Covid-19 Live Updates: Texas and Georgia Join Growing List of States Making All Adults Eligible for Vaccine

Texas, Indiana and Georgia announced Tuesday that residents 16 years and older will be eligible for Covid-19 vaccinations starting Thursday for Georgia residents, Monday for Texans and on March 31 for Indianans. They joining a growing list of states that plan to broaden vaccine eligibility to all adults ahead of a May 1 deadline set by President Biden.

“With every dose, Texas gets closer to normal and protects more lives from COVID-19 hospitalization and death,” the state’s health department said in a Twitter post.

West Virginia, Alaska and Mississippi are the only states where all adults are eligible to receive shots. Others, like Texas, Georgia and Indiana, have announced future expansions; Utah, for example, will open eligibility to all adults on Wednesday. And Tennessee announced last week that all residents 16 and older would be eligible for vaccinations starting April 5. Some states, such as New York, have been gradually expanding eligibility: New Yorkers 50 years and older became eligible on Tuesday.

Widening the eligibility for vaccines comes at a time when federal health officials have warned of a possible fourth surge of the virus as troubling new variants spread, urging Americans to get vaccinated. Mr. Biden has said there would be enough vaccines available by the end of May for all adults and has suggested that Americans could see a return to normalcy by July 4 if they got vaccinated and kept following health precautions, like mask wearing.

Virus case numbers in the country “have plateaued — that’s not good, they should keep going down and down,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases and a top adviser to Mr. Biden, said Tuesday on “Good Morning America.” As of Monday, the seven-day average of new virus cases nationwide was 54,000 a day, according to a New York Times database, a level comparable to that of mid-October.

“When you plateau like that, there really is a danger of a resurgence,” Dr. Fauci said.

About 25 percent of the total U.S. population has received at least one shot, and 14 percent are fully vaccinated. The pace of vaccinations has been steadily increasing in recent weeks to an average of about 2.5 million shots daily, well above the daily rate of fewer than one million shots two months ago. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said Tuesday that a total of 27 million doses would be allocated to states, pharmacies and other jurisdictions and programs, 4 million of which would be of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.

In Texas, about 22 percent of all residents have received at least one shot of a vaccine, and 11 percent are fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Earlier this month, Gov. Greg Abbott lifted the state’s mask mandate and scrapped crowd capacity limits on all businesses, a move that drew criticism from federal officials, including the president. “Texas is OPEN 100%,” Mr. Abbott tweeted at the time.

About 19 percent of Georgians have received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to a Times database. Gov. Brian Kemp said that as of Tuesday, more than one million older residents have received at least one vaccine dose.

“As you all know, this is our ticket back to normal,” Mr. Kemp said. “And we’re getting closer to that point every single day.”

Businesses in much of the country are open and more than a dozen states have no mask mandates in, a Times database showed.

In Indiana, Gov. Eric Holcomb announced that the state’s mask mandate will drop to an advisory on April 6. But face coverings will remain mandatory in all state buildings, facilities, vaccination and testing sites “until further notice” and in schools for the remainder of the year.

In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper said Tuesday that the state would ease some restrictions beginning on Friday, including increasing the number of people permitted at mass gatherings, and reinstating normal hours for when alcohol may be served at bars and restaurants. Mr. Cooper continues to enforce a statewide mask order.

In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam announced some changes on Tuesday, including allowing sports and entertainment venues to operate with additional capacity and increasing the number of people allowed at events indoors and outdoors. He also issued preliminary guidance on in-person graduation ceremonies and commencements and will continue universal mask wearing.

On Monday, the C.D.C. director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said members of Mr. Biden’s virus team have reached out to governors and other state officials about the spread and detection of variants and sought to persuade them “to slow down the relaxation.”

“We just don’t want to be at this rapid uptick of cases again, and that is very possible that that could happen,” she said. “We’ve seen that. We’re behind the eight ball when that starts to happen.”

