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Federal health officials on Wednesday bolstered their recommendation that pregnant people be vaccinated against Covid-19, pointing to new safety data that found no increased risk of miscarriage among those who were immunized during the first 20 weeks of gestation.
Earlier research found similarly reassuring data for those vaccinated later in pregnancy.
Until now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said the vaccine could be offered during pregnancy; the recent update in guidance strengthens the official advice, urging pregnant people to be immunized.
The new guidance brings the C.D.C. in line with recommendations made by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other medical specialty groups, which strongly recommend vaccination.
“At this time, the benefits of vaccination, and the known risks of Covid during pregnancy and the high rates of transmission right now, outweigh any theoretical risks of the vaccine,” Sascha R. Ellington, an epidemiologist who leads the emergency preparedness response team in the division of reproductive health at the C.D.C.
The risks of having Covid-19 during a pregnancy are well-established, she said, and include severe illness, admission to intensive care, needing mechanical ventilation, having a preterm birth and death.
So far, there is limited data on birth outcomes, she added, since the vaccine has only been available since December. But the small number of pregnancies followed to term have not identified any safety signals.
Pregnant women were not included in the clinical trials of the vaccines, and uptake of the shots has been low among pregnant women. The majority of pregnant women seem reluctant to be inoculated: Only 23 percent of pregnant women had received one or more doses of vaccine as of May, a recent study found.
Dr. Adam Urato, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Framingham, Mass., who counsels patients about the vaccine almost daily, said pregnant women are very wary of exposure to synthetic chemicals and want more solid scientific evidence that the vaccines are safe.
“The one question my patients ask me all the time is, are we absolutely sure that these vaccines won’t affect my baby?” he said.
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Schoolteachers and school staff in California must have proof of vaccination against Covid-19 or else face weekly testing, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Wednesday, making the state the first in the nation to make the move.
“We think it’ll be well-received to keep our most precious resource healthy and safe,” he said, “and that’s our children.”
The new policy — which applies to both public and private school staff members serving students in kindergarten through 12th grade — will go into effect on Thursday, with the deadline for full compliance being Oct. 15.
The announcement comes as such mandates are gaining momentum among both public and private employers as cases across the United States have jumped amid the spread of the Delta variant. Several localities in California have renewed mask restrictions, including Los Angeles County.
Many large companies, including Google, Disney, Tyson Foods and Microsoft, have announced some vaccination requirements for workers who would be returning to offices and plants.
While California officials initially emphasized they were merely encouraging everyone to get vaccinated, the governor announced late last month that the state would require health care workers and state government employees to be inoculated or be tested at least weekly.
Last week, state health officials made the requirement even more stringent for many, largely removing the testing option for more than two million health care workers in the state.
But it wasn’t clear then whether California would extend a mandate to hundreds of thousands of educators, who are in the midst of a fraught back-to-school season after roughly a year of remote instruction.
Over the weekend, Randi Weingarten, the head of the powerful American Federation of Teachers, expressed her strongest support to date for mandatory vaccination of educators against Covid, saying on Sunday that she would urge her union’s leadership to reconsider its position against vaccine mandates.
“It’s not a new thing to have immunizations in schools,” Ms. Weingarten said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “And I think that on a personal matter, as a matter of personal conscience, I think that we need to be working with our employers, not opposing them, on vaccine mandates.”
On Tuesday, Oakland Unified School District officials announced that all teachers and staff members — including contractors and volunteers — must be vaccinated or be tested weekly in order to be on campus.
Speaking at Wednesday’s news conference in front of a colorful mural, Dr. Kyla Johnson-Trammell, the district’s superintendent, said the vaccines were critical “to make sure our schools and our communities are safe.”
Public school officials in Long Beach and San Francisco also announced similar mandates just ahead of the state.
For Mr. Newsom, getting children safely back into classrooms is a task with particularly high stakes. Next month, the state’s voters will be asked whether they want to recall the governor from office, and frustration among parents over prolonged school closures has been a significant driver of support for his ouster.
On Wednesday, the governor was flanked by local elected officials who drew an explicit contrast between the pandemic response led by Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, and those of other states where conservative leaders have, in recent weeks, sought to block vaccine mandates and masking requirements.
