Covid-19 Live Updates: Chicago Is Reopening Schools Against Fierce Resistance From Teachers

Across the country, many big cities like New York have struggled to resume even limited in-person instruction, while a number, including Los Angeles, have simply given up on the idea, choosing to stick with all-remote education into the spring.

Few places have seen as much acrimony over the issue as Chicago, whose public school system is the nation’s third-largest. Now, with 6,000 prekindergarten and special education students preparing to return to the city’s public school buildings on Monday for the first time since March, a question looms: How many of their teachers will be there to greet them?

Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago has argued that giving parents the option of sending their children to school in person is critical to preventing some of the city’s mostly poor and Black and Latino students from falling permanently behind.

But the teachers’ union has fiercely resisted the plan, arguing that schools are not safe while the coronavirus is surging. Over the past week, fewer than 60 percent of the roughly 2,000 teachers who were expected to return to their buildings to prepare for the arrival of students actually showed up.

Janice K. Jackson, the chief executive of the school system that serves about 350,000 students, said on Friday that she was optimistic that most teachers would go to work on Monday. She warned that any who stayed home without permission would not be paid, raising the prospect of a heightened clash with the union, which has suggested it may strike if teachers are not permitted to stay home if they want to.

“This is probably the most contentious and unpleasant reopening, in terms of how the different sides are interacting with each other,” said Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University who has collected data on coronavirus cases in schools and has argued that reopening schools is safe under many circumstances.

Interviews with parents and officials in Chicago indicate that many families are torn between concerns that their children are losing out educationally and fears that they will bring the virus home.

Katrina Adams, who lives on the South Side, said she wanted to send her oldest daughter, who is in the fourth grade, back to school, but said she didn’t think the district was ready to open. Ms. Adams said her views had not been influenced by the teachers’ union, but she acknowledged feeling unsettled by many teachers’ concerns about in-school transmission of the coronavirus.

“If they don’t feel safe coming back, most definitely that’s an alert, to a parent or anyone,” she said.

Five new coronavirus vaccination centers opened in New York City on Sunday, in the latest effort to accelerate the sluggish pace that has dogged the rollout in the city.

Delays were reported at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after an air traffic control center that serves the area reported a coronavirus infection and closed for cleaning on Sunday, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center, located in Leesburg, Va., was closed from 11:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. for cleaning. It is one of 20 such centers in the United States, which generally provide service to aircraft while they are en route, as opposed to airport control towers, which handle takeoffs and landings.

While the center was closed, the controllers worked from “an alternate location,” the F.A.A. said, and airplanes were “routed around the airspace or handled by underlying facilities.”

Reagan airport attributed delays of more than 45 minutes to the Washington Center’s closure but no others in the region did. The delays appear to have been resolved by midafternoon.

There have been at least 13 prior reported cases at the center, according to F.A.A. It was not immediately clear if any of those had resulted in closures of the facility.

Other air route traffic control centers have similarly closed for cleaning after infections were discovered over the past few months, resulting in widespread delays. In December, the one in Memphis was closed for cleaning after an employee tested positive, resulting in slight delays. In early January, the one serving Jacksonville was closed for a few hours, causing delays and flight cancellations.

Last month, the center that serves the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport closed for several hours after an employee tested positive. The F.A.A. declared a ground stop, halting all departing flights. The closure caused ripples of delays and diverted flights across the country.

The state of Florida’s coronavirus testing and vaccination site at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens — the recent scene of long lines of people awaiting vaccination — will be shut down for much of Monday to make way for the College Football Playoff national championship game. No testing will be done on Monday, and vaccinations will end at noon, the Florida Division of Emergency Management announced on Sunday.

The pandemic is in an alarming new upward spiral in Florida, with nearly 20,000 new cases of the virus reported there on Friday and more than 15,000 on Saturday. But the state’s well-intended effort to throw open the doors of the vaccine program to everyone 65 and older has led to long lines, confusion and disappointment. The temporary closure of the Hard Rock Stadium site to accommodate a football game seemed likely to complicate things further for Miamians.

Experts say Florida is an example of what happens when officials attempt to distribute a vaccine that is still in very limited supply to a broad spectrum of the population. In a state with about 4.4 million people 65 and older, more than 402,000 doses had been administered as of Friday, according to federal data, the fourth-highest total in the nation. But Florida has used only about 30 percent of the vaccine doses it has received, a smaller proportion than 29 other states.

