, and it seemed more plausible to him the virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory.

While there is no scientific consensus on how the deadly virus originated, the World Health Organization has called the laboratory theory “highly unlikely.”

Redfield’s endorsement on CNN of the so-called “lab-leak” theory of the virus’s origin outraged several state lawmakers, who saw his comments as exacerbating anti-Asian sentiment that has been on the rise since the outbreak began.

American tourists — chafing at social distancing rules, impatient over the rollout of coronavirus vaccines — are surging back to Cancún.

William Cruz can’t decide whether to welcome them, or worry about a new wave of coronavirus cases.

“Should gringos come here?” asked the father of two, who waits tables in the city’s popular tourist district.

He knows he needs them, desperately.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has encouraged Americans to avoid all travel to Mexico. More than 2 million coronavirus cases have been detected so far in the country, and Mexico has the third-highest covid-19 death toll in the world.

But with tourists who seem to want to keep partying, economic pressures make it hard for Cancún to contemplate turning visitors away.

People 16 and older will be eligible for immunization against the coronavirus in at least 15 states by the end of the month — a sign of rapidly expanding access to the shots as the nation confronts an uptick in infections.

More widespread availability is made possible by enlarged supply of the three authorized vaccines. The federal government is preparing to distribute as many as 35 million doses next week, according to a federal official. That includes 11 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine, which so far has been available to states and other jurisdictions in sharply limited quantities.

With ramped-up manufacturing, rationing is no longer required in many places. Kansas and Minnesota were two of the most recent states to unveil plans to open the floodgates, on Monday and Tuesday of next week respectively.

Six states have already removed eligibility requirements: Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, Utah and West Virginia. Those preparing to do so by the end of March also include Indiana, Louisiana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas.

At least 34 states have announced plans to make everyone 16 and older eligible by mid-April, according to a Washington Post review. And Jeff Zients, coordinator of the White House’s coronavirus response, said 46 states and D.C. had already made clear they would prioritize all adults by May 1 — the deadline set by President Biden.

He said opportunities for more Americans to be immunized signaled the program’s success. More than 71 percent of people 65 and older have received at least one shot, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

Zients acknowledged that some states were rapidly opening up eligibility because they have not been able to fill appointments among their most vulnerable populations, which includes elderly people and those with high-risk medical conditions.

“If there are states that are lagging behind, we’re working with those states to ensure they continue to prioritize the most vulnerable populations,” he said during a Friday briefing.

Health officials stressed that the accelerating pace of inoculations may not be sufficient to ward off another wave of infections. The latest seven-day average of daily cases, which stands at about 57,000, represents an increase of 7 percent from last week, said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. She warned of a “real potential for the epidemic curve to soar again.”

Following new federal guidance, Arlington Public Schools will switch from six to three feet of distance between students in classrooms — allowing the school division to place more children in face-to-face learning before the end of the year.

The three-feet paradigm will also enable Arlington to offer five days a week of in-person summer instruction and to better plan for five days a week of in-person learning this fall, Superintendent Francisco Durán told the school board at a meeting Thursday.

But the Northern Virginia school system of 27,000 will not add more days of in-person schooling per week before the end of this academic year, Durán said, because it would be too complicated logistically and would disrupt education for many. The majority of the roughly 15,000 Arlington students who have returned to classrooms this semester are heading to campus two days a week, although special-needs children are coming into classrooms four days a week.

With Thursday’s announcement, Arlington is stepping out ahead of some other school districts in Northern Virginia. Neither Alexandria City Public Schools nor Fairfax County Public Schools, the state’s largest district with 180,000 students, have said how they will respond to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s revisions.

Loudoun County Public Schools said it was switching to three feet of separation a few days before the CDC began recommending that distance.