“As I was driving here this morning, I was hearing news from Florida about a governor who is literally going to punish educators who are doing what is right,” said Mayor Libby Schaaf of Oakland, referring to a new state rule meant to counter local school mask mandates that has been touted by Florida’s governor, a Republican. “I know this is not a political press conference, but I cannot miss an opportunity to say that if Californians do not participate in the special election coming up, this could be our fate as well.”
Schools were closed longer in California than in many other states in large part because of a brutal winter surge, but also because of protracted negotiations with the state’s large, powerful teachers unions, who demanded extensive safety precautions, including priority access to vaccine doses.
On Wednesday, the president of the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union and an affiliate of the National Education Association, said in a statement that it supported the vaccine mandate.
“Educators want to be in classrooms with their students, and the best way to make sure that happens is for everyone who is medically eligible to be vaccinated, with robust testing and multitiered safety measures,” the union president, E. Toby Boyd, said, adding that the testing alternative is appropriate for educators who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons.
Becky Zoglman, a spokeswoman for the association, said that surveys have shown that about 90 percent of the union’s some 310,000 members have already been inoculated.
Students and educators are already required to wear masks inside schools.
But Mr. Newsom once again urged all Californians who haven’t been vaccinated to get their shots.
“The one thing that could end this pandemic once and for all is available in abundance,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s a more damn patriotic thing you can do on behalf of yourself and your community.”
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Two court rulings on Tuesday cleared the way for local leaders who oppose a ban by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, on mask mandates to at least temporarily require face coverings to help curb a rise in coronavirus cases.
The first ruling came in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio. Masks can now be required in public schools and other public buildings there.
Masks will also be required for county and city employees, said Andy Segovia, the city attorney for San Antonio. The chief executive of Bexar County, Judge Nelson W. Wolff, said that the ruling was important because many students who are too young to be vaccinated would otherwise be coming back to school with no protection.
The second ruling was delivered by a district judge in Dallas County who said the ban prevented officials from protecting residents during an emergency.
“Dallas County citizens will be irreparably harmed” if local leaders cannot require face coverings to stop the transmission of the virus, the judge, Tonya Parker, wrote in the ruling.
In light of the decision, Clay Jenkins, the county’s chief elected official, said he planned to issue an emergency order on Wednesday.
Dallas and San Antonio now join Austin, Fort Worth and Houston in instituting mask mandates in schools. That means the state’s five largest cities are defying Mr. Abbott’s ban for schools.
On Tuesday, Texas recorded 20,000 new virus cases, nearly double the number of cases as two weeks ago, according to a New York Times database.
Some hospitals in the state are nearing capacity and are bracing for an influx of patients. The intensive care unit at Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital in Houston is at full capacity, and 63 percent of those patients are Covid cases, CNN reported.
While Mr. Abbott remains unmoved as one of the most strident opponents of mask mandates, he did put some restrictions in place in March 2020, such as limiting social gatherings to 10 people and closing some businesses, like gyms. Those that remained open operated at a limited capacity. Last July, as cases surged across Texas, he enacted a mask mandate.
The state lifted the mandate this past March, citing the presence of vaccine.
This week the governor appeared to acknowledge the growing burden on the health care system. He directed the state Health Department to find additional health care workers from outside Texas to provide reinforcements for overwhelmed hospitals statewide. He also sent a letter to the Texas Hospital Association telling hospitals to postpone elective medical procedures.
President Biden has recently criticized the governors of Texas and Florida, two states where virus cases have risen particularly sharply, for their pandemic response.
“I say to these governors, please, if you aren’t going to help, at least get out of the way for people who are doing the right thing,” he said at a news conference last week. On Tuesday, he encouraged people to get vaccinated as part of their preparation for hurricane and wildfire seasons.
Mr. Biden singled out Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi as states with low vaccination rates that are also more at risk from hurricanes.
On Tuesday, a temporary mask mandate for students, staff members and visitors to public schools in Dallas went into effect.
Brendan Steinhauser, a consultant who lives in a Republican-leaning suburb of Austin, said the rising number of cases had led more people to wear masks.
“It is palpable,” he said of his neighbors’ mask-wearing attitude. “I noticed it and it was like, ‘Whoa.’”