“How do you do something this huge and roll it out?” said Dr. Leslie M. Beitsch, the chairman of the behavioral sciences and social medicine department at Florida State University. “It’s not in any way surprising — to anyone who followed it closely, for sure — that there would be halting kind of progress and missteps getting something of this magnitude underway initially, whether we’re talking about Florida or the entire country.”

With states and counties left by the federal government to sort out logistics largely by themselves, the rollout has gone anything but smoothly. In Florida, images of seniors camped on sidewalks overnight in Fort Myers and Daytona Beach for first-come, first-served vaccines drew national attention. Health department offices that tried to offer scheduled appointments saw their phone systems and websites crash; at least one now accepts requests only by mail.

“Each of our 67 counties seems to be taking a slightly different pathway — and that’s remarkable, because we have a single department of health that is supposed to cover the entire state,” Dr. Beitsch said.

At a museum in Wuhan, China, a sprawling exhibition paints a stirring tale of how the city’s sacrifices in a brutal 76-day lockdown led to triumph over the coronavirus and, ultimately, rebirth.

But the exhibition may be most striking for what is not included about the experiences of the city where the virus first came to the world’s attention.

For example, visitors are invited to lay a virtual chrysanthemum at a wall of martyrs that includes Li Wenliang, the ophthalmologist at a Wuhan hospital whose death from the virus led to nationwide mourning. But missing from his brief biography is a crucial fact: that Dr. Li was reprimanded by the government for warning colleagues about the virus.

China has spent much of the past year trying to spin a narrative of the coronavirus pandemic as an undisputed victory led by the ruling Communist Party. As life in the city, and most of the country, has returned to normal, the state-run news media has largely ignored the government’s missteps. Instead, the media cites China’s response as proof of the superiority of the country’s authoritarian system, especially compared with that of the United States and other democracies, which are still struggling to contain raging outbreaks

And now, as the Jan. 23 anniversary of Wuhan’s lockdown nears, the government has deployed an army of censors to scrub the internet of critical coverage of the Wuhan outbreak.

A recent propaganda directive explicitly banned coverage of the anniversary of the outbreak, according to journalists at state-run news outlets who were briefed on the order. Instead, propaganda agencies have pushed feel-good videos and adulatory articles that depict Wuhan as a city reborn.

The government underscored its message to the media last month when it sentenced Zhang Zhan, a 37-year-old citizen journalist who documented Wuhan’s ordeal, to four years in prison. She is the first person known to have faced trial for chronicling China’s outbreak.

As the coronavirus has surged through the winter, some ambulance crews have struggled to keep pace with the number of patients requiring emergency care, and staffing and bed shortages at hospitals have led to hours of waiting to unload patients.

Ambulance crews have been transporting the relentless tide of Covid-19 patients as the post-holiday surge accelerated: The United States reported 300,594 new cases on Friday and more than 4,100 deaths on Thursday, both single-day records. Hospitalizations remained at near-record levels, with 130,777 patients on Saturday, according to the Covid Tracking Project, while the nation’s vaccine rollout is off to a slow start.

In the Augusta, Ga., area, all three major hospitals were out of beds last week, said Steven Vincent, the vice president of Gold Cross EMS in Augusta.

Waiting until a bed is available can sometimes take hours, he said, so ambulance crews have often opt to continue driving to other hospitals or trauma centers many miles away. Some hospitals have erected medical tents outside so that emergency medical service crews can split up, one member waiting with the patient and while the ambulance leaves to answer another call.

“Right now, our hospitals are completely full,” Mr. Vincent said. “We’re trying to get creative, because it is rough right now.”

The intensity has taken an emotional and physical toll on the emergency medical workers, he said. “They are stressed, they are overworked. It’s been a struggle, no doubt about it.”

In Habersham County, in the state’s northeast, the average number of calls per day for emergency medical service crews has been far higher than usual, said Chad Black, the director for emergency services for the county and the board chairman of the Georgia E.M.S. Association. About every other call is related to Covid, he said, and ambulances have had to wait upward of two hours to unload patients.

The county has had staffing problems for years, he said, a complication aggravated when employees contract the virus and must isolate. Some days, ambulances are at 50 percent staffing, Mr. Black said.

“They know when they come in, in the morning, that there’s a great chance they’re going to be up for 24 straight hours,” Mr. Black said about the ambulance workers. “You’ve got to worry — is there a breaking point?”

And in the Atlanta area, Mr. Black said, emergency crews are often “hospital shopping” — calling multiple facilities in the metro area and driving around until one agrees to admit their patient.