The announcement this week that the AstraZeneca shot, the workhorse of global vaccine rollouts, had achieved nearly 80 percent efficacy in a gold-standard American trial was met with relief by the many countries relying on it.

But by Tuesday, that campaign had, once again, been thrown off course, at least for the moment. For AstraZeneca, it was seemingly another episode of public relations whiplash, part of a series of recent miscues and communication blunders by the company that scientists said had undercut the effort to sell one of the most potent and indispensable vaccines against the coronavirus.

In a highly unusual move, American health officials said on Tuesday that the company’s account of its U.S. trial findings had not been entirely accurate, suggesting that AstraZeneca had used only the most favorable data to generate apparently spectacular efficacy results.

Those comments created new friction between AstraZeneca and American officials even as the company vies for a coveted authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. But more urgently, they threw a wrench into the efforts of elected leaders around the world to rebuild trust in a shot whose low price and easy storage requirements have made it the backbone of many countries’ campaigns to end the pandemic.

“It’s eroding confidence,” said Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading. “When you pump things up, and then people not unreasonably question it, then that erodes confidence.”

Faith in the vaccine had already plunged across Europe after recent reports that a very small number of recipients had developed unusual blood clots. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, more people now believe that the vaccine is unsafe than that it is safe, polling has shown, a blow to a shot that remains the continent’s best hope for saving people’s lives during a mounting surge of new infections.

Despite the drumbeat of troubling news reports about the vaccine, European and global regulators have deemed it safe and effective. More than 11 million doses have been administered in Britain alone, almost all of them without serious side effects, driving down hospitalizations and helping the country to emerge from a dreadful wintertime wave of infections.

Nevertheless, results from AstraZeneca’s U.S. trial was hotly anticipated. Health officials around the world were looking to it as a crucial guide to their own rollouts: It would supply crucial data on older people, who had not been as well represented in earlier trials, and a more precise read on the vaccine’s overall efficacy, which had appeared from earlier trials to be lower than that of other leading shots.

By Tuesday, scientists said, it seemed as though AstraZeneca had punched a hole in fledgling efforts by lawmakers to shore up public confidence in the vaccine. Rather than sewing up questions about the shot, it had called to mind communications problems that have dogged the company since last year, delaying the regulatory process in some regions and creating hesitation among some recipients.

In its first public comments, AstraZeneca said that the results published on Monday reflected its U.S. trial data up to Feb. 17. It said that its preliminary assessment of more complete trial data showed that “the results were consistent with the interim analysis,” but said that it would share more up-to-date efficacy results within 48 hours.

Scientists said that the problem could yet turn out to be a technical matter that did not change their assessment of the vaccine. American officials did not suggest that any safety issues had been withheld, a subject of intense interest in the wake of the concerns in Europe.

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was inoculated against the coronavirus on Tuesday, the Kremlin said, ending months of holding out against being vaccinated even while promoting his country’s domestically made shots.

The president’s injection was not shown on television, an exception to the usual wall-to-wall coverage of Mr. Putin’s daily activities on state television.

His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said that Mr. Putin had promoted vaccination in other ways and did not need to be shown in public receiving a shot.

“The president, as you see, has dedicated a significant part of his work time to events, discussions and meetings about vaccines, about production of vaccines and so on,” Mr. Peskov said. “The president is already doing a lot for vaccine propaganda.”

Mr. Peskov addressed the issue of shortage only in export markets for the most widely used Russian vaccine, called Sputnik V, saying that demand abroad exceeded supply and that the vaccine therefore did not need promotion.

In addition to Sputnik V, Russia has approved for emergency use two other domestically developed vaccines — EpiVacCorona and CoviVac — that have yet to complete their clinical trials. All three Russian vaccines require two doses.

Mr. Peskov declined to specify which of the three Russian-made vaccines Mr. Putin received.

Under Russian rules, Mr. Putin became eligible for a Sputnik V shot in late December based on his age; he is 68. But months passed with no word from the Kremlin on his inoculation.

The Kremlin and outside analysts of Russian vaccine politics have offered a variety of explanations about the presidential foot-dragging.