Correction: An earlier version of this item misspelled the surname of Bexar County’s chief executive. He is Judge Nelson W. Wolff, not Wolf.
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As the Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads in the United States, some counties are reopening community testing sites that they shuttered last spring, when case counts were falling and attention was shifting to vaccination.
The demand for testing has been rising over the last month. By the end of July, an average of nearly 900,000 coronavirus tests were being performed daily, compared with 500,000 to 600,000 a day earlier in the month, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Several factors are likely responsible for the increase, including the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant, as well as new mandates that require unvaccinated people to take frequent tests. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also recently changed its guidance for vaccinated people, recommending that they be tested if they are exposed to the virus, even if they don’t have any symptoms.
Testing has been a trouble spot for the United States since the start of the pandemic. A flawed test, regulatory red tape and supply shortages initially led to hourslong lines at testing sites and dayslong waits for results.
Officials eventually ironed out some of these kinks and when infections were soaring last year, government-run mass testing sites, offering free virus tests to all comers, sprang up all over the country. Some delays and problems persisted, however, even as capacity increased.
When the vaccines were authorized, many of the large testing sites were converted into vaccination sites and some shut down entirely. Virus testing largely shifted to the private sector — to local pharmacies and commercial labs, for instance.
“There are far fewer testing sites, public testing sites, than existed six months ago,” said Mara Aspinall, an expert in biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University. “So that to me is a concern.”
After residents began reporting a three-day wait for testing appointments at pharmacies in Hillsborough County, Fla., the county opened two free, walk-in testing sites last weekend. Officials had planned to administer about 500 tests a day at each site and ended up performing almost twice that many, said Kevin Watler, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Health.
“It was very, very busy,” he said. “So the demand is certainly there.”
Many other testing sites are springing up across Florida, where the virus is surging, as well as across the country. In California, San Diego County added five new test sites last week after an increase in traffic at its existing sites, officials said.
Other localities are expanding the hours at testing sites or deploying pop-up testing clinics, and some are combining their testing and vaccination services. Last week, Delaware’s Division of Public Health announced that it would begin offering tests at its vaccination sites, and a new drive-through testing and vaccination site opened in New Orleans.
“As we experience the fourth and most severe surge of Covid-19 in Louisiana, we must take a multipronged approach to combat the virus,” Dr. Jennifer Avegno, the director of the New Orleans Health Department, said in a statement. “Masking slows the spread, testing identifies cases and pandemic trends, and vaccines prevent hospitalizations and deaths. It only makes sense to co-locate these resources so that residents can access the tools they need to stay safe in one stop.”
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Recovery in some of the world’s major economies appears to be slowing down as people spooked by the Delta variant spend less, travel less and dine out less, according to new report by the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, the research and policy group of the world’s richest countries.
In recent months, as vaccination rates increased globally, optimism that life appeared to be returning to normal helped spur consumer spending from Ohio to Paris to Beijing.
But that renewed sense of confidence may be ebbing amid news of breakout infections, lockdowns and other requirements. In countries like France and Italy, people now need health passes — paper or digital proof of being fully vaccinated, a recent negative test or recent Covid-19 recovery — to attend big concerts and to enter cinemas, museums and theaters.
The O.E.C.D., a Paris-based organization, looked at economic indicators including employment, retail sales, manufacturing output and wage growth in 38 member countries. It said the indicators suggested that growth in major economies like the United States and China may be slowing down, with similar signs of sputtering in Europe, including in Britain, France and Germany.
The group said that there might be higher than usual fluctuations in how economic recoveries are playing out because of persistent uncertainties, “despite the gradual lifting of Covid-19 containment measures in some countries and the progress of vaccination campaigns.”
The report also said that growth was slowing in Russia and Brazil, where the pandemic has buffeted society and industry. In Brazil, millions have gone hungry in recent months, with scenes of undernourished teenagers holding placards at traffic stops with the word hunger in large print.
China, a manufacturing powerhouse, has played a leading role in an upward global economic trend. But some economists say that its growth has started to level off in recent months and that the government’s tougher pandemic restrictions could undermine it.
There have been some cautiously encouraging signs, however. Since the pandemic recession bottomed out in the United States in the spring of 2020, the nation’s economic output has been resilient, with second-quarter output 0.8 percent higher than before coronavirus.
