Covid-19 Live Updates: Cautious Optimism as More Americans Become Eligible for Vaccine

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Biden: U.S. on Track for 100 Million Vaccinations Since Jan. 20

President Biden said Thursday the U.S. would on Friday reach his Covid-19 vaccine goal of 100 million shots in 100 days, though he had earlier conceded they should aim higher.

In the last week, we’ve seen increases in the number of cases in several states — scientists have made clear that things may get worse as new variants of this virus spread. Getting vaccinated is the best thing we can do to fight back against these variants. While millions of people are vaccinated, we need millions more to be vaccinated. And I’m proud to announce that tomorrow, 58 days into our administration, we will have met my goal of administering 100 million shots to our fellow Americans. That’s weeks ahead of schedule. Eight weeks ago, only 8 percent of seniors, those most vulnerable to Covid-19, had received a vaccination. Today, 65 percent of people age 65 or older have received at least one shot. And 36 percent are fully vaccinated. This is a time for optimism, but it’s not a time for relaxation. I need all Americans, I need all of you to do your part. Keep the faith, keep wearing the mask, keep washing your hands and keep socially distanced. We’re going to beat this. We’re way ahead of schedule, but we’ve got a long way to go.

As more states expand eligibility for coronavirus vaccinations, the pace of daily shots administered in the United States has steadily increased to a pace that is now 12 percent higher than it was just a week ago.

On Thursday, Illinois joined a growing list of states to announce they were widening the pool of people eligible to receive the vaccine, opening appointments to all residents 16 years and older on April 12.

“The light that we can see at end of the tunnel is getting brighter and brighter as more people get vaccinated,” Gov. J.B. Pritzker said at a news conference.

In Utah, which also announced Thursday that it was opening up vaccinations earlier than it had planned. “This is a significant movement in timing,” said Gov. Spencer Cox.

In Washington, it was a day for crowing at the White House.

President Biden said Thursday that the United States was a day away from reaching his goal of administering 100 million vaccine doses in 100 days — with six weeks to spare before his self-imposed deadline.

“We’re way ahead of schedule,” Mr. Biden said in brief remarks from the White House, “but we have a long way to go.”

Mr. Biden maintained that the 100 million-shot goal was ambitious, even though he himself he had conceded in January that the government should be aiming higher. And though the new administration has bulked up the vaccine production and distribution campaign, its key elements were in place before Mr. Biden took office.

As of Wednesday, the seven-day average was about 2.5 million doses a day, according to a New York Times analysis of data reported from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mr. Biden’s comments continued his pattern of claiming unexpectedly fast progress in meeting his vaccine goal, even as public health officials have said that goal was less ambitious and easier to achieve than the president would have it.

Since Mr. Biden took office, 99.2 million shots have been administered across the country, the C.D.C. reported.

Last week, Mr. Biden set a deadline of May 1 for states to make vaccines available to all adult residents. At least Maine, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., plan to meet that goal. Others, including Colorado, Connecticut, Ohio, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, hope to make vaccines available to all of their adult residents even earlier.

Mr. Cox, the Utah governor, said opening up eligibility to all adults would help address vaccine equity and reach rural communities.

He said it would “allow us to take our mobile vaccination clinics into these hard to reach areas or populations who may have a little more vaccine hesitancy.”

Other states have also pushed up their eligibility dates: Nevada will make vaccines available to all adults on April 5; Missouri will allow any adult to get a vaccine on April 9; Maryland will open vaccines up in waves with all adult residents eligible as of April 27; and Rhode Island will allow all adults to get vaccinated starting April 19.

New York has yet to make all adults eligible, but the state recently expanded to include public-facing government employees, nonprofit workers and essential building service workers. On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, newly eligible because of the change, received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at a news conference.

States have been able to open vaccinations up to more people as supply has steadily increased. Another 22 million doses of vaccine is being sent to states, jurisdictions and pharmacies this week.

Across the country, more than 75 million people have received at least one shot of the vaccine, and about 12 percent of adults have been fully vaccinated, according to C.D.C. data analyzed by the Times.

Some 31 states are leading the national pace by at least 1 percentage point. So far, Alaska is in the lead with 19 percent of its adult residents fully vaccinated. Currently everyone who lives or works in the state and is 16 or older is eligible for the shots.

