Covid Dwell Updates: Florida Education Board Punishes School Districts Over Masks Mandates

The political battle in Florida over masks in schools escalated this week, as the state Board of Education voted to authorize sanctions on eight local school districts for not following instructions from Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration that make masks optional.

The eight districts, whose boards all voted to require masks in school buildings, could face cutbacks equal to their school board members’ salaries unless, according to the Tampa Bay Times, they show within 48 hours that they are in compliance with state orders. The districts are in Alachua, Brevard, Broward, Duval, Leon, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach Counties.

The measure was approved unanimously during a conference call meeting on Thursday by the State Board of Education, all of whose members are appointees by Republican governors. The vote came after superintendents from the eight districts argued their mask policies had been effective at curbing the spread of the virus.

After the vote, one of the superintendents, Alberto M. Carvalho of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, noted on Twitter there had been “no major outbreaks” in his district and that student cases had been declining after a spike in early September.

“We disagree with today’s State Board of Education’s recommendation and wholeheartedly believe that we are in compliance with law, reason, and science,” he said in a Twitter post.

But the state board said that the county school boards had “willingly and knowingly violated the rights of students and parents by denying them the option to make personal and private health care and educational decisions for their children.”

Masks in schools have become the center of a fiercely partisan debate in Florida, Texas, Arizona and other states whose Republican governors oppose mask mandates as an infringement on personal liberties. In late July, Governor DeSantis, a possible Republican presidential candidate, signed an executive order directing state officials to ensure parents have the power to decide whether children wear masks in school.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that all students, teachers and employees wear masks, regardless of their vaccination status. Most masks offer far more protection to others than to the person wearing them, dispersing the exhaled aerosols that carry the coronavirus in an infected person. So individual masking undermines the protection the masks offer.

President Biden, a Democrat, has openly criticized the Republican governors blocking local mask mandates, and the federal Department of Education has started investigating whether such policies in five states violate the civil rights of disabled students.

Lawsuits have also been filed in a number of states, including Florida, challenging bans on mask mandates. In late August, a federal judge said that Florida’s state constitution allowed school districts to impose strict mask mandates on students, handing Mr. DeSantis a defeat. The state asked an appellate court to reverse the ruling, which has been stayed temporarily pending a final decision.

On Thursday, the Florida school board maintained that a “parents’ bill of rights” enacted by state lawmakers earlier this year gave parents the sole right to decide if their children should wear masks. The board’s statement said that the law requires districts and schools to “protect parents’ right to make health care decisions such as masking of their children in relation to Covid-19.”

“Every school board member and every school superintendent has a duty to comply with the law, whether they agree with it or not,” the chairman of the state board, Tom Grady, said in the statement.

The Russian authorities have repeatedly delayed inspections by the European Union’s main drug regulator that are required for the approval of its Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine, the bloc’s ambassador to Russia told the country’s news media on Friday.

Moscow has criticized the bloc for not approving the vaccine’s use sooner, but the ambassador, Markus Ederer, said that the extended timeline was not politically motivated.

“The Russian side has repeatedly postponed the timing of the inspection requested by the E.M.A., which slows down the process,” Mr. Ederer told the local outlet RBC, referring to the European Medicines Agency. “These are the facts.”

Sputnik V has been approved for use in more than 70 countries, according to the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund that backed the vaccine’s development. But it has not been approved by the European regulator or the World Health Organization. That creates difficulties for Russians traveling to the European Union and to the United States.

Mr. Ederer pushed back against regular assertions by the Russian authorities that the lack of approval was political.

“This is a technical rather than a political process,” he said. “When Russian officials talk about the process being delayed and politicized by the European side, I sometimes think they are largely referring to themselves, because it is they who make this about politics.”

Russia’s health ministry said in a statement carried by the state news agency TASS on Friday that the European regulator had received the required documents by the end of September. E.M.A. officials could visit in December, it said.

Separately, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization said on Friday that the agency was “near” to resolving outstanding issues with certifying Sputnik V.

“We are slowly solving most of the issues,” the spokeswoman, Fadéla Chaib, said at a news briefing in Geneva, without elaborating on a timeline.