At the least, Mr. Putin is not shy about appearing in public shirtless, relishing opportunities to show his general good health with bare-chested pictures from Siberian fishing or horseback-riding vacations.

He is also not known to be generally squeamish about vaccines. He told Russian newspaper editors last month that he receives annual flu shots, and said then that he might be inoculated against the coronavirus along with a flu shot in the autumn.

In response to a question on whether he should promote vaccination by example, he said he didn’t want to “make a monkey” of himself by appearing in public receiving a coronavirus vaccine, according to a report of the meeting.

Russia’s inoculation campaign has lagged far behind the United States and most European nations — the country has vaccinated 3.9 percent of the population with at least one dose, compared with 25 percent in the United States. Some attribute that difference to widespread vaccine hesitancy, something a presidential shot could help overcome.

Russian news media reports, though, have pointed to signs of another cause: shortages and production bottlenecks that officials have only recently acknowledged.

During a video conference with vaccine makers on Monday, Mr. Putin said Russia had produced 8.9 million two-dose sets of the Sputnik V vaccine since regulators approved it in August. But he said production would ramp significantly to 17 million sets monthly starting in April. Last fall, officials had predicted a far swifter rollout.

Promoting vaccination with a presidential shot before doses were widely available in Russia might have served only to highlight the vaccine shortage at home even as Russia has been exporting vaccines globally, a sensitive political issue.

Mr. Putin cited his own vaccination plans on Monday while also announcing plans to produce enough doses for most adults by August.

global roundup

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, warning that her country is facing a significantly more deadly wave of the coronavirus, announced a five-day lockdown over Easter and the extension of existing restrictions until mid-April in an effort to break a spike in coronavirus cases.

Starting April 1, until the following Monday, Germany will effectively shut down for an extended Easter break, with private meetings limited to only two groups of up to five adults and all stores ordered shuttered, with only supermarkets allowed to open on the Saturday. Churches are asked to hold services online, and people are being asked to stay home and not travel.

“We are in a very, very serious situation,” Ms. Merkel told a news conference early Tuesday, after hours of deliberations with the leaders of the country’s 16 states over the Easter lockdown and extension of existing restrictions through April 18.

“After we were able to sharply bring down the number of new infections in January, we are now experiencing, through the spread of the more contagious British variant, a more dangerous variation, the numbers are going up and the intensive care beds are filling up,” she said.

Germany is the latest country in Europe to tighten restrictions as more contagious virus variants spread and the continent struggles to vaccinate its citizens. Poland, Italy and parts of France have ordered that residents stay home, and many businesses have shut ahead of the holiday.

A resurgent virus and lagging vaccinations have forced governments to renege on promises that they would slowly reopen businesses and society as spring approached. That has spurred protests across Europe as people chafe at more restrictions.

Europe’s vaccine campaign slowed after a small number of cases of blood clots and abnormal bleeding were reported in patients who received the AstraZeneca vaccine, dampening confidence in its safety. While the European drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency, cleared the vaccine for use last week and said it was “safe and effective,” the scare further complicated vaccination efforts.

Just three weeks ago, Ms. Merkel and state officials hammered out a road map to reopening that relied on a decline in case rates. But the number of new daily cases in Germany has increased by 69 percent in the past two weeks, to levels last seen in January.

• Residents of England who travel abroad without a valid reason will be fined 5,000 pounds, or $6,900, under coronavirus regulations that are scheduled to come into force on Monday if lawmakers approve. Daily coronavirus deaths in Britain have dropped to their lowest level since fall, thanks in part to a vaccination program that has already reached more than half the adult population, and the country is preparing to slowly reopen its economy after months of national lockdown. A stay-at-home order is to be lifted on Monday, though many shops and other businesses will be closed until mid-April or later. Travel abroad for leisure is banned until May 17 at the earliest, and the new regulations signal a potentially longer wait for vacationers.