Amy Schoenfeld WalkerRemy Tumin a Michael Gold contributed reporting.

Getting a vaccine in New York City isn’t easy.

The state runs its own website for its vaccination sites; the city’s Department of Health runs another. Every drugstore chain, hospital and nonprofit provider has its own site and phone number. So finding an appointment, particularly for those without internet skills and access, can take hours or days — or simply be impossible.

But that is beginning to change. Following the lead of two volunteer websites that have streamlined the appointment process, NYCVaccineList and TurboVax, the City Council unanimously passed a bill on Thursday requiring the city to develop a single, unified website for vaccine appointments.

“The inspiration was these volunteer sites,” said Mark Levine, the city councilman who sponsored the bill. “They proved what was possible. My thought was, ‘Imagine what we could do with the resources of the city behind this.’”

NYCVaccineList and Turbovax use computer code to check availability from dozens of locations and providers at once, and then list the information on a single webpage. Turbovax, developed by Huge Ma, an Airbnb software engineer, also has a Twitter bot that can alert users when appointments become available.

Most New Yorkers, however, are not on Twitter. So the City Council bill requires the city to come up with something similar on its own website, in multiple languages: a push system that would allow people to preregister for notifications when appointments become available.

Work has already begun on the city’s side to make the appointment system simpler. The Department of Health’s main appointment website, vax4nyc.nyc.gov, has begun to include appointments from organizations doing pop-up vaccination sites, including large sites run by Affiliated Physicians.

Several other major nonprofits and hospitals have also agreed to allow their appointment systems to integrate with the city’s main site in recent days, Mr. Levine said. He added that he hoped the bill’s passage would provide additional momentum and encourage more partnerships.

Earlier this year, city health officials said creating a unified vaccine appointment website was impossible because of the separate electronic medical records systems used by the various vaccination centers. But Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed the system was “too cumbersome,” and council members said Thursday they felt the legislation helped break the logjam.

The mayor is expected to sign the legislation.

Along with other New Yorkers, government officials have also struggled to make appointments. Corey Johnson, the Council speaker, said Thursday he used Turbovax to help make his own appointment in February, but it still took him five hours of pressing refresh to find something.

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France’s prime minister announced that several regions, including the Paris area, will go under a new lockdown on Friday for at least a month, effectively curbing social life for about a third of the French population.

“The situation is worsening,” Primer Minister Jean Castex said Thursday at a news conference. “Our responsibility now is that it not get out of control.”

The new restrictions will apply to the Paris region, the country’s northern tip and the area surrounding the southern city of Nice.

Businesses considered nonessential will be forced to close; outdoor activities will be limited to within a six-mile radius of one’s home; and inter-regional travel will be banned. But schools will remain open, Mr. Castex said.

The new restrictions are a last-ditch effort to stop a rise in coronavirus infections that has been threatening to spiral out of control. A slow vaccination campaign hasn’t helped.

On Wednesday, France reported nearly 40,000 cases, according to a New York Times database — the highest number since November, when a second wave of infection forced the entire country into lockdown.

The new restrictions, Mr. Castex said, will be less sweeping.

Unlike the national lockdowns imposed in the spring and fall of last year, the new measures amount to closing parts of the country “without locking up,” he said.

Coronavirus infections in France are up 24 percent over the previous week. The rampant spread of the variant first identified in Britain now represents three-quarters of new cases.

Mr. Castex said the situation “looks more and more like a third wave, even as we approach the terrible figure of 100,000 dead.”

The Paris region has borne the brunt of it.

Last week, health officials in Paris ordered area hospitals to cancel many of their procedures to make room for Covid-19 patients. And this week, and some patients were transferred to other regions in an attempt to ease the pressure on hospitals.

France has been under a nighttime curfew since mid-January, with restaurants, cafes and museums remaining closed. Making a calculated gamble, the government tried to tighten restrictions just enough to stave off a third wave of infections without taking more severe steps that might hurt the economy.

But as infections started to increase in late February, the government imposed new lockdowns on weekends in the French Riviera, the famed strip along the Mediterranean coast, and in the area surrounding the northern port of Dunkirk. Officials made clear that more lockdowns might follow in other regions.

