Nation & World Glance
Debate begins for who’s first in line for COVID-19 vaccine
Who gets to be first in line for a COVID-19 vaccine? U.S. health authorities hope by late next month to have some draft guidance on how to ration initial doses, but it’s a vexing decision.
“Not everybody’s going to like the answer,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently told one of the advisory groups the government asked to help decide. “There will be many people who feel that they should have been at the top of the list.”
Traditionally, first in line for a scarce vaccine are health workers and the people most vulnerable to the targeted infection.
But Collins tossed new ideas into the mix: Consider geography and give priority to people where an outbreak is hitting hardest.
And don’t forget volunteers in the final stage of vaccine testing who get dummy shots, the comparison group needed to tell if the real shots truly work. As school begins amid virus, parents see few good options
WOODSTOCK, Ga. – John Barrett plans to keep his daughter home from elementary school this year in suburban Atlanta, but he wishes she were going. Molly Ball is sending her teenage sons to school in the same district on Monday, but not without feelings of regret.
As the academic year begins in many places across the country this week, parents are faced with the difficult choice of whether to send their children to school or keep them home for remote learning because of the coronavirus pandemic. Many are unhappy with either option.
“I definitely think it’s healthy for a child to go back to school,” said Ball, who feels her sons, William and Henry, both at River Ridge High School in Georgia’s Cherokee County district, suffered through enough instability in the spring. “At the same time, I wish they weren’t going back to school right now. It’s very scary.”
Offering parents choices eases some of the problems facing schools. If some students stay home, that creates more space in buildings and on buses.
But the number of families with a choice has dwindled as the virus’s spread has prompted school districts to scrap in-person classes – at least to start the academic year – in cities including Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, as well as parts of the South and Midwest where school is starting this week.
Orphaned toddler grows up in shadow of massacre,
coronavirus
An infant boy who survived a shooting last year that left his parents and 21 others dead now likes to thumb through picture books and dance to a Batman jingle with his grandmother, according to an uncle who helps care for the 1-year-old.
It will be years before Paul Anchondo learns what happened to his parents in an event that many El Paso residents still struggle to comprehend, Tito Anchondo said. Anchondo’s brother Andre and sister-in-law Jordan died in the shooting at a Walmart store.
“We’ve been putting collections together of my brother’s photos, his accomplishments, basically trying to get as much information that we can and save it for” the boy, Tito Anchondo said. “When he does get to that age, we can tell him, ‘You know what, like, this is what happened to your dad . ... Something horrible happened to your mom and dad. But, you know, we’re still here.’”