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American parents of school-age children are more supportive of school mask requirements than mandatory coronavirus vaccines, according to a new survey. It found that nearly two-thirds of those parents want schools to insist on masks for students, teachers and staff members who do not have their shots.
The survey, released on Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, offers a window into the thinking of U.S. parents at the outset of another complicated school year. Debates over mask mandates are raging, the Biden administration is making a push for young people to get inoculated, and the Delta variant is sending more young people to the hospital with Covid-19.
The survey found that 63 percent of parents wanted masks required in schools for people who are unvaccinated. But parents’ views about vaccinating their children are complicated, the survey found, and tend to fall along the partisan lines that have shaped the discussion around vaccinating adults.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in May for use in people aged 12 and older. But more than half of the parents of school-age children said they still did not think schools should require it.
The Kaiser research, part of an ongoing study of public attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccination, is based on a nationally representative sample of 1,259 parents with a child under 18 in their household. Conducted July 15 to Aug. 2, it found that one in five parents of children ages 12 to 17 said their child would “definitely not” get vaccinated.
“Despite controversy around the country about masks in schools, most parents want their school to require masks of unvaccinated students and staff,” Drew Altman, the foundation’s chief executive, said in a statement. “At the same time, most parents don’t want their schools to require their kids get a Covid-19 vaccine despite their effectiveness in combating Covid-19.”
School officials around the country say they are deeply concerned about their ability to keep classrooms open this year, and many schools are promoting vaccination and even running vaccination clinics. But persuading parents to vaccinate their children is an uphill battle, educators say.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that just 30 percent of students ages 12 to 15 are fully vaccinated; the rate is 80 percent among U.S. adults over 65.
“The biggest challenge is just making sure that folks are understanding that the vaccines are safe and that the vaccines mitigate the effects” of Covid-19, said Raymond C. Hart, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban school districts.
The Kaiser study reflected that challenge. An overwhelming majority — 88 percent — of parents whose children were unvaccinated said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that not enough is known about the long-term effects of Covid-19 vaccines in children, and 79 percent expressed concern about serious side effects.
Nearly three-quarters of the parents said they worried the vaccines could hurt their child’s fertility, even though the C.D.C. has found no evidence of that.
Attitudes toward vaccination broke down along racial, ethnic and partisan lines.
Hispanic and Black parents were more likely than white parents to cite concerns that reflect access barriers to inoculation, including not being able to get a vaccine from a trusted place or believing that they might have to pay for it. The survey found that about two-thirds of Democratic parents favored mask and vaccine mandates, while more than three-quarters of Republicans opposed them.
When it comes to our children and Covid, we have more questions than answers. How will new variants affect them? How will they go back to school safely? Join Dr. Anthony Fauci and Times journalists (who are parents themselves) for a vital Q&A session for parents, educators and students everywhere.
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The World Health Organization is testing three additional drugs as part of an enormous global trial to find effective treatments for Covid-19, the agency announced on Wednesday.
The trial, which involves researchers at more than 600 hospitals in 52 countries, will evaluate whether the drugs that have already been approved for other uses — one for malaria, one for cancer and one for autoimmune diseases — can reduce the risk of death in patients who are hospitalized with Covid.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O., said Wednesday that he hoped that “one or more of the drugs” would prove effective in treating the virus.
Although there are already some treatments available for people with Covid-19, including steroids and monoclonal antibodies, Dr. Tedros said, “We need more for patients at all ends of the clinical spectrum.”
The first phase of the W.H.O.’s trials for new drugs, which it called Solidarity, yielded disappointing results. Researchers found that four different drugs, including hydroxychloroquine and the antiviral drug remdesivir, had few or no benefits for hospitalized Covid patients.
The three drugs in the new trial, called Solidarity Plus, were selected by an independent panel of experts and are being donated by their manufacturers, Ipca, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson. The drugs are artesunate, an antimalarial drug that may have an anti-inflammatory effect; imatinib, an anticancer drug that might help reverse lung damage; and infliximab, a drug for autoimmune disorders that might help tamp down an overly aggressive immune response to the virus.
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After a nurse admitted to replacing the contents of a Covid vaccine vial with a saline solution in a small German inoculation center in April, the local authorities said on Tuesday that she might have systematically substituted vaccines for saline solution over a period of weeks while working at the center.