The new restrictions announced Thursday will affect about a third of the population, though they don’t go as far as those imposed a year ago, at the start of the epidemic.

Primary schools and secondary schools will remain open and the rules for high schools and universities will remain much the same, with attendance limited to prevent infections. People will also be allowed to take walks and exercise within a six-mile radius, with no time limit.

Though nonessential shops will close, the definition of essential has been expanded to include bookshops and music shops.

Bruno Riou, the head of the crisis center for Paris public hospitals, said earlier this week that a lockdown was the only remaining option to prevent more deaths, given that less than nine percent of the population has received at least a first vaccination.

“I hear a lot of people saying that a week without a lockdown is a week that’s gained,” Mr. Riou said. “For me, it’s a week that’s lost.”

The United States plans to send millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico and Canada, White House officials said Thursday, a notable step into vaccine diplomacy just as the Biden administration is quietly pressing Mexico to curb the stream of migrants coming to the border.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said the United States was planning to share 2.5 million doses of the vaccine with Mexico and 1.5 million with Canada, adding that it was “not finalized yet, but that is our aim.”

Tens of millions of doses of the vaccine have been sitting in American manufacturing sites. While their use has been approved in dozens of countries, including Mexico and Canada, the vaccine has not yet been authorized by American regulators. Ms. Psaki said the shipments to Mexico and Canada would essentially be a loan, with the United States receiving doses of AstraZeneca or other vaccines in the future.

The announcement came at a critical time in negotiations with Mexico. President Biden has moved quickly to dismantle some of former President Donald J. Trump’s signature immigration policies, including halting construction of a border wall, stopping the swift expulsion of children at the border and proposing a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants.

But he is clinging to a central element of Mr. Trump’s agenda: relying on Mexico to restrain a wave of people making their way to the United States.

Anticipating a surge of migrants and the most apprehensions by American agents at the border in two decades, Mr. Biden asked President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico in a video call this month whether more could be done to help solve the problem, according to Mexican officials and another person briefed on the conversation.

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U.S. Will Send Vaccines to Canada and Mexico

On Thursday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the Biden administration would deliver vaccines to Mexico and Canada. Asked if the agreement to lend doses to Mexico was tied to commitments made in ongoing border security talks, she said discussions about the two issues were “unrelated.”

“The pandemic knows no borders, and ensuring our neighbors can contain the virus is a mission critical step, is mission critical to ending the pandemic. Many countries, as you know, have already requested, have requested the have already approved AstraZeneca and also have requested our doses from the United States. That includes Canada and Mexico, but is certainly not limited to Canada and Mexico.” “Were there expectations set with the Mexicans that they help deal with the situation on the border?” “There have, there have been expectations set outside of — unrelated to any vaccine doses or request for them that they would be partners in dealing with the crisis on the border. And there have been requests unrelated that — four doses of these vaccines, every relationship has multiple layers of conversations that are happening at the same time.” “You didn’t rule out or the United States isn’t ruling out using our vaccine stockpile.” “I’m actually, I’m actually trying to convey that with every country, there’s rarely just one issue you’re discussing with any country at one time. Right? Certainly that’s not the case with Mexico. It’s not the case with any country around the world. And so, I wouldn’t read into it more than our ability to provide, to lend vaccine doses of a vaccine that we have some available supply on to a neighboring country where there is a lot of traffic that goes back and forth between the countries.”

The two presidents also discussed the possibility of the United States sending Mexico some of its surplus vaccine supply, a senior Mexican official said.

At a news briefing on Thursday, Ms. Psaki said that the discussions over vaccines and border security between the United States and Mexico were “unrelated” but also “overlapping.”

Asked by a reporter if there were “strings attached” to the United States’ offer to lend vaccines to Mexico, Ms. Psaki replied that there had been “several diplomatic conversations — parallel conversations — many layers of conversations.”

Mexican officials also say the efforts to secure vaccines are separate from the negotiations over migration, and rejected the notion that a quid pro quo was involved.

“These are two separate issues,” Roberto Velasco, director general for the North America region at Mexico’s foreign ministry, said in a statement.

But Mexican officials acknowledge that relations between the United States and Mexico, which has suffered one of the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreaks, would be buoyed by a shipment of doses south.

