CDC changes schools stance and lets kids sit closer
The revised recommendations represent a turn away from the 6-foot standard, which has sharply limited how many students some schools can accommodate.
Students can safely sit just 3 feet apart in the classroom as long as they wear masks but should be kept the usual 6 feet away from one another at sporting events, assemblies, lunch or chorus practice, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday in relaxing its COVID-19 guidelines.
The revised recommendations represent a turn away from the 6-foot standard, which has sharply limited how many students some schools can accommodate. Some places have had to remove desks, stagger schedules and take other steps to keep children apart.
Three feet “gives school districts greater flexibility to have more students in for a prolonged period of time,” said Kevin Quinn, director of maintenance and facilities at Mundelein High School in suburban Chicago.
In recent months, schools in some states have been disregarding the CDC guidelines, using 3 feet as their standard. Studies of what happened in some of them helped sway the agency, said Greta Massetti, who leads the CDC’s community interventions task force.
“We don’t really have the evidence that 6 feet is required in order to maintain low spread,” she said. Also, younger children are less likely to get seriously ill from the coronavirus and don’t seem to spread it as much as adults do, and “that allows us that confidence that that 3 feet of physical distance is safe.”
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the revised recommendations are a “roadmap to help schools reopen safely, and remain open, for in-person instruction.” She said in-person schooling gives
The administration has increased the supply from 900,000 doses administered per day to nearly 3 million since Jan. 20 when President Joe Biden took office.
But demand remains so high that governors, mayors and public-health officials say it is still not enough.
“Through March, the vaccine supplies have been almost flat as the ability to administer supplies grew,” Yolanda Richardson, secretary of the Government Operations Agency in California, said Thursday. “Unfortunately, like every state in the nation, we have been getting less vaccine than we need.”
California expects to receive 1.8 million doses a week over the next two weeks.
“In April, we expect that to change,” Richardson said. “We are expecting a sharp increase in vaccines starting just in the first week of April.”
In North Carolina, public health officials have been told to expect J&J shipments to resume the weeks of March 29 and April 5 and that 4 million to 6 million doses will be available nationwide each week.
And in Florida, Gov.
Ron DeSantis said he is not expecting any shipments of the J&J vaccine
“for the next two or three weeks.” The state’s top vaccine official said shipments of the Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were expected to remain flat – just shy of 500,000 first doses per week – for the remainder of March.
The Biden administration pushed out J&J’s entire inventory of 3.9 million vaccines once the product received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration at the end of
February.
“J&J has communicated that the supply will be limited for the next couple of weeks,” Jeff Zients, coordinator of the White House COVID-19 response team, said at the time. “The company then expects to deliver approximately 16 million additional doses by the end of March.”
FEMA SITES CLOSING
The lull in supply comes as the Federal Emergency Management Agency is
winding down several vaccination mega-sites in four of Florida’s metropolitan areas — Miami, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville.
Mary Hudak, a FEMA spokesperson, said the site closures weren’t tied to an ebb in vaccine supply. The sites were set up for administering three weeks of first doses and three weeks of second doses, she said.
The Biden administration has said that other FEMA sites throughout the
country would operate temporarily. One mass vaccination site opening at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta is only planning to stay open for eight weeks.
Two FEMA-supported mass vaccination sites opened in Oakland and Los Angeles in mid-February, with the goal to vaccinate up to 6,000 Californians at each location per day.
By March 11, the California Department of Public Health announced that more than 67% of the doses had gone to underserved Californians as part of the state’s effort to increase vaccination in hard-hit communities.
California Office of Emergency Services spokesman Brian Ferguson said the sites are nearly six weeks into the twomonth mission they were approved to complete.
Ferguson said the state has an interest in extending the timeline, but that it’s ultimately up to the federal government to approve the request.
“(The sites) have been really successful,” Ferguson said, adding that about 400,000 doses have been administered through the partnership. “We think it’s a good model.”
Zients, on a call with reporters Friday, was unable to provide details on specific federal sites, or how long they are supposed to remain open.
“But I can say across the board, these sites are really an important opportunity to increase the number of places where Americans can get vaccinated,” he said.
“We’re now well over a million doses administered at the federal sites. The federal sites are seen as very well run, and importantly, not only efficiently and effectively delivering vaccines, but doing so in an equitable way,” he said. “The plan is for the federal sites to continue.”