The authorities are now asking all 8,557 people who were jabbed during the nurse’s working hours to return for third, and in some rare cases fourth, jabs as a precautionary measure. She worked at the center, near the town of Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea coast, for seven weeks in March and April.
Although the saline solution itself is harmless, anyone injected with it would have missed out on the protection of a Covid vaccine.
“It is quite deceitful to sneak into a vaccination center with the intention to do something like that,” Heiger Scholz, who leads the Lower Saxony coronavirus task force, said at a news conference on Tuesday.
He said there were indications that the nurse might be against vaccines.
A police investigation found that the nurse had shared social media posts criticizing the government’s pandemic restrictions.
The criminal investigation is focusing on accusations that the nurse’s switching of the initial vial resulted in saline solution being injected instead of six vaccine doses. But the police now say there is a credible chance that the nurse intentionally substituted vaccines on other occasions while working in the laboratory of the Friesland vaccination center. She was responsible for preparing vaccine syringes.
Officials have not said whether they plan charge her with any crime. A lawyer representing the nurse told the German news service DPA that she had switched just one vial.
The nurse, who has not been charged with any offense, admitted in April that she had refilled a broken Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine vial with a saline solution, in an episode that she described as an accident.
Unable to pinpoint exactly which vials had been compromised in April, the authorities invited 117 people to take antibody tests. They also offered additional vaccine shots to another 80 who had been to the center for second doses.
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A rise in coronavirus cases brought on by the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant has pushed companies to grapple with vaccine mandates and delayed returns to the office.
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McDonald’s said Wednesday that it would require U.S.-based office workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. The requirement does not apply to employees of McDonald’s restaurants, whether corporate-owned or franchised.
The company said it would push back its official office reopening to Oct. 11 from Sept. 7 to allow time for vaccinations. In addition, the company said U.S.-based office workers must wear masks when they are not eating, drinking or alone in an enclosed room. The news was shared with employees in an internal memo obtained by The New York Times.
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Capital One said that it would require all employees returning to the office to prove that they are vaccinated.
“Unvaccinated associates should continue to work from home and will be supported in doing so,” the bank’s chief executive, Rich Fairbank, said in a memo to employees. Mr. Fairbank said that policy would be in place through at least the first three months of 2022.
Capital One will also push back its return-to-office date to Nov. 2 from early September.
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The New York Stock Exchange said that starting Sept. 13, anyone entering the iconic trading floor will need to be fully vaccinated. The Big Board is also expanding its random testing program to include vaccinated brokers and exchange employees who work on the floor, effective immediately, according to a memo from Michael Blaugrund, the N.Y.S.E.’s chief operating officer. The moves are “based on recent shifts in public health conditions as well as updated recommendations from federal, state and local authorities,” according to the memo.
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All Amtrak employees must be fully vaccinated by Nov. 1, the rail service’s chief executive, Bill Flynn, said Wednesday in a companywide memo. Those who do not provide documentation will be required to be tested weekly for the coronavirus. In addition, all new hires as of Oct. 4 must be vaccinated to start work.
The return to work sites has been extended to Nov. 1, and masks are required in all facilities, including offices, the company said.
Vaccine mandates are legally allowed and have been held up in court challenges. But for various reasons, not all employers have applied blanket requirements. Here is how some companies are approaching them:
4 Different Return-to-Work Approaches
Lauren HirschReporting on back-to-office policies 💼
4 Different Return-to-Work Approaches
Lauren HirschReporting on back-to-office policies 💼
James Estrin/The New York Times
Companies have mandated vaccines for their workers as the highly contagious Delta variant has driven a surge in coronavirus cases. But not all of these mandates look the same.
Here’s what some companies are doing →
4 Different Return-to-Work Approaches
Lauren HirschReporting on back-to-office policies 💼
JPMorgan Chase encourages, but does not require, vaccinations.
Until recently, this approach was the default. Companies have offered incentives for vaccination, such as cash bonuses.
On Friday, JPMorgan announced that unvaccinated employees would be required to complete coronavirus testing twice a week.