“We look for a more humane migratory system and enhanced cooperation against Covid-19, for the benefit of our two countries and the region,” Mr. Velasco said.

President Biden and Democrats in Congress included more than $31 billion in federal aid for Native American governments and programs to help Indigenous people, who have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic.

The $1.9 trillion stimulus package that Mr. Biden signed into law last week contains billions in aid, a record level of assistance intended to help bolster health care and other services in some of the nation’s poorest communities.

The money, a crucial plank of Mr. Biden’s vow to address racial and economic inequities, is a potentially transformative lifeline for Native Americans. It is also a high-profile step toward more equitable treatment after centuries of treaty violations and failures by the U.S. government to live up to its obligations.

Mr. Biden signed the law last week, and on Monday the Senate confirmed Deb Haaland, who had been representing New Mexico in the House, as interior secretary, the first Native American woman to serve in the cabinet.

The new legislation, passed with no Republican votes, allocates $20 billion to Native governments. It also includes more than $6 billion for the Indian Health Service and other Native American health systems, including a $20 million fund for Native Hawaiians, as well as $1.2 billion for housing and more than $1.1 billion for primary, secondary and higher education programs.

The money comes on top of $8 billion allocated to Native governments by Congress last March in the $2.2 trillion stimulus law, and additional funding for health and education services in other relief legislation passed last year.

“Our promise to them has always been — on any of these issues — they will have a seat at the table,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said in an interview. “It’s essential that we’re listening to the specific issues.”

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, said during a floor speech that the legislation “takes us a giant step closer to fulfilling our trust responsibilities to all Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians.”

The aid comes after a year that devastated Native people across the country, as poverty, multigenerational housing and underlying health conditions contributed to the deadly spread of the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in August that Native Americans were disproportionately affected by the virus compared with their white counterparts in nearly half of states.

“There’s nothing more unjust than the way we currently treat Native people in the United States with whom we have treaty interest, and this was an opportunity for us to put our money where our mouth is,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee. “This is quite literally the biggest down payment in American history in the right direction, in the direction of justice.”

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

The authorities in Seoul, the South Korean capital, issued mixed messages on Thursday about a contentious plan to test all foreign workers in the city for the coronavirus, leading to criticisms that the proposal was xenophobic and discriminatory.

On Wednesday, the Seoul Metropolitan Government said that hundreds of thousands of foreigners in the city would be required to undergo testing after a spike in infections among foreign workers.

Officials said that all companies that employ at least one foreigner had 15 days from Wednesday to send their workers for testing or face fines of up to 2 million won, about $1,700.

The announcement was met with anger, and diplomats and Korean politicians called for the order to be revoked.

“The administrative order of the Seoul city government is an unfair racist act against foreigners, and it is so ridiculous,” Lee Sang-min, a lawmaker from the governing Democratic Party, wrote on Facebook. “It is a human rights violation that would disgrace South Korea internationally.”

But as some city officials insisted that the tests were mandatory, others indicated that they were recommended but not required.

An official in the city’s foreign-labor department said that although the city could not force foreign workers to take a test, those who did not get tested before the deadline could face financial penalties if they were later found to be infected. The penalties include paying for treatment for anyone they made sick.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government later walked back those claims and said all foreign workers in Seoul would be required to get a test, including unregistered foreign workers.

The mixed messages led to confusion, even as hundreds of workers flocked to designated testing sites across the city. The government said it could test up to 3,600 foreigners a day over the next two weeks.

Park Yoo-mi, a city quarantine officer, told reporters that a recent cluster among foreign workers had prompted the city to order the testing.

“The coronavirus cases of foreigners count 6.3 percent of entire cases in Seoul from January to March this year, and the number keeps increasing,” she said.

Last week, the authorities in Gyeonggi, the province that surrounds the capital, issued a similar order for foreign workers to undergo testing.

Graham Nelson, a political counselor at the British Embassy in Seoul, criticized the plan, likening discrimination to a disease.

“Both coronavirus and discrimination are fatal diseases,” he wrote on Twitter. “Many foreigners are expressing concerns on the movement of regions, including Gyeonggi province, Seoul city and South Jeolla province, requiring only foreigners for testing.”

