Alabama schools set to fully reopen as child COVID-19 hospitalizations nearly triple in a week A surge of COVID-19 cases is rapidly engulfing Alabama, fueled by the Delta variant, low vaccination rates and the abandonment of all mitigation measures. With schools just weeks away from beginning the year fully in-person as the vast majority of children remain unvaccinated and school mask mandates are being ditched statewide, the fall is on course to be a deadly semester. Dr. Brytney Cobia of Birmingham summarized the situation to AL.com, “All these kids are about to go back to school. No mask mandates are in place at all, 70 percent of Alabama is unvaccinated. Of course, no kids are vaccinated for the most part because they can’t be… So it feels like impending doom, basically.”