San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Biden team eyes contingency plan for looming wave
The White House is stepping up its warnings about a coronavirus surge this fall and winter and is making contingency plans for how it will provide vaccines to the American public if Congress does not allocate more money for the COVID-19 response.
With prospects for a fresh round of emergency coronavirus aid appearing shaky on Capitol Hill, administration officials met last week with key senators — including two leading Republicans — to press their case. Democrats have been contemplating wrapping COVID-19 aid into another emergency package for Ukraine, but it was unclear whether they will do so. The White House has been asking Congress for $22.5 billion in emergency aid to continue responding to the pandemic, but Republicans have insisted on a much lower number — $10 billion — and have stripped $5 billion in global aid from the request. Republicans are also insisting that the Biden administration suspend its plans to lift a public health order known as Title 42, which authorities have used to deport asylum-seekers during the pandemic.
The Biden administration is preparing for the possibility that 100 million Americans — roughly 30% of the population — will get infected with the coronavirus this fall and winter, according to an administration official, who spoke to the New York Times on condition of anonymity.
The administration’s goal is to prevent a spike in hospitalizations and deaths. One way that might be accomplished would be to revive mask mandates, the official said.
If Congress does not approve more money for the domestic response, the official said, the administration would use funds designated for testing and therapeutics to develop a bare-bones vaccination program that would cover just older Americans and those with compromised immune systems. Officials have said they cannot provide enough boosters for the general population in the fall without more funding.
Both Moderna and Pfizer are now working on “bivalent vaccines” that can protect against some known variants. If those vaccines are authorized by federal regulators in time, and a substantial number of Americans take them or get booster shots that are already authorized, the official said, the fatality rate should drop to less than 0.1% of people who get infected. But if access to vaccines is limited, the United States could see hundreds of thousands of deaths, the official said.
Crowds line up in New York City’s Times Square in March to buy theater tickets. Most Broadway theater operators stopped checking the vaccination status of their patrons last week.
demand,” said Debby Soo, chief executive officer of OpenTable. “It’s typically one of the biggest dining days of the year. We expect this year to be bigger than ever.”
Some cities, especially in warm regions in the South and the West, are seeing an even sharper increase in Mother’s Day reservations, tracked up to April 18, compared with the same period ahead of the 2019 holiday. Scottsdale, Ariz., has seen a 168% jump in reservations; in Orlando the increase is 117%, in Austin, Texas, it’s 108%. In Las Vegas there’s been an 82% uptick.
A major reason for the increase in reservations is that customers have been forced to plan ahead to get into increasingly crowded dining rooms. From March 21 to April 20 this year, walk-ins dropped by 10% compared with the same time period in 2019, according to OpenTable.
Resy, the reservation platform owned by American Express Co., is also seeing a higher rate of bookings. Reservations
for Mother’s Day this year are outpacing the 2019 holiday, according to a Resy spokesperson.
into crowded theaters without the assurance that their seatmates were vaccinated, and several nonprofit Broadway theaters continue to require proof of vaccination.
“I just don’t feel as safe as I have the past several months,” said Lauren Broyles of Hershey, Pa., who visited New York to see shows several times during the winter but said she had stopped planning a summer theater trip after reading that Broadway dropped its vaccine mandate.
The changes to safety protocols come as Broadway yearns for a profitable spring. More than a dozen shows opened last month, a major, risky bet for a theater industry trying to bounce back from a rough winter in which the virus forced a number of shows to cancel performances during the crucial holiday period and others to close prematurely.
Theater operators were among the first to require customers to show proof of vaccines and to wear masks.