In other developments around the world:

• The World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa on Thursday urged countries on the continent to continue with their inoculation campaigns, even as several European countries have paused the use of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine. The Democratic Republic of Congo followed suit this week, but Angola, Ethiopia and Ghana said they would go ahead with administering it. Several African public health experts said at a briefing on Thursday that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine far outweighed the risks.

• The number of new daily coronavirus cases in Turkey reached a new high of nearly 19,000 on Wednesday. The rise comes about two weeks after the government reopened restaurants and allowed more students to resume in-person classes. The spread of new variants has fueled the increase, with the variant that first originated in Britain the most prevalent, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said.

The pandemic is not just making many of us sick. It is also making virtually all of us lonelier, according to a Harvard report based on a national survey of 950 Americans issued in February.

The loneliest people, as a group, are young adults. And the second loneliest demographic appears to be older people, said the report’s lead researcher, Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Plus, the coronavirus has largely kept these generations apart, weakening a bond that researchers say is critical for the well-being of both.

On top of age-exclusive institutions like schools and retirement communities, and social media that often divides people into silos of their own peers, to a large extent “the generational twain stopped meeting,” said Marc Freedman, the founder of Encore.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that is engaged in projects that bring the generations together.

But lately he has seen signs that this is changing.

“There’s been a blossoming of creativity in bringing young and old together since the onset of the pandemic,” Mr. Freedman said. “The young themselves have initiated efforts to check in on elders, and deliver food and prescriptions.”

One such young adult is Ella Gardner, age 18, a student at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. Moved by the isolation of older people who have become housebound during the pandemic, she volunteered with the San Francisco-based nonprofit Mon Ami to shop and do chores for them.

She also extensively interviewed her grandfather on Zoom for an anthropology paper. “I asked him if he was going to get the vaccine,” she said, “and he chuckled and said, ‘I remember back when I was growing up and we had to get the polio vaccine — and look at me now, I’m still here.’”

Dr. Weissbourd believes that people in these two groups would feel a lot less isolated if they had more contact with one another.

“The elderly have so much to share with young people — wisdom about love, work, friendship, mortality and many other things,” he said. “And young people have so much to share with the elderly about a rapidly changing world — not just technology, but new and important ways of thinking about race and racism, justice, sexuality and gender and other critical issues.”

The U.S. government says it will reimburse families of Covid-19 victims for funeral expenses incurred after Jan. 20, 2020.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, best known for responding to hurricanes, floods and wildfires, said on Wednesday that it aimed to ease some of the financial stress caused by the coronavirus and that it would start reimbursing people next month.

“We are working with stakeholder groups to get their input on ways we can best provide this assistance, and to enlist their help with outreach to families and communities,” FEMA said in a statement. “In the meantime, people who have Covid-19 funeral expenses are encouraged to keep and gather documentation.”

To be eligible, the death must have occurred in the United States, including U.S. territories, and the death certificate must indicate that the death was attributed to Covid-19.

More than 537,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the United States. And the pandemic has disproportionately affected the poorest in society, with those in the lower economic strata more likely not only to catch the virus, but also to die from it.

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New York to Expand Reopening of Sports and Arts Venues

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said on Thursday that outdoor performing arts and sports venues seating more than 2,500 people, and indoor venues seating more than 1,500, can open at limited capacity April 1.

Currently, travel for sports is limited to contiguous counties and regions. Starting next Monday, March 29, statewide travel for sports and recreational activities will be performed OK; second, outdoor performing arts are starting April 1, 2,500-plus capacity venues — live concerts, shows can open at 20 percent capacity. As the Covid rates continue to improve, the capacity will continue to increase. April 1, sports venues with 1,500-plus indoor or 2,500-plus outdoor capacity — indoor will do 10 percent capacity. Outdoor will do 20 percent capacity — we’ll have testing required when we open. If you get your vaccine that’s — I have my card, I can go to a game as soon as it opens. You can take a rapid test, you can take a PCR test, but we’re going to have testing as a precaution. As time moves on and as our experience grows, and we see how the games work, we then, right away, do what’s called contact tracing, where we follow up on the game to see if anybody got infected, etc. And I think you’re going to see the capacity increase and the testing requirements decrease as we get more evidence. But we want to start safe.