4 Different Return-to-Work Approaches
Lauren HirschReporting on back-to-office policies 💼
Daniel Slim/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Delta Air Lines requires vaccinations for new hires.
It is unclear how many workers this policy will ultimately affect. The airline industry, like others, is facing a labor shortage.
4 Different Return-to-Work Approaches
Lauren HirschReporting on back-to-office policies 💼
Walmart requires vaccinations for some, but not all, of its employees.
The country’s largest private employer requires vaccination for workers in its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters and for managers who travel in the U.S., but not for the majority of its employees, who work in its stores and elsewhere.
A spokesperson said the limited mandate would send a message to all workers that they should get vaccinated.
4 Different Return-to-Work Approaches
Lauren HirschReporting on back-to-office policies 💼
Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
Microsoft requires vaccines for all U.S. employees.
The tech company, which employs roughly 100,000 people in the U.S., said in early August that it would require proof of vaccination for all employees, vendors and guests to enter its offices.
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Emily Flitter, Gregory Schmidt and Noam Scheiber contributed reporting.
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After a week in which Hawaii reported more cases than in any other week, Gov. David Ige said on Tuesday that he was reimposing restrictions to try to curb the surge.
“Social gatherings will be limited to no more than 10 people indoors and 25 people outdoors,” he said at a news conference. Indoor events at bars, restaurants, gyms and places of worship will be reduced to 50 percent capacity, and masks must be worn at all times except when eating or drinking, he said.
The measure, which went into effect immediately, came five days after Mr. Ige, a Democrat, ordered all state and county employees to show proof of vaccination by next Monday or face weekly testing.
“We know that we won’t see benefits from the increase in vaccinations going up for another six to seven weeks,” he said on Tuesday. “In the meantime, we must take action now in order to slow the spread of Covid-19, especially with the new Delta variant, which has wreaked havoc in our communities.”
Hawaii has had the country’s fewest reported cases per capita over the course of the pandemic, but its number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has soared from just 40 on July 1 to 246 on Tuesday, of whom 235 are unvaccinated.
“That’s a pretty rapid trajectory,” said Hilton Raethel, the chief executive of the Healthcare Association of Hawaii, a nonprofit that represents hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, home-care companies and hospices. “Hospitals are full, and then you have all these Covid patients. That really stretches our health care system.”
Mr. Raethel said that the first of 550 additional health care workers would arrive in Hawaii this weekend from the U.S. mainland. Only one other time during the pandemic has the state needed reinforcements, he said, and that was last September and October.
“The numbers tell us that the worst of the surge is in front of us,” he said.
The state, with a population of 1.4 million, has a seven-day average of more than 500 reported cases per day and a test positivity rate of 7.3 percent, Mr. Ige said on Tuesday.
Eighty-six percent of Hawaii residents 18 and older have had at least one vaccine dose, but only 65 percent are fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database.
Credit…Matthew Abbott for The New York Times
A Sydney man who caused a weeklong lockdown in a coastal Australian town is being charged with breaching public health orders.
The man, whom the local news media identified as Zoran Radovanovic, spent over a week in the town, Byron Bay, before testing positive for the virus on Monday. The town and surrounding areas imposed the lockdown amid concerns that an outbreak could devastate the region, where many people are unvaccinated.
Mr. Radovanovic “didn’t believe in the virus,” Mayor Michael Lyon of Byron Shire, which includes Byron Bay, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Tuesday.
The mayor said that Mr. Radovanovic had not been wearing a mask or socially distancing and was not cooperating with authorities.
Residents in eastern Sydney are not allowed to travel more than about six miles from their homes as part of pandemic restrictions.
On Wednesday morning Gary Worboys, the deputy police commissioner of New South Wales, the state that includes Byron Bay, told reporters that the authorities were examining whether the man had genuinely been looking at real estate during the trip as he had claimed. Travel for inspecting properties is exempt from the restrictions.
Mr. Radovanovic is being treated for the virus in a hospital in the nearby town of Lismore. The police said they intended to pursue strict bail conditions.
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YouTube on Tuesday removed a video by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky for the second time and suspended him from publishing for a week after he posted a video that disputed the effectiveness of wearing masks to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
A YouTube representative said the Republican senator’s claims in the three-minute video had violated the company’s policy on Covid-19 medical misinformation. The company policy bans videos that spread a wide variety of misinformation, including “claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of Covid-19.”