• A year after European leaders ordered people into their homes to curb a deadly pandemic, thousands are pouring into streets and squares. Often, they are met by batons and shields, raising questions about the tactics and role of the police in societies where personal liberties have already given way to public health concerns. From Spain and Denmark to Austria and Romania, frustrated people are lashing out at the restrictions on their daily lives.

• Health authorities in Greece announced a record in daily coronavirus cases on Tuesday, just a day after the country’s government relaxed some lockdown restrictions. The country’s national public health organization reported 3,586 new cases on Tuesday, the highest daily rate since the beginning of the pandemic. The announcement came a day after authorities allowed archaeological sites to reopen, ahead of a planned reopening of the Greek tourism sector in mid-May.

• Mumbai, India’s financial hub, has begun random testing for the coronavirus in malls, railway stations and other crowded places as officials attempt to tamp down on a worrying surge in cases. Rapid antigen tests will be taken without individuals’ consent, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai said in a statement on Monday. Anyone who resists will be in violation of India’s colonial-era epidemic act, which gives the government the power to fine or imprison people who violate rules to contain an outbreak.

• The world-famous cherry trees of Japan are expected to be in full bloom in most of the country this week, but once again the coronavirus pandemic will keep the usual crowds away. Spring in Japan has long meant cherry blossoms, or sakura, with scores of picnickers welcoming the warmer weather over bento box lunches or barbecue as well as copious amounts of sake and other alcohol. But last spring, with the coronavirus spreading, officials were quick to curb cherry-blossom viewing despite its cultural significance. Yuriko Koike, the governor of Tokyo, compared the loss to “taking hugs away from Italians.”

Emily Schmall, Hisako Ueno, Mark Landler, Stephen Castle and Isabella Kwai contributed.

A monoclonal antibody treatment developed by the drug maker Regeneron sharply cut the risk of hospitalization and death when given to high-risk Covid-19 patients in a large clinical trial, the company announced on Tuesday.

The results are the latest in a growing flurry of evidence that the infused drugs, meant to mimic the antibodies that the immune system generates naturally in fighting the coronavirus, can help infected patients avoid the worst outcomes if given early.

Regeneron’s treatment, a cocktail of two antibody drugs, was given last fall to President Donald J. Trump shortly after he got sick with Covid-19 and is now one of three such therapies available in the United States.

The new results come from a Phase 3 trial that enrolled more than 4,500 patients beginning in late September, around the time virus cases began to climb dangerously in the United States. The study found that patients who got the infused treatment within 10 days of developing symptoms or testing positive had a roughly 70 percent reduced risk of being hospitalized or dying compared with patients who were infused with a placebo.

“I think these are exciting data,” said Dr. Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious diseases physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved in the study.

Even as vaccinations speed up, antibody treatments are expected to be helpful for high-risk people who still get sick for many months at least, and longer still if the virus can’t be wiped out. While there are signs that emerging virus variants may in some cases make antibodies less potent, Regeneron’s cocktail has not shown such vulnerability in laboratory tests.

In the new findings, Regeneron’s treatment worked equally well when given at half the dosing at which it was authorized. Regeneron said that it planned to request that the Food and Drug Administration allow the treatment to be given at that reduced strength.

Such a change would bring several advantages: While the cocktail is safe, getting it at a lower dose reduces the odds of side effects, such as an infusion reaction.

It would also allow Regeneron to increase the supply it can provide the United States. The company said that it had expected to supply the country with about 750,000 doses at the originally authorized higher strength by the end of June. If the lower strength is authorized, the company expects to provide about 1.25 million doses by then.

The antibody treatments from Regeneron and the drug maker Eli Lilly, which makes the other two such drugs authorized in the United States, were expected to be in high demand and to serve as a bridge in fighting the pandemic before vaccinations ramped up. Instead, they ended up sitting on refrigerator shelves in many places even during recent surges.

Many patients and their doctors did not know to ask for them or where to find them. Overwhelmed hospitals lacked the bandwidth to prioritize giving out the treatments. And some doctors were unconvinced by the relatively weak evidence available last fall supporting their use.