New York will allow sports and performing arts venues that seat more than 2,500 people outdoors to open at limited capacity starting on April 1, just in time for the Yankees’ first home game of the season, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Thursday.

The state will also allow indoor venues that seat more than 1,500 people to open at 10 percent capacity.

The governor’s announcement, which he made with Yankees and Mets officials in attendance, is the latest in a slate of recent reopening steps he has taken, even as the virus remains persistent in the state.

On Monday, the state will allow indoor fitness classes to resume statewide, including in New York City, where local officials have raised objections. Movie theaters in the city were also allowed to reopen earlier this month after being closed for nearly a year. And on Friday, the city’s restaurants will be allowed to serve at half their maximum capacity indoors while outside New York City, indoor dining can increase to 75 percent capacity.

“Spring is a new season,” Mr. Cuomo said on Thursday. “And it is a new attitude.”

The governor has pointed to falling rates of positive test results, virus-related deaths and hospitalizations to explain the reopenings.

All three measures are dramatically lower than they were last spring, when the first wave of virus cases swept into the state and devastated New York City in particular.

But according to a New York Times database, New York State is adding new virus cases at the second-highest rate in the country. As of Wednesday, the state was reporting an average of 36 new virus cases a day for every 100,000 residents over the last week, trailing only New Jersey, at 41 cases per 100,000. (The nation as a whole was averaging 17 new cases per 100,000 people.)

New York City, home to the state’s two Major League Baseball teams, is adding new cases at 44 cases per 100,000 — a per capita rate more than five times higher than that of Los Angeles County — though average hospitalizations have dropped by nearly half in the last month.

According to the city’s health data, the weekly average positive test rate has hovered near 6.5 percent for the last several days and has not dropped below 6 percent in more than three months. City officials have said new virus variants have likely kept the positivity rate from falling further, and on Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said questions about the variants were a reason to delay the state’s reopening plans.

Though New York State’s number of virus-related hospitalizations remains lower than it was at the start of the year, when the state was experiencing a surge linked to holiday gatherings, it remains significantly higher than it was last summer, when the state had more stringent restrictions in place.

As of Wednesday, 4,582 people were hospitalized, down from a recent peak of 8,991 on Jan. 21, according to the state’s data. On Aug. 30, the state recorded just 418 hospitalizations.

Virus-related deaths have followed a similar trend. As of Wednesday, the state averaged 89 deaths a day over the past seven days, according to the Times database, compared to 198 on Jan. 20.

Mr. Cuomo pointed to the sustained decline over recent months as a cause for optimism.

“Covid’s coming down. Vaccine rates are going up,” Mr. Cuomo said Thursday. “Start to look to the future aggressively, and let’s get back to life and living. And get that economy running, because it is safe.”

He has also left the state’s mask mandate in place and has required businesses that reopen to meet significant capacity limits, safety requirements and social distancing protocol.

At sporting events, attendees will be required to provide a negative coronavirus test result or proof that they have been vaccinated, similar to requirements the state put in place for a Buffalo Bills playoff game in January, Mr. Cuomo said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released its guidance for people in the United States who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, which is two weeks after the second dose in the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine or two weeks after the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. It allows for the resumption of some activities in private settings between fully vaccinated people in small groups or a fully vaccinated household with one other unvaccinated household. It emphasized how fully vaccinated people should keep following health and safety precautions in public, including wearing a mask.

Most people who recover from Covid-19 remain shielded from the virus for at least six months, researchers reported on Wednesday in a large study from Denmark.

Prior infection reduced the chances of a second bout by about 80 percent in people under 65 and by about half in those older than 65. But those results, published in the journal Lancet, were tempered by many caveats.

The number of infected older people in the study was small. The researchers did not have any information beyond the test results, so it’s possible that only people who were mildly ill the first time became infected again and that the second infections were largely symptom-free.

Scientists have said that reinfections are likely to be asymptomatic or mild, because the immune system will suppress the virus before it can do much damage. The researchers also did not assess the possibility of reinfection with newer variants of the virus.

Still, the study suggests that immunity to a natural infection is unpredictable and uneven, and it underscores the importance of vaccinating everyone — especially older people, experts said.