In Arizona, which has a higher rate of new cases per capita than any other state, according to a New York Times database, E.M.S. workers worry about being exposed to the virus, then bringing it home to their families and getting severe symptoms, said Brian Moore, the central region director of the Arizona Ambulance Association.

“This whole thing has put a lot of fear in folks who are on the front lines,” Mr. Moore said.

Emergency medical service dilemmas are particularly acute in Los Angeles County, where understaffed hospitals are overwhelmed and a Covid-related death happens every eight minutes. The nation’s most populous county has urged ambulance crews not to take people they cannot resuscitate to hospitals.

The county’s memo on the matter reflected a relatively small change from its previous policy, which already discouraged emergency personnel from transporting most people whose heartbeats could not be restored. But after the memo gained widespread attention, medics felt compelled to post on social media to try to quell anxieties that they believed were unfounded.

Kari Dickerson, a paramedic in Kentucky who tweets as @MedicTrommasher, said the memo had particularly alarmed people of color, who have been disproportionately harmed by the pandemic.

She said she worried that her fellow workers could face wrenching situations whenever they broke the news that someone had died, perhaps causing families to wonder: “Did they do this on purpose, did they not work as hard as they would have for somebody that looks like them?”

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the day the United States reported its single-day record for Covid-19 deaths. It was Thursday.

Pope Francis’s personal physician, Dr. Fabrizio Soccorsi, died on Saturday as a result of the coronavirus, the Vatican said.

Dr. Soccorsi, 78, had been in hospitalized at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome and was being treated for cancer, but died “because of complications from Covid-19,” according to Vatican News, the Vatican’s online news portal. Francis selected Dr. Soccorsi to be his personal physician in 2015.

Dr. Soccorsi specialized in internal medicine, and served for a time as the chairman of the hepatology department at the San Camillo Hospital in Rome. He also taught immunology at the Rome and Lazio Region Medical School.

The Vatican newspaper, l’Osservatore Romano, wrote in an obituary published on Saturday that Dr. Soccorsi had been “profoundly affected,” by the “premature death” of his daughter, Cristiana, in June 2017.

Social distancing measures and other pandemic safety protocols were imposed in Vatican City in March. Since then, several senior church figures, including cardinals, have tested positive for the virus. In all, twenty-seven residents of Vatican City, out of a total population of roughly 800, have tested positive, according to a New York Times database.

In a television interview scheduled for broadcast in Italy Sunday evening, the pope said he would be vaccinated as soon as this week, and he called on everyone to get vaccinated when possible, calling it an ethical choice to do so.

Every day, Tan Eng Chye, the president of the National University of Singapore, scans his online dashboard to see how crowded the cafeterias are.

If the real-time map shows that one cafeteria is too packed, he has administrators send out an advisory to avoid it and to remind students that there are campus-run food delivery services, free of charge.

Following the government’s lead, universities in Singapore, a semi-authoritarian city-state of almost six million people, have taken a top-down approach to managing the coronavirus. The result: Since the start of the pandemic last year, not one person has been found to have contracted the virus at any of Singapore’s three major universities.

While Singapore’s universities have benefited from a generally low caseload in its broader population, their experience and stringent measures stand in stark contrast to many campuses across the United States. A number of American universities experienced an explosion in cases almost as soon as students returned last fall.

The National University of Singapore, or N.U.S., describes its strategy as containment, decongestion and contact tracing. The university has harnessed technology to enforce social distancing measures, assigned students to different zones on campus and imposed tough penalties for flouting the rules. Like some American colleges, it is testing people extensively and even sifting through sewage for traces of the virus.

The goal, Professor Tan said, “is to make sure there are no infections” among the students, faculty and staff members at N.U.S.

The last step in the long journey to adopt a child through the foster care system is the courtroom finalization. It’s traditionally provided an important opportunity for loved ones to gather and pose for pictures as a judge blesses the creation of a new “forever family” with a smack of the gavel.

But, like so many other things in the Covid-19 era, this tradition has gone virtual. “We finalized our adoption over the phone,” said Celeste Scott, who last May adopted her three youngest children — who were 4, 5 and 6 when they first came to live with her in the spring of 2019. “It was kind of anticlimactic.”

Still, Scott, of The Dalles, Ore., knows she is fortunate to have finalized the adoptions at all. If she lived elsewhere in the country, she could very well still be waiting. The pandemic has created new challenges in the foster care system and worsened old ones — creating delays in placements and adoptions and forcing some older youth to exit the system amid a public health and economic crisis.