That picture is gradually shifting, thanks to improved logistics and more awareness. And more solid evidence, like the new data from Regeneron, also appears to be helping the drugs get used more widely. “As the data get stronger and stronger, I would expect that use will increase,” Dr. Gandhi said.

Americans who need health insurance will now have even longer to select a health plan for the rest of the year. The Biden administration announced Tuesday that it would extend enrollment for Obamacare plans sold on Healthcare.gov until Aug. 15, from a May deadline.

The change was announced on the 11th anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, the law that established the markets where individuals could buy their own health insurance, and made plans available to shoppers regardless of pre-existing health conditions, among many other provisions.

“We have a duty not just to protect it but to make it better and keep becoming a nation where health care is a right for all and not a privilege for a few,” President Biden said at the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital at the Ohio State University on Tuesday.

The stimulus bill signed this month expanded subsidies that help people buy such coverage, lowering the price of a typical plan to zero dollars for low-income families and offering financial assistance for the first time to households higher on the income scale. But it is taking time for the Department of Health and Human Services to implement the new provisions, and so far it has decided not to make the changes automatic. That means that even people who currently get coverage on the exchanges will need to go back to request new benefits. The extended enrollment period will give them more time to do that.

“Every American deserves access to quality, affordable health care — especially as we fight back against the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services. His statement encouraged uninsured Americans to sign up and current Obamacare customers to review new discounts.

The administration also announced that sign-ups for special subsidies for Americans who receive unemployment insurance this year will start July 1. Congress established a system for them to receive zero-premium health plans all year, but carrying out that provision quickly has proved complicated.

Enrollment in Affordable Care Act plans for most Americans is typically limited to a six-week period each year, as a means of encouraging people to enroll when they are healthy. But the Biden administration had already opened a second enrollment period this year, arguing that the pandemic and its economic effects presented an emergency that justified expanding options for coverage. The original special enrollment period had been set to expire in mid-May.

The changes apply in the 36 states that use the federal Healthcare.gov platform to manage their insurance marketplaces. But several states that run their own marketplaces have also extended their enrollment periods.

Mr. Biden, who wore a black mask throughout his speech in Ohio, said the extension would also benefit minority communities that “historically have gone without insurance at higher rates” and have been disproportionally impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Millions of families will be able to sleep a little more soundly at night,” the president said, “because they don’t have to worry about losing everything if they get sick.”

More than two months after he was fully vaccinated against Covid, a doctor in New York woke up with a headache and a dull, heavy feeling of fatigue. A fever and chills soon followed, and his senses of taste and smell began to fade.

This, he thought, could not be happening. But it was: He tested positive for the coronavirus.

“It was a huge shock,” he said. He knew that no vaccine was perfect and that the Pfizer-BioNTech shots he received had been found 95 percent effective in a large clinical trial. “But somehow in my mind, it was 100 percent,” he said.

The doctor, who requested anonymity to protect his privacy, is among the few reported cases of people who have been infected after being partly or even fully vaccinated. Nearly 83 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine, and it’s unclear just how many of them will have a “breakthrough” infection, though two new reports suggest the number is very small.

One study found that just four out of 8,121 fully vaccinated employees at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (not Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, as an earlier version of this briefing stated) became infected. The other found that only seven out of 14,990 workers at UC San Diego Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles tested positive two or more weeks after receiving a second dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or the Moderna vaccine. Both reports, published on Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, show how well the vaccines work in the real world, and during a period of intense transmission.

But these breakthrough cases, though quite rare, are a sharp reminder that vaccinated people are not invincible, especially when the virus continues to circulate widely.

“We felt really strongly that this data should not lead people to say, ‘Let’s all get vaccinated and then we can all stop wearing masks,’” said Dr. Francesca J. Torriani, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Diego Health who led the California study. “These measures have to continue until a larger segment of the population is vaccinated.”