“You can certainly not rely on a past infection as protecting you from being ill again, and possibly quite ill if you are in the elderly segment,” said Steen Ethelberg, an epidemiologist at Denmark’s public health agency.

For some writers stuck at home during the pandemic, online meet-ups have been a way to hold themselves accountable with their craft — a variation on the traditional writing group that includes not just discussions and feedback, but also focused quiet time.

Such informal gatherings have flourished as people who once shied away from writing groups — because of the time commitment, commute or intimidation factor of a room full of aspiring authors — are finding that the pandemic has lowered the barriers to entry.

“The idea of a writing community in New York is very scary,” said Hannah Pasternak, 25, an editor at Self magazine who started a group last March, around the time that many offices in New York City were closing because of the pandemic. “You feel like everybody is better than you, or everybody has a book deal and you don’t, or everybody is published in X magazine or Y magazine.”

The number of writing groups and people involved with them are difficult to count, because formats and membership vary so widely, but participants said the groups had been thriving over the past year.

Some are led by one or a few people, while some are organized by the group. Many are free, though some teachers lead groups and charge for them. Some are focused on “accountability” and keeping members writing, while others are more reflective and conversational.

Groups offering silent writing time are common, and sometimes tied to institutions. London Writers’ Salon and Gotham Writers Workshop charge $100 to more than $400 for some of their classes, and also run free hourlong writing sessions.

For some, joining a group isn’t about trying to write a book or pursue a career in writing. Hannah Zweig, 26, a client solutions manager at Nielsen, minored in creative writing in college but didn’t keep up with it until the pandemic gave her a freer schedule. She joined Ms Pasternak’s group in April and initially used the sessions to journal about her feelings and experiences around the pandemic. Now, she mostly uses the time to write poetry.

“I honestly hadn’t done a lot of writing since college, and it made me kind of sad,” Ms. Zweig said. “I had no reason to write and to stretch myself in that way, so I think it’s reignited my ability to write and my appreciation for good writing.”

Homelessness in the United States rose for the fourth straight year, with about 580,000 people living on the streets or in temporary shelter at the start of 2020, according to an annual nationwide survey that was completed before the pandemic.

But the report, which was released on Thursday, almost certainly underestimates the spread, depth and urgency of the crisis, and not by a little, federal officials warned.

The report showed a 2.2 percent increase in homelessness from the previous year, but that does not reflect the displacement of people who lost work as a result of the sharp downturn caused by the coronavirus.

“I can’t give you numbers on how much homelessness has increased during the pandemic, but we know it has increased,” Marcia L. Fudge, who was confirmed last week as President Biden’s secretary of housing and urban development, said during a briefing at the White House.

She called the situation “devastating,” and said the country had a “moral responsibility” to address both long-term homelessness and hardships spurred by the coronavirus.

HUD officials say the effect on homelessness might not be known for years. Nationwide moratoriums on evictions, which have been in place since last spring and are scheduled to expire this year, have slowed the pace of displacement, although a Government Accountability Office report released this week showed the programs were not universally effective.

Ms. Fudge, a former Democratic congresswoman from Ohio, set an ambitious goal during her briefing: to reduce the number of homeless people by 130,000 using additional resources provided to her department under Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill.

The package includes $21.55 billion for emergency rental assistance, $5 billion in emergency housing vouchers for families displaced by the pandemic’s economic fallout, $5 billion for homelessness assistance and $850 million for tribal and rural housing.

But Ms. Fudge said that funding, while welcome, was a fraction of what was needed to address the crisis once and for all.

Asked how much was needed, she replied, “$70 to $100 billion” — roughly double the department’s annual budget for all its programs.

Even before the pandemic, homelessness was re-emerging as a major national problem, especially in big cities. The country’s two biggest cities, New York and Los Angeles, account for a quarter of all homeless people counted in the 2020 survey.

The annual snapshot count, taken on a single night in January 2020, signaled worrying trends: For the first time in years, homelessness among veterans and families — two groups targeted by recent federal housing efforts — did not improve.

Homelessness affects Black and Latino communities with disproportionate force. About 40 percent of people counted were Black, compared with their 13 percent representation in the population, and nearly a quarter of homeless people self-identified as Latino, a group that makes up about 18 percent of all Americans.