“We apply our policies consistently across the platform, regardless of speaker or political views, and we make exceptions for videos that have additional context such as countervailing views from local health authorities,” the representative said in a statement.
In the video, Mr. Paul says: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection.” Later in the video, he adds, “Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science, which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.”
In fact, masks do work, according to the near-unanimous recommendations of public health experts.
On Tuesday, Twitter suspended Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, for seven days after she posted that the Food and Drug Administration should not give the coronavirus vaccines full approval and that the vaccines were “failing.”
On Twitter, Mr. Paul called his suspension “a badge of honor” and blamed “left-wing cretins at YouTube,” while linking to an alternative site to watch the video.
The senator said in a statement that private companies had the right to bar him, but that YouTube’s decision was “a continuation of their commitment to act in lock step with the government.”
“I think this kind of censorship is very dangerous, incredibly anti-free speech and truly anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth,” he said.
Last week, YouTube removed from his channel an eight-minute Newsmax interview in which the senator said that “there’s no value” in wearing masks. According to YouTube policy, the company issues a warning for a first offense, then the weeklong suspension is part of its “first strike” response to a second offense.
The strike will be removed from his account after 90 days if there are no more violations. A second-strike in the 90 days would result in a two-week suspension, and the account would be permanently banned after a third strike.
Credit…Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters
Bangladesh’s health care system is buckling under the ferocity of the country’s third, and by far deadliest, wave of coronavirus infections, and only 4 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. Yet the country of 165 million people lifted much of its lockdown on Wednesday.
Banks, shops and malls were allowed to reopen, and buses and trains were operating at half capacity. That followed the reopening of the garment industry, a mainstay of the economy, two weeks ago.
And while health experts feared that the lifting of restrictions would worsen the outbreak, the effect of the restrictions on people’s livelihoods in Bangladesh has been devastating. The pandemic has pushed at least 24.5 million into poverty, according to an April study.
Government advisers say the country’s leaders have little choice but to reopen. “It’s not possible for the government to keep the country locked down forever,” Mohammad Shahidullah, the president of the government’s Covid-19 committee, told the local news media.
Credit…Kristina Barker for The New York Times
Oregon is restoring a statewide mandate ordering both vaccinated and unvaccinated people to use face coverings when gathering indoors.
Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon, a Democrat, said on Wednesday that masks — which will be required starting on Friday — were needed to fight rising caseloads driven by the Delta variant, and that face coverings were a simple tool to help keep schools and businesses open.
“After a year and a half of this pandemic, I know Oregonians are tired of health and safety restrictions,” Ms. Brown said in a statement. “This new mask requirement will not last forever, but it is a measure that can save lives right now.”
Oregon was the third state to introduce an indoor mask mandate for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people, after Louisiana and Hawaii. Washington, D.C., has also reinstated its mask mandate, as have several large cities.
While many states brought in mask mandates and other restrictions last year, they have been reluctant to implement such orders again. Two states led by Republican governors, Texas and Florida, have barred mask mandates entirely, though some local leaders plan to impose them anyway.
On Tuesday, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said that masks would again be mandated in all of the state’s schools.
Oregon has made it through the pandemic with some of the lowest numbers of virus cases and deaths in the country. But new cases have surged in recent days from a daily average of 110 a month ago to nearly 1,300 on Tuesday.
With 84 percent of people over 65 fully vaccinated in the state, the rise in deaths has been far smaller, reaching a daily average of six as of Wednesday. But hospitalizations have quadrupled in the past month, with the daily average number of hospitalized patients exceeding 550.
Ms. Brown’s office projects that the state’s hospital capacity could be overrun in the next several weeks if mitigation measures are not in place, leaving Oregon as many as 500 beds short by next month.
“When our hospitals are full, there will be no room for additional patients needing care — whether for Covid-19, a heart attack or stroke, a car collision or a variety of other emergency situations,” Ms. Brown said. “If our hospitals run out of staffed beds, all Oregonians will be at risk.”
Ms. Brown also said that all employees working under the state’s executive branch would be required to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 18, or six weeks after a vaccine receives full approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State, a Democrat, announced a similar mandate on Monday.
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