Only some of the virus-positive health workers in the California study showed symptoms, she said, and they tended to be mild, suggesting that the vaccines were protective. Some people had no symptoms at all, and were discovered only through testing in studies or as part of their medical care.

In the next few months, Pfizer and Moderna are expected to release data that should indicate how often vaccinated people become infected by the virus, even if they have no symptoms.

The vaccinated New York doctor who became ill stayed in isolation at home for nearly two weeks. He described his symptoms as relatively mild, and said that knowing he had been inoculated helped put his mind at ease.

“I didn’t have a moment’s anxiety. I did not think I was going to die. Thinking you’re not going to die — that’s a pretty big thing.”

Apoorva Mandavilli contributed reporting.

Dr. Vivek Murthy, who helped found several health-related advocacy groups and later tackled the opioid epidemic and e-cigarettes as surgeon general during the Obama administration, was confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday to reprise that role for President Biden.

The vote, 57 to 43, was a much smoother ride for Dr. Murthy than the first time he was confirmed, in 2014, when Republicans cast Dr. Murthy as a politically connected supporter of President Barack Obama’s who would use his position to push for stricter gun control. The fight dragged on for months, leaving the country without a top doctor for more than a year.

When President Donald J. Trump was elected, Dr. Murthy was asked to resign. He refused and was fired, his wife, Alice Chen, said at the time.

Dr. Murthy will return as surgeon general at a critical moment, as the president tries to steer the nation out of the worst public health crisis in a century while expanding access to health care for millions of Americans. During his confirmation hearing, he told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that he would make ending the coronavirus pandemic his highest priority.

Dr. Murthy, 43, helped found Doctors for Obama, a group that worked to elect Mr. Obama and now works to expand health care access for Americans. It now goes by Doctors for America.

As an undergraduate at Harvard University, he helped found two nonprofits, one focusing on H.I.V./AIDS education in the United States and India, and another to train women as community health workers in rural India.

A son of Indian immigrants and the first person of Indian descent to hold the surgeon general’s post, Dr. Murthy, 43, was born in England and grew up mostly in Miami, watching his parents in their own medical practice. He invoked them during his confirmation hearing.

“I have tried,” Dr. Murthy said, “to live by the lessons they embodied: that we have an obligation to help each other whenever we can, to alleviate suffering wherever we find it, and to give back to this country that made their lives and my life and the lives of my children possible.”

Positive trends in pandemic statistics in the United States are easy to distrust. After all, the country went through two false dawns last year, in the late spring and then again in the late summer, when declines in case reports prefaced even darker days. Each time, the apparent good news prompted relaxations and reopenings that helped bring on the next wave.

So it is no surprise that public health experts are wary about the latest flattening in the curve of the pandemic, from the steep decline in cases seen in late January and February to something like a plateau or slight decline more recently. With more contagious virus variants becoming prevalent, they fear the good news could be ending and a fourth wave might be building.

On Monday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, again warned Americans about the spread of the coronavirus, saying that with increased travel, looser pandemic restrictions and worrisome variants bearing down on the United States, another surge could erupt if Americans did not take protection efforts seriously “for just a little bit longer.”

“We are at a critical point in this pandemic, a fork in the road, where we as a country must decide which path we are going to take. We must act now,” said Dr. Walensky, who has been one of many federal officials in recent weeks to warn governors against lifting mask mandates too soon. “And I am worried that if we don’t take the right actions now, we will have another avoidable surge, just as we are seeing in Europe right now and just as we are so aggressively scaling up vaccination.”

That said, there are positive signs:

• Daily death reports, which stayed stubbornly high long after the post-holidays surge, have finally come down sharply, to levels not seen since mid-November. As of Monday, the nation had averaged 1,051 newly reported virus deaths a day over the past week; the average had hovered around 3,000 for weeks over the winter.