The number of people living on the street, the most visible reminder of a crisis that also plays out in shelters and among “couch people” forced to move in with family or friends, is also rising.

For the first time since the nationwide survey of homelessness was released in February 2007, the number of single adults living on the street, 209,000, was greater than the number of people counted in shelters, which was around 199,500.

One out of every six homeless people, about 106,000, were under the age of 18. A majority live in shelters. But 11,000 live at least part of the time outside, without shelter, the report found.

For the first time in nearly a year, Iowa is reporting that there are no active coronavirus outbreaks in any of the state’s long-term care facilities.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 2,200 residents of those facilities have died from the virus, according to Iowa’s Covid-19 dashboard.

But the rate of outbreaks began a steep decline in January, when the state ramped up vaccinations for residents and staff.

In the first two weeks of January alone, cases declined 70 percent, from 410 to 119 by mid-January, according to the Iowa Health Care Association. Of the state’s 445 skilled nursing homes and 258 assisted living facilities, 146 were experiencing outbreaks in December.

“This is a big milestone,” said Nola Aigner Davis, the public health communications officer for the Polk County Health Department in Des Moines. “It really speaks volumes of how effective this vaccine is.”

For much of the pandemic, residents and employees in nursing homes have been some of the most vulnerable people in the country.

The coronavirus, as of late February, had scythed through more than 31,000 long-term care facilities and killed at least 172,000 people living and working there. More than 1.3 million long-term care residents and workers have been infected over the past year.

Of Iowa’s 5,673 deaths, nearly 60 percent were people over the age of 80.

That has changed, however, with the advent of vaccinations.

Facilities for the elderly were given early priority for shots, and from late December to early February, a New York Times analysis found, new cases among nursing home residents — a subset of long-term care residents — fell by more than 80 percent. That was about double the rate of improvement in the general population.

And even as fatalities were peaking in the general population, deaths inside the facilities decreased by more than 65 percent.

About 4.8 million residents and employees in long-term care facilities have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 2.8 million have been fully vaccinated.

Asian-American lawmakers warned the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday that the nation had reached a “crisis point” amid a sharp increase in discrimination and violence targeting the Asian community, in the first congressional hearing on the issue held in over three decades.

They described the fear and trauma rippling through the Asian-American community, and they argued that the uptick in attacks on Asian-Americans was a direct result of the rise of anti-China messaging stoked during the coronavirus pandemic.

“You can say racist, stupid stuff if you want, but I’m asking you to please stop using racist terms like ‘Kung flu’ or ‘Wuhan virus’ or other ethnic identifiers in describing this virus,” Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, told Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas. “I am not a virus. And when you say things like that, it hurts the Asian-American community.”

Mr. Lieu’s comments came after Mr. Roy, one of the top Republicans on the judiciary panel, used his introductory remarks to issue a lengthy condemnation of the Chinese government’s handling of the coronavirus and asserted that objections to what he categorized as nothing more than hawkish messaging about China amounted to “policing” of free speech.

“There’s old sayings in Texas about, you know, ‘find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree.’ You know, we take justice very seriously, and we ought to do that — round up all the bad guys,” Mr. Roy said in comments that drew outrage on Twitter. “My concern about this hearing is it seems to want to venture into the policing of rhetoric.”

The hearing, which was scheduled weeks ago, came on the heels of a mass shooting in which a white gunman killed eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors. Six of the victims were of Asian descent.

Representative Grace Meng, Democrat of New York, said rhetoric like Mr. Roy’s puts “a bull’s-eye on the back of Asian-Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids.”

The exchanges reflected the deeply partisan fault lines that have emerged around the issue of anti-China messaging, as Republicans have continued to mimic xenophobic phrases used by former President Donald J. Trump and as lawmakers in both parties have taken an increasingly combative tone toward the Chinese government.

Attacks targeting Asian-Americans — many of them women or elderly — have increased nearly 150 percent in the past year, experts testified on Thursday. Americans of Asian descent have reported being slashed across the face with a box cutter, burned by thrown chemicals, punched in the face and shoved to the ground.

Lawmakers and experts testified that it was crucial to view the recent spate of violence against a systemic history of anti-Asian bias in the United States, including the lynchings of Chinese immigrants in the 19th century, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the World War II-era internment camps for Japanese-Americans.