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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.