“The child welfare system is extremely complex and can vary widely by state, and even by county,” said Celeste Bodner, executive director and founder of FosterClub, an advocacy organization for foster youth. “Each of these systems is navigating the pandemic on its own, meaning the experience of a child in one county can be completely different from the one right next to it.”

Soon after the pandemic took hold, for instance, Florida’s child welfare system began conducting the bulk of the work certifying foster parents and placing children in their homes remotely.

In New York, the system ground to a halt. “For a long while, the courts here were just not doing anything virtually,” said Shantell Lewis, a recruiter with the Wendy’s Wonderful Kids program, which focuses on finding placements for older foster youth, at a Brooklyn nonprofit called MercyFirst. Though New York has more recently allowed work to be conducted virtually, the state has a considerable backlog.

Many child welfare professionals are also concerned about older youth “emancipating” from foster care, when local governments are no longer bound to provide financial assistance. This abrupt transition into adulthood, between 18 and 21 depending on the state, in the very best of times represents a significant challenge for roughly 20,000 young people each year. But today, those aging out of foster care are aging in to a country gripped by an ongoing pandemic and crippled economy.

“When a young person ages out of the system, we have in many ways already failed them,” said Rita Soronen, president and chief executive of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. “But this is even more true right now — there’s nothing like a crisis to show how truly vulnerable this group of young people are as they transition to adulthood.”

Sperm banks are running low on supplies because of an overwhelming demand for pandemic babies, so women are trying something unconventional: joining unregulated Facebook groups to find donors.

“People are fed up with sperm banks,” said Kyle Gordy, 29, who lives in Malibu, Calif. He invests in real estate but spends most of his time donating his sperm, free (except for the cost of travel), to women. He also runs a nearly 11,000-member private Facebook group, Sperm Donation USA, which helps women connect with a roster of hundreds of approved donors. His donor sperm has sired 35 children, with five more on the way, he said.

There have always been infertile straight couples in need of donor sperm, but with the legalization of gay marriage and the rise of elective single motherhood, the market has expanded over the last decade. About 20 percent of sperm bank clients are heterosexual couples, 60 percent are gay women, and 20 percent are single moms by choice, the banks said.

To meet this demand, men provided sperm at a steady rate for years, some banks said. But the coronavirus changed things. Existing donors were scared to go in. New donor sign-ups stopped for months during lockdown and never really bounced back at some banks. Several banks said that they had a lot of old frozen sperm in storage, but that it could last only so long.

The reason I know this at all is simple enough: I am 32 years old, partnered to a woman, stuck at home and in the market for the finest sperm I can get.

If you’re in a relationship (or haven’t been out much since March), it may be news to you that despite a raging pandemic, people are meeting up, cuddling, making out and having sex with new partners, often weighing their emotional and physical needs against safety concerns.

Some have gone about their private lives quietly, out of fear that those in their social circles — especially established couples — would judge their choices. Others have been more conspicuous when hooking up. In November, New York sheriffs broke up an 80-person party at a sex club in Queens. That same month, a swingers’ convention in New Orleans led to 41 people testing positive for the coronavirus.

Going on dates has involved a mental calculus not unlike the kind applied to other social interactions in the Covid-19 era: Will I feel safe? What is the likelihood of infection? How many people could this hurt? But hookups have been viewed with particular scrutiny.

“Even pre-pandemic, there was a lot of stigma around sexuality and sex in general,” said Dr. Oni Blackstock, the former assistant commissioner at the New York City Department of Health’s Bureau of H.I.V. “With the pandemic, there’s another layer of expectations and judgment.”

It took Alison Stevenson eight months to find a pandemic friend with benefits. Along the way, she had an intense, short-lived texting relationship that ended when the man on the other end told her he was getting back together with his ex. Then came two disappointing outdoor dates, including one with a guy who made fun of her for asking him to keep his mask on.

“I needed a ‘situationship,’” said Ms. Stevenson, a 31-year-old comedian and writer in Los Angeles. “A person I can rely on and trust to hang out with once a week.”

The effort could mean setting boundaries and conditions from the outset, like regular testing (keep in mind that tests can show false negatives, especially if the amount of the virus in the body is too small to be detected, and that whoever is taking the test could be infected while waiting for results), quarantining before meeting and sticking to a single partner.

As they negotiate, people are finding that the key to dating now is what it’s always been: trust. And ultimately for many single people, hooking up has been worth the increased risk of contracting the virus.

“Everything I enjoy doing has been taken away from me,” said Emmy Nicholson, a 26-year-old publicist in Brooklyn. “But there’s one thing they can’t take away, and that’s having sex.”