• Some recent hot spots have made major progress — notably Los Angeles, whose mayor, Eric Garcetti, said on CBS on Sunday that he had “not felt this optimism in 12 months.” The city and surrounding county, where cases in some areas leapt 450 percent over the holidays and hospitals became so swamped that some turned away ambulances, now has a test positivity rate of about 1.9 percent, and in an important shift, new case reports have fallen among people experiencing homelessness.

• Vaccinations are becoming more accessible by the week, as states receive more doses and open up eligibility, in some cases to include all adult residents. The number of doses administered nationwide each day is rising, and the country surpassed President Biden’s initial goal to have administered 100 million shots on March 19, almost six weeks ahead of schedule.

The question now is which will prevail: the positive effects of trends like these or the negative effects of looser behavior and the evolution of the virus into more dangerous forms?

It’s still “a race between vaccinations and variants,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on Twitter. Like other experts, he cautioned: “Opening up too fast helps the variants.”

Noah Weiland contributed reporting.

Cineworld, the parent company of the U.S. movie theater chain Regal Cinemas, announced on Tuesday that it would reopen its cinemas in the United States in April and in Britain in May as those countries ease lockdown restrictions.

“We have long awaited this moment,” said Mooky Greidinger, the chief executive of Cineworld, which is based in London. “With capacity restrictions expanding to 50 percent or more across most U.S. states, we will be able to operate profitably in our biggest markets.”

Regal Cinemas is the second largest theater chain in the United States, after AMC Theaters. The announcement by Cineworld comes six months after the movie theater chains were forced to shut down across the United States and Britain last October in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The decision affected a total of 45,000 employees in both countries and forced studios to postpone film releases.

Cineworld also announced a multiyear agreement with Warner Bros. starting in 2022 that will allow the chain to show the studios’ films for 45 days in the United States and 31 days in Britain. The deal shortens the typical window that theaters have to show movies before they are released to on-demand streaming services.

The reopening plans in the United States will coincide with the release of two movies from Warner Bros. Pictures, “Godzilla vs. Kong” on April 2 and “Mortal Kombat” on April 16.

“We are very happy for the agreement with Warner Bros.,” Mr. Greidinger said. “This agreement shows the studio’s commitment to the theatrical business.”

Last week, AMC Theaters announced the reopening of nearly all of its U.S. theaters.

The moves come at a time of concern that looser restrictions will lead to a rise in coronavirus cases. On Monday, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that relaxed pandemic restrictions could lead to another spike. “If we don’t take the right actions now,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, “we will have another avoidable surge.”

In September, Cineworld reported a pretax loss of $1.6 billion for the first half of 2020. In 2019, 90 percent of the company’s revenue was generated in the United States and Britain.

Most school districts in New Jersey have partly reopened, but one in four children still live in a district where public schools are closed. No state in the Northeast had more districts relying on all-virtual teaching in early March than New Jersey, according to Return to Learn, a database created by a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and Davidson College. Nationwide, only seven states had a greater proportion of all-remote instruction.

As the distribution of vaccines has accelerated and President Biden has signaled a push for broader reopenings, frustration among parents has grown, particularly in New Jersey’s affluent suburbs, where schools with stellar reputations are a key reason families are willing to pay some of the nation’s highest taxes.

These parents have filed federal lawsuits, held protests, created online petitions and shown up at virtual board of education meetings to demand expanded in-person instruction.

The pressure to open schools more fully comes as the infection rate in New Jersey, which is small and densely populated, remains stubbornly high: With a weekly average of 45 cases for every 100,000 residents, the state leads the nation in new infections per capita, according to a New York Times database.

The drumbeat intensified after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a major policy shift on Friday, reducing its distancing recommendations to three feet from six feet for all elementary schools and for middle and high schools in areas where the virus infection rate is not high.

Anger at the pace of reopening has led some families who can afford it to enroll their children in private schools, start home-schooling them or move. If enough children leave a district in New Jersey, it could lead to cuts in state aid, scaled-back programming or potentially layoffs.

Several New Jersey cities and counties have held educator-only vaccine distribution events. But the virus’s hold on the state has left teachers and their powerful unions wary of expanded reopening.