Laura Ungar and Samantha Young
Kaiser Health News
California mom Megan Bacigalupi has had enough. She wants her kindergartner and second-grader back in their Oakland classrooms.
But the coronavirus is spreading too quickly to open schools in Alameda County, based on current state standards. And the local teachers union hasn’t agreed to go back – even after teachers have been vaccinated. So she expects her kids will be logging on to school from home for a while.
“The impediments to opening are just too great,” said Bacigalupi, who is lobbying California lawmakers to establish firm, statewide health metrics that, once met, would require schools to open. “In the end, it comes down to a lack of political will to get the kids back in the classroom.”
USA TODAY
In late December, the idea that safe, effective vaccines against COVID-19 had been created in less than a year seemed miraculous – a triumph of science and American ingenuity.
It took only six weeks to tarnish that image.
Pride in the remarkable feat has been replaced by confusion, accusations of unfairness, frustrating waits and the nightmare of vaccine vials gathering dust while tens of thousands of people die of what is now a preventable disease.
Even people leading the effort are at a loss to explain how and why things took such a bad turn so fast. I would love to understand it, said Moncef Slaoui, head of the vaccine development effort under the Trump administration and an adviser to the Biden administration.
In Alamogordo, New Mexico, Florence Nightingale is known for being a bit cantankerous.
She’s an older, bigger lady and when she stops working, she often needs some gentle coaxing before she’ll start again. The coronavirus pandemic has pushed her to the brink, and working so much overtime depleted her tank. She spent the holiday break getting some much-needed pampering.
Flo, as her friends call her, is a 40-foot Winnebago turned into a mobile nurse s station. She s Alamogordo Public Schools most lauded health care provider, purchased with CARES funding.
Her most frequent passenger? School nurse Lisa Patch, who is also the health services director for the rural school district just 80 miles from the Mexican border.
Lori Torres was nervous about returning to teaching in-person this week in Chicago. Torres, 47, teaches Spanish to all grades at her preK-8 school and has a medical condition that puts her at increased risk for COVID-19, but her request to continue to teach from home hadn t been approved.
Her short-term concern was addressed when the Chicago Teachers Union voted to stay remote while union and city leaders haggled over the safety of working conditions in buildings.
But Torres long-term concern – getting a vaccine before she returns to Monroe Elementary School – is unresolved.
Chicago Public Schools vaccination schedule for teachers won t start until mid-February – and the district wants staff and students back before that. Some teachers in Chicago s suburbs, meanwhile, already have received vaccinations.
New U.S cases of the coronavirus have fallen 35% from their Jan. 11 peak, a USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins University data shows. The average number of daily cases has fallen to about 162,000, from 249,000.
And there are positive signs for hospitalization: The COVID Tracking Project said Wednesday that the number of people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 is decreasing in every major US region. About 107,000 Americans were hospitalized because of the virus Tuesday, down from a peak of more than 130,000 three weeks ago.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said this week that the improvement in numbers appears to be the result of “natural peaking and then plateauing” after a holiday surge, rather than an effect of the rollout of vaccines that began in mid-December.