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(NEW YORK) — Several states have reinstated indoor mask mandates as the delta variant continues to rip across the country, but others have fiercely resisted and imposed bans on such rules.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a guidance update late July that vaccinated people may be able to spread COVID-19 and should resume wearing masks in public indoor settings in areas with high transmission levels, a reversal of May’s guidance that said they didn’t need to mask up. The unvaccinated are still urged to wear masks in public.

The guidance also called for universal masking in schools — a contentious issue that has triggered a slew of lawsuits.

Masking has long been a divisive issue, despite science indicating that face coverings are “critical” in the battle against transmitting the disease, according to the CDC. At the same time, misinformation about face coverings has proliferated and changing guidance has added to the confusion.

Currently, at least four states and Puerto Rico have indoor mask mandates for the vaccinated and unvaccinated: Oregon, Nevada, Hawaii, Louisiana.

Most states have not issued new mandates — focusing on vaccination instead — but a number, including California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Washington, have recommended constituents follow the CDC’s guidance. Each state’s guidelines vary slightly.

On the other hand, the idea of masking up once again, has been met with resistance in some places.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, said the CDC guidance on masks “will unfortunately only diminish confidence in the vaccine and create more challenges for public health officials.” Other officials have argued against mask mandates, citing arguments like parental freedom.

Worry over delta variant

Concern is mounting over the surge of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations among children, now at their most dire level yet in the entire pandemic.

Nearly 94,000 new child COVID-19 cases were reported last week, with the worst numbers in Louisiana and Florida, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) reported.

Nationwide, COVID-19 has surged at an alarming rate in recent weeks. The daily COVID-19 case average in the U.S. has surged to more than 113,000, up by 24.3% in the last week, according to the latest federal data. Hospitalizations have also soared, hitting its highest point in six months with more than 75,000 patients currently hospitalized across the country with COVID-19.

So far, 59% of the US population over the age of 12 is fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. There is still no vaccine authorized for kids under the age of 12.

A number of states — Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Virginia and Washington state — have also called for masking in schools.

But efforts to ban masks in schools in several states, such as Florida, Texas, South Carolina and Arkansas, have sparked bitter backlash and legal battles.

Kentucky and Arkansas

In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, signed an executive order Tuesday requiring masks for all schools, a move immediately slammed by state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican.

Cameron filed a response to the mask mandate in schools on Wednesday with the Kentucky Supreme Court, arguing the governor’s order goes against laws passed in the General Assembly this year. He accused the governor of engaging “in an unlawful exercise of power by issuing his executive order,” in a statement.

Earlier this year lawmakers passed bills to restrict the governor’s power to mandate health restrictions like masks. He vetoed the legislation, but was overturned, and Beshear filed a lawsuit. Now the case is pending a Supreme Court decision, which has yet to hand down a ruling.

In a press conference Tuesday, Beshear cited grim COVID-19 numbers as the reason for the mandate, as the state reported 2,500 new COVID-19 cases, with 490 among individuals 18-years-old and younger, that day.

“We cannot keep our kids in school if we’re unwilling to put on a mask,” Beshear said. “It’s everywhere, and we all need to act like we’re in that red zone.”

In Arkansas, the state’s Department of Education recommended students wear masks in schools on Tuesday, in line with the CDC guidance, but didn’t mandate it.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, said earlier this month that he regrets signing an April law banning mask mandates as virus infections surged among unvaccinated youth.

He called on lawmakers to consider rolling back the ban for schools but faced fierce opposition among his GOP peers. Last week, a judge temporarily blocked the state from enforcing that law, saying it violates the state’s constitution, and several schools have since announced mask requirements, local ABC affiliate KATV reported.

Hutchinson said he supports the judge’s decision.

“It is conservative, reasonable and compassionate to allow local school districts to protect those students who are under 12 and not eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine,” he said on masking in schools last week.

Texas

Meanwhile in Texas, at least two districts, Austin ISD and Dallas ISD, have defied Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s May executive order banning mask mandates.

The Southern Center for Child Advocacy, a nonprofit education group, filed a lawsuit Sunday night in Travis County against the ban, seeking to give power to local districts to decide for themselves. No response has been filed in that case yet.

The ban has faced litigation from city and county officials in Dallas and Bexar counties. The Harris County Attorney also announced Tuesday plans to take legal action against Abbott’s ban on mask mandates, though but documents have not yet been filed.

