Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/us/coronavirus-today-masks.html

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This is the Coronavirus Briefing, an informed guide to the pandemic. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.

As India’s virus caseload reaches new highs, its vaccination drive is faltering.

New York City’s mayor wants the city to “fully reopen” on July 1.

France set a timeline to emerge from its third lockdown.

Get the latest updates here, as well as maps and a vaccine tracker.

The new mask guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which says that vaccinated people can go barefaced in most outdoor settings, is a baby step back to normalcy. But after the trauma of the past year, many Americans are finding it difficult to uncover their faces so quickly — let alone return to their old ways.

Do we shake hands now? Hug? Dine indoors? These are questions made more complicated by ever-changing rules, which can vary from state to state and even among neighborhoods.

Some of us have also found that masks are useful for things other than preventing infection. They can keep our faces warm in the winter, help introverts hide in plain sight and allow us to lip-sync a Dua Lipa anthem during a workout without embarrassment. Not to mention helping us let go of vanity and save time. “It saves me having to put on sunscreen and wear lipstick,” said Sara J. Becker, an associate professor at the Brown University School of Public Health.

Dr. Susan Huang, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California, Irvine, medical school, said that the conflicted psychology around mask wearing is a function of rapidly changing risk, and differences in risk tolerance. While about a third of the country is fully vaccinated, we are still nowhere near the roughly 80 percent needed to reach herd immunity.

“We’re between the darkness and the light,” Huang said, likening the psychology around masks to the different ways people choose to dress in spring. People who are more risk averse continue to wear winter clothes on 50-degree days, while bigger risk takers might choose shorts.

“Eventually,” she said, “everyone will be wearing shorts.”

My colleague Ginia Bellafante, who writes about New York City, noticed that people in her Brooklyn neighborhood were also reluctant to shed their masks, either because they were traumatized after relatives fell ill, or had people in their lives who were unvaccinated or living with underlying conditions.

“Whatever happens, many of us will not be able to let go of the fear and insularity that the pandemic has brought,” she wrote. “Even the fully vaccinated are, in many instances, still choosing outdoor seating when they go out to eat.”

At least for now, Ginia continued, some of us are “hostages still beholden to the demands of our captor.”

Perhaps more than any other population, nursing-home residents and staff have borne the brunt of the pandemic. In the U.S., deaths in long-term care facilities account for nearly a third of all the country’s Covid deaths. The pandemic also kept nursing-home residents and their loved ones apart for a year, and that isolation ignited its own physical and mental health crisis.

As nursing-home facilities open up, families are once again being let in, and photographers for The Times were there to document the reunions.

In The Morning newsletter, David Leonhardt explains why the U.S. vaccination program has declined by 20 percent in the past two weeks.

New social science research suggests that a set of deeply held beliefs is at the heart of many people’s resistance to vaccines, complicating efforts to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control.

More than 100 colleges across the U.S. will require students to receive coronavirus vaccines to attend in-person classes next fall.

Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, are expected to apply to get European Union approval of their vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds.

People in Detroit who take residents for vaccinations will earn $50 per person, per shot, the Detroit Free Press reports.

More than half of U.S. states have seen a significant decline in new virus cases over the past two weeks, suggesting that the virus’s trajectory is improving.

Turkey is bracing for its strictest lockdown yet, as the virus surges and vaccinations lag.

With Covid deaths soaring to record highs in Pakistan this week, the government has sent troops to the streets to help enforce coronavirus precautions, and is warning it may impose a lockdown.

In The Times Opinion section, a professor of public policy uses math — the principle of exponential decay — to demonstrate how U.S. case numbers should drop sooner than we might think.

Retailers are adapting to new U.S. shopping habits, sometimes by raising prices.

The Times asked readers to share their visions for life after the pandemic, whenever it arrives. Here’s a look at 18 of those plans.

Let us know how you’re dealing with the pandemic. Send us a response here, and we may feature it in an upcoming newsletter.

Email your thoughts to briefing@nytimes.com.