Russia’s health minister, Mikhail Murashko, said last week that all that remained for the W.H.O. certification was some paperwork. Once the United Nations agency receives all of the necessary data and inspects the production sites, it can schedule a meeting to validate a vaccine for an emergency-use listing.

In Russia, vaccine skepticism and nonchalance about the virus have led to climbing infection rates. On Friday, the country recorded a record 936 Covid deaths and 27,246 new infections.

A surge driven by the Delta variant is receding in the United States, but officials and experts say that increased transmission during the coming colder months remains a threat and that steady rates of vaccination are key to keeping the coronavirus at bay.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that about 56 percent of the U.S. population was fully vaccinated. Providers are administering an average of about 949,000 doses per day, including first, second and additional doses, far below the April peak but higher than the recent Sept. 28 low point of about 625,000, according to a New York Times database.

Surveys from the Kaiser Family Foundation show that vaccine support has been rising out of fear of the Delta variant: Almost 40 percent of newly inoculated respondents said they had sought the vaccines because of the rise in cases, and more than a third said they had become alarmed by overcrowding in local hospitals and rising death rates.

The number of people eligible for vaccinations could also soon increase substantially: Pfizer and BioNTech asked federal regulators on Thursday to authorize emergency use of their coronavirus vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, a move that could help protect more than 28 million people in the United States.

The companies say they are submitting data supporting the change to the Food and Drug Administration. The agency has promised to move quickly on the request and has tentatively scheduled a meeting on Oct. 26 to consider it. An F.D.A. ruling is expected as early as the end of this month.

Rupali Limaye, a behavior scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies vaccine hesitancy, said that parents’ getting their children aged 5 to 11 vaccinated would be a “huge game changer” because they represent a large proportion of population.

Vaccine mandates have also been taking effect recently, with federal workers and contractors, teachers, health care providers and others compelled to get immunized or risk losing their jobs. Such a requirement for New York teachers spurred thousands of last-minute vaccinations. Tyson Foods reported a 91 percent vaccination rate ahead of a November deadline, compared with less than half before its mandate was announced in August.

President Biden appealed on Thursday for more companies to mandate Covid vaccinations for employees, asking them to take initiative because an effort that he announced last month to require 80 million American workers to get the shot undergoes a rule-making process and may not go into effect for weeks.

A report released by the White House on Thursday sought to show how vaccine mandates had helped persuade more people to receive their shots: Seventy-eight percent of eligible adults have had at least a first dose.

As the country nears colder temperatures that will push many indoors, Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Stanford, said that the next few months would be critical, but that the combination of increased vaccinations and natural immunity from infections could prevent another catastrophic wave like the one that struck last year.

“Most of us don’t think we’re going to see the terrible surge we saw last winter,” she said. “That was horrific. I hope we never have to live through something like that again.”

While wealthier countries with higher coronavirus vaccination rates are increasingly reopening their borders and their economies, nations with more restricted vaccine access are having to make tougher moves.

In Mozambique, that has meant closing popular beaches this week over fears of spreading the virus, less than two weeks after they were cautiously reopened. The authorities fear that beaches along the Indian Ocean — which are at the center of the country’s tourism industry and its communal life — could become infection hot spots or encourage a lax attitude toward Covid-19 regulations.

Just 5 percent of Mozambique’s adult population is fully vaccinated against the virus, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the authorities have warned that life cannot yet return to normal, even as temperatures rise and summer approaches.

The Mozambican government announced the closure on Wednesday, immediately shuttering 18 beaches around the capital, Maputo, and in resort towns like Xai Xai and Tofo, for at least two weeks.

It’s a stark contrast with neighboring South Africa, which has the continent’s highest number of Covid-19 infections but has eased restrictions and kept its beaches open as vaccination rates climb steadily. Other popular Indian Ocean tourist destinations, like the islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles, have welcomed the return of tourists after successful vaccination campaigns.

Mozambique has recorded an average of just 30 daily coronavirus cases in the last seven days and no new Covid deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Still, the country, which has recorded 150,899 cases since the start of the pandemic, has enforced strict measures to keep infections low.

The authorities reopened the beaches on Sept. 23 as the country emerged from a third wave of infections, although the reopening came with a warning that the easing of restrictions did not mean the end of the pandemic. Officials continued to impose strict regulations on beaches in particular, banning the consumption of alcohol, gatherings and games, and imposing a 5 p.m. closing time.

Beachgoers were warned that flouting the rules would lead to swift action. And that came this week as a government spokesman, Filimão Suazi, announced the closing of some of Mozambique’s most popular beaches, blaming “bad behavior.”

Mozambique entered its third wave of infections earlier this year, with over 4,400 new cases reported in the first week of July. With only three doctors per 100,000 people, according to the U.S. Embassy in Mozambique, the country’s health facilities were strained. The authorities moved quickly to close schools, limit shopping times at markets and impose an overnight curfew.

England has reduced to just seven the number of “red list” countries that it considers the highest coronavirus risk and from which it requires travelers to quarantine in government-designated hotels upon arrival.

The change, announced on Thursday, removes 47 countries and territories from the list, including Afghanistan, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. Taking effect on Monday at 4 a.m. local time, it lifts a set of restrictions that have separated family members and thwarted business travel and vacations.

Residents and officials in restricted countries have in recent months called for the measures to be lifted as their infection numbers have fallen and vaccinations have risen. One online petition asking that Turkey be removed from the list gained nearly 49,000 signatures.

“We’re making it easier for families and loved ones to reunite, by significantly cutting the number of destinations on the red list, thanks in part to the increased vaccination efforts around the globe,” Grant Shapps, Britain’s transportation secretary, said in a statement.

The countries remaining on the list are all in Latin America or the Caribbean: Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Panama, Peru and Venezuela.

Fully vaccinated people arriving from countries not on the red list will no longer be required to take a coronavirus test before traveling to England, although they must still pay for a test on the second day after their arrival.

Unvaccinated people traveling from these destinations will still have to take a pre-departure test, plus tests on their second and eighth days after arriving, and will still be required to isolate for 10 days.

The changes followed an announcement this week that England’s three-tiered traffic light-inspired system was being reduced to a single “red list.” Testing and quarantine requirements for fully vaccinated arrivals were also eased.

Sajid Javid, Britain’s health secretary, cited what he called the country’s “phenomenal progress” in vaccination. Seventy-three percent of people in Britain have received a single dose, and 67 percent are fully vaccinated, according to figures collated by Our World in Data.

The latest coronavirus wave led to a second straight month of disappointing job growth in September, as Americans avoided restaurants and travel and were reluctant to rejoin the work force.

U.S. employers added 194,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said Friday. That was down from 366,000 in August and far below the more than one million jobs added in July, before the more contagious Delta variant led to a spike in coronavirus cases across much of the country. The leisure and hospitality sector, which had been a main driver of job growth before Delta emerged, added fewer than 100,000 jobs for the second straight month.

The unemployment rate fell to 4.8 percent, but that was partly a result of people leaving the labor force entirely — a sign that public health fears and other disruptions from Covid are still keeping people from looking for work.

“Employment is slowing when it should be picking up because we’re still on the course set by the virus,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist for the accounting firm Grant Thornton.

The data released on Friday was collected in mid-September, when the Delta wave was near its peak. Since then, cases and hospitalizations have fallen in much of the country, and more timely data from private-sector sources suggests that economic activity has begun to rebound. If those trends continue, job growth could approach its pre-Delta pace later this fall.

“This report is a glance in the rearview mirror,” said Daniel Zhao, an economist at the career site Glassdoor. “There should be some optimism that there should be a reacceleration in October.”

Nonetheless, the recent slowdown shows the economy’s continued vulnerability to the pandemic, and the challenges that will remain even once it is over. There are five million fewer people on U.S. payrolls than in February 2020, and 2.7 million people have been out of work for six months or more, the standard threshold for long-term unemployment. Yet the number of job openings is at a record high, and many employers report having a hard time filling positions.

Earlier this year, many economists and policymakers hoped that September would be the month when that logjam began to abate, as schools and offices reopened and expanded unemployment benefits ended. That easing hasn’t happened. The resurgence of the pandemic delayed office reopenings and disrupted the start of the school year, and made some people reluctant to accept jobs requiring face-to-face interaction. At the same time, preliminary evidence suggests that the cutoff in unemployment benefits has done little to push people back to work.

“I am a little bit puzzled to be honest,” said Aneta Markowska, chief financial economist for the investment bank Jefferies. “We all waited for September for this big flurry of hiring on the premise that unemployment benefits and school reopening would bring people back to the labor force. And it just doesn’t seem like we’re seeing that.”

Ms. Markowska said more people might begin to look for work as the Delta variant eases and as they burn through savings accumulated earlier in the pandemic. But some people have retired early or have found other ways to make ends meet and may be slow to return to the labor force, if they come back at all. That could have long-lasting economic effects, particularly if the recent slowdown in hiring persists.

In the meantime, employers are raising wages and offering other inducements to lure applicants. Average earnings rose 19 cents an hour in September and are up more than $1 an hour over the last year, after a series of strong monthly gains.

That, combined with benefits such as the child tax credit that have provided a financial cushion to low-income families, has arguably put workers in their strongest bargaining position in decades, said William M. Rodgers III, director of Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

“This period right now represents the first time in a long time where people feel they have some security,” Mr. Rodgers said. “And it’s probably, for many of them, an odd feeling, because they haven’t had it for a long time.”

Singapore will soon open its borders to fully vaccinated people arriving from the United States and South Korea without those travelers needing to quarantine, officials said on Thursday, as the country begins to cautiously reopen.

Under the plan, known as Vaccinated Travel Lanes, fully vaccinated people traveling between Singapore and those countries will subject only to Covid-19 PCR tests instead of quarantining, according to the transportation ministry. Those travelers will also have no restrictions on their purpose of travel and will not be required to have a controlled itinerary or sponsorship, the ministry said.

The change regarding South Korea takes effect on Nov. 15, according to the ministry. The plan with the United States will begin before the end of the year, The Straits Times reported, citing a speech by Gan Kim Yong, Singapore’s trade minister, in Washington on Thursday.

Email messages to the ministry seeking comment were not immediately returned on Friday.

The Vaccinated Travel Lanes are one of the biggest reopening steps being taken by Singapore, a major economic and transportation hub, after early successes in thwarting the coronavirus and then a sharp setback in controlling its spread.

Singapore was widely considered a success story in its initial handling of the pandemic, closing its borders, testing and tracing aggressively, and ordering vaccines early.

Singapore has now fully inoculated 83 percent of its population, and a top politician told the public in August that an 80 percent vaccination rate was the criterion for a phased reopening.

But in September, with cases doubling every eight to 10 days, the government reinstated restrictions on gatherings. The United States said its citizens should reconsider travel to the country, emergency departments in several Singapore hospitals were crowded, and people were once again told to work from home.

The country’s experience has become a sobering case study for other nations pursuing reopening strategies without having had to deal with large outbreaks in the pandemic. For Singapore residents, there were nagging questions about what it would take to reopen if vaccines were not enough.

For many, the repeated tweaks to the restrictions have taken a toll. The number of suicides in 2020 was the highest since 2012, a trend that some mental health experts have attributed to the pandemic.

Tesla will move its headquarters from California to Austin, Texas, the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, said on Thursday, a move that makes good on a threat that he issued more than a year ago when he was frustrated by coronavirus lockdown orders that forced Tesla to pause production at its factory in Fremont, Calif.

Mr. Musk was an outspoken early critic of pandemic restrictions, calling them “fascist” and predicting in March 2020 that there would be almost no new cases of virus infections by the end of April. In December, he said he had moved himself to Texas to be near the company’s new factory.

His other company, SpaceX, launches rockets from the state.

“There’s a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area,” Mr. Musk said at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday, adding that high housing prices there translated to long commutes for some employees.

The company’s Texas factory, which is near Austin and will manufacture Tesla’s Cybertruck, is minutes from downtown and from an airport, he said.

Tesla is one of several California companies to say they were moving to Texas in recent months. Hewlett Packard Enterprise said in December that it was moving to the Houston area, and Charles Schwab has moved to a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth.

Tesla is on track to sell about a million cars this year and is planning a major expansion. In addition to the Austin factory, Tesla is building one near Berlin. Its headquarters have been in Palo Alto for more than a decade.

The unexpected drop in hiring in September may have been a result of quirks in the way the government reports the data. But the broader recent slowdown is no statistical fluke — the rise of the Delta variant has clearly taken a toll on the economy.

The Labor Department said on Friday that government employment fell by 123,000 jobs in September, with most of the losses coming in education.

But public schools didn’t actually lay off tens of thousands of teachers, custodians and other workers. That figure is seasonally adjusted, meaning that it tries to account for predictable annual patterns in hiring and firing. One of the most predictable patterns of all: Schools hire lots of workers in September, and lay them off in June and July.

The pandemic, however, has disrupted those patterns. Early in the pandemic, many schools laid off workers earlier than usual. This year, some schools started hiring earlier than usual, meaning they also did less hiring in September than in most years. (Another possible factor: Many school districts have reported having difficulty hiring bus drivers and other workers, which could be holding down job growth.)

On an unadjusted basis, the government actually added close to 900,000 workers in September. Because that’s fewer than in a typical September, the seasonal adjustment formula interprets it as a loss in jobs.

Seasonal adjustment can help explain why job growth was weaker in September than in August, but it can’t explain why job growth in the last two months has been weaker than in the spring and early summer. That slowdown is real, and it reflects the impact of the Delta variant.

Employers in leisure and hospitality, one of the sectors hit hardest by the pandemic, added hundreds of thousands of jobs per month from February through July, as restaurants reopened and Americans began traveling more. But the sector added just 38,000 jobs in August and 74,000 in September.

Overall, private sector job growth has slowed to a pace of a bit above 300,000 a month over the last two months, from more than 800,000 a month in June and July.

Job growth in sectors less affected by the pandemic was relatively strong in September, however. Construction companies, manufacturers and retailers all added jobs, suggesting that the effects of the latest virus wave have been fairly contained.

San Francisco plans to ease face-mask requirements in limited settings, health officials said on Thursday. The change, set to take effect on Oct. 15, is dependent on coronavirus cases and hospitalization rates remaining stable or declining.

In settings such as offices, gyms, fitness centers, religious gatherings and college classes, people will be permitted to remove their mask if everyone present is vaccinated and their status has been verified. The new rule applies only to gatherings that do not exceed 100 people.

The employer or host is also required to ensure proper ventilation, verify that there have been no recent Covid-19 outbreaks and make sure that no children under 12 are present, among other safety measures.

California is among the states with the lowest number of newly reported coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents, according to a New York Times database. In San Francisco County, 74 percent of residents age 12 and older are fully vaccinated.

“I’m excited that we’re once again at a place where we can begin easing the mask requirements, which is the direct result of the fact that we have one of the highest vaccination rates in the country, our cases have fallen, and our residents have done their part to keep themselves and those around them safe,” said Mayor London Breed.

Ms. Breed called the eased restrictions “yet another milestone in our recovery” and said that “the City feels like it is coming alive again” on Twitter.

Indoor mask mandates remain in place for most other public settings, including retail stores and other common areas like building elevators, lobbies and restrooms, and masks continue to be required at bars and restaurants except when patrons are eating or drinking.

Proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test has been required to go indoors at bars, restaurants, clubs, gyms and large indoor events in San Francisco since late August.

“Vaccines continue to be our path out of the pandemic, but masks have blunted the Delta-driven surge and protected our vital hospital capacity, while allowing businesses to remain open and children to return to school,” said Dr. Susan Philip, the city and county’s health officer.

For many college students, the pandemic’s arrival did more than disrupt their studies, threaten their health and shut down campus life. It also closed off the usual paths that lead from the classroom to jobs after graduation. Campus recruiting visits were abandoned, and the coronavirus-induced recession made companies pull back from hiring.

But this year seniors and recent graduates are in great demand as white-collar employers staff up, with some job-seekers receiving multiple offers.

The demand for college students at this stage of the pandemic — when overall U.S. employment remains more than five million jobs below the level in early 2020 — underscores the longstanding economic premium for people with a college education over holders of just a high school diploma.

The unemployment rate for all workers with a college degree stood at 2.8 percent in August, compared with 6 percent for high school graduates with no college.

What’s more, the spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus has been a one-two punch for those lacking a college degree, hitting the sectors they depend on the most, like restaurants and bars, hotels and retail businesses.