“First responders and school leaders are speaking out and standing up as delta ravages our community. We have their back,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said in a statement Tuesday. “Protecting the community during an emergency is a duty, not an option for government leaders.”

On Tuesday two separate state district judges granted local authorities in those counties temporary power to issue mask mandates on Tuesday, the Texas Tribune reported. Both decisions are temporary and pending hearings later this month.

The following day the governor and state Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a petition to halt the judge’s order in Dallas County. “Any school district, public university, or local government official that decides to defy GA-38—which prohibits gov’t entities from mandating masks—will be taken to court,” Abbott said in a statement.

“Removing government mandates, however, does not end personal responsibility or the importance of caring for family members, friends, and your community,” Abbott said in response to the lawsuits to CBS affiliate KHOU-11. “Vaccines are the most effective defense against contracting COVID and becoming seriously ill, and we continue to urge all eligible Texans to get the vaccine.”

Florida

Florida is facing least three lawsuits against its ban on school mask mandates: one filed by a parent in Broward County, another by parents in several counties including Miami-Dade and Palm Beach and a third in Orange and Volusia counties.

In late July, Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order directing the state’s health and education departments to bar the use of face coverings in school. DeSantis said that move was meant to “protect parents’ freedom to choose whether their children wear masks.”

DeSantis said in a press conference last month Florida students shouldn’t be “muzzled” during the school year, adding, “We need them to be able to breathe.”

Despite the order, several school districts have announce masks will be mandatory for the 2021-22 school year.

Despite public outcry, many governors are doubling down in their refusal to reimpose masks.

In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster said on the heels of the CDC guidance release, “State law now prohibits school administrators from requiring students to wear a mask…Shutting our state down, closing schools and mandating masks is not the answer. Personal responsibility is.”

State positions on masking are still changing. A number of states never created a mask mandate in the pandemic, including Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Idaho.

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(NEW YORK) — Florida’s latest COVID-19 wave is making Bob Gortney, an intensive care nurse in Fort Myers, think twice about his two decades in medicine.

Gortney, who works at Gulf Coast Medical Center, recently came back from vacation and found the hospital full of COVID patients. “I never left the COVID battle from last year,” Gortney told ABC News Fort Myers affiliate WZVN-TV. “We went from having three or four COVID patients that weren’t really sick to now probably 20 to 30 patients [who are] actually on a ventilator that are very, very sick and unvaccinated.”

COVID-19 is surging throughout the United States, with daily case averages reaching more than 110,000, up 25.5% from last week. Hospitalizations, which tend to follow rising cases, particularly in areas with low vaccination rates, are now at their highest point in six months, with more more than 75,000 COVID-19 patients currently hospitalized, according to updated data from the Department of Health and Human Services.

“It’s disheartening,” Gortney said. “I know some nurses have walked away from it. Some have just picked up and said, ‘I can’t do this no more.'”

“It is a challenge to find experienced talent due to the national health care worker labor shortage,” said Mary Briggs, a spokesperson for Lee Health, the not-for-profit hospital system that owns Gulf Coast. Despite that challenge, Lee Health has made an effort to staff, Briggs explained, hiring 160 registered nurses in June and July and bringing in travel and contract nurses.

As hospitals across the country, including in Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi, scramble to meet the rising need, Jean Ross, co-president of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest nursing union, pointed to a systemic health care issue that predates COVID-19. Similar to public health funding, hospitals follow a pattern of panic and neglect. They pour money into acute problems, like a COVID surge, then disband those efforts when the situation becomes anything less than a crisis. Preparation and prevention are afterthoughts.

“There was a failure to plan before the pandemic,” Ross said. “There was a failure to listen to us during it. And now that we’re experiencing another surge, once again, there is a failure to plan.”

In Ross’ estimation, hospitals were too frugal about staffing even before the pandemic, in order to maximize profits. COVID exacerbated that. Earlier in the year, when it looked like the virus was receding in the United States, and as hospitals were struggling financially after a year of canceled elective procedures and low patient volume, some hospitals cut costs by furloughing or laying of health workers, or reducing their pay, according to Becker’s Hospital Review. Many other hospitals closed altogether.

“Unfortunately, the national nurse staffing shortage is a difficult challenge for hospitals throughout the U.S. and is at critical levels for certain parts of the country,” said Jennifer McDonnell, director of public relations and communications at MountainView. “We are doing everything in our power to retain and recruit new nurses to our community, from shift bonuses to new grad programs.”

“I don’t necessarily feel like there is a nursing shortage in terms of actual people who are registered nurses,” said Nicole Taylor, a labor and delivery nurse at MountainView Hospital in Las Vegas and chief nurse representative for her hospital at National Nurses United. “There’s a shortage of people who are willing to work in unsafe conditions.”

Taylor is currently on maternity leave, but she said she speaks with nurses at the hospital every couple of days. When COVID surged in the area and the hospital had to start putting two patients in a room instead of one, nurses were expected to pick up the slack. “They can’t possibly hire people in a fast enough manner to accommodate that. That’s really unsafe.”

“I feel pretty confident,” she added, “that a majority of the units are running on bare minimum and just trying to survive.”

During the first wave of the pandemic, traveling nurses descended on New York City and other hotspots, then moved on as the virus did. This time around, much of the country is a hotspot. And adding traveling nurses can be costly.

“Travelers are expensive,” Ross said. “We have our nurses begging for them to get extra help. Some states I’m told that are hardest hit right now are finally looking to other states and asking for help, and asking for travelers.”

But even if hospitals have the budget, Ross added, securing travelers only gets harder as demand skyrockets “country-wide, even worldwide.”

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(NEW YORK) — The United States is facing a COVID-19 surge this summer as the more contagious delta variant spreads.

More than 618,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and over 4.3 million people have died worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Just 58.9% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Here’s how the news is developing Friday. All times Eastern:

Aug 13, 5:27 am
Alabama children’s hospital sees rise in patients

Children’s of Alabama reported a significant increase in the number of COVID-19 positive patients being treated at the hospital in recent weeks.

As of Thursday, the hospital said it is treating 22 COVID-19 positive patients, five of whom are on ventilators.

The hospital said in January, at the height of the last surge, their highest number of patients was 13.

“There are three proven ways to slow the spread of this highly transmissible strain of the virus: Vaccination for everyone 12 and up, masking, especially when indoors, and social distancing,” the hospital wrote in a Facebook statement.

Aug 12, 11:48 pm
FDA authorizes booster shot for immunocompromised

Immunocompromised Americans will be able to get a third shot of either of the mRNA vaccines, Pfizer or Moderna, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced late Thursday.

The booster will be targeted specifically for people who did not have an ideal immune response to their initial vaccines, which has proven to be the case for many cancer patients, transplant recipients, people with HIV and people on immunosuppressant drugs.

“The country has entered yet another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the FDA is especially cognizant that immunocompromised people are particularly at risk for severe disease,” acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said in a statement. “After a thorough review of the available data, the FDA determined that this small, vulnerable group may benefit from a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna Vaccines.”

For more, read ABC News’ full story on the authorization.

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(NEW YORK) — As universities prepare to welcome droves of students back to campus, some have announced additional fees for those who are not vaccinated — to help foot the bill for their supplementary COVID-19 testing — in a move that has courted controversy among the vocal faction of Americans resisting the shot.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, are imploring Americans to get the COVID-19 vaccine to protect themselves and those around them from the virus that has left more than 600,000 dead in the U.S.

“COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective,” the CDC states on its website. “Millions of people in the United States have received COVID-19 vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history.”

Still, vaccine requirements or penalties for refusing the jab have emerged as a hot button issue in a nation that has recorded the highest number of coronavirus cases.

West Virginia Wesleyan College, a private liberal arts college with about 1,500 students in Buckhannon, West Virginia, made national headlines when it announced it was charging a “non-refundable $750 Covid fee” for students who do not provide proof of vaccination by Sept. 7.

The college said it was not mandating the vaccine, but would as soon as the Food and Drug Administration formally approves it for use beyond the current emergency-use status.

“Students who do not submit a proof of vaccination status or who are not vaccinated will be required to undergo weekly surveillance testing,” the university stated on its website. “This testing will be conducted by WVWC officials. The cost will be covered by the Covid Fee charged to all unvaccinated students.”

Some 42.94% of the population of West Virginia is fully vaccinated, compared to the national benchmark of 50.3%, according to the CDC.

Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama, similarly announced a $500 charge for students who are unvaccinated. The college cited the spread of the highly transmissible delta variant, and implored students to get vaccinated to protect community members.

“Due to the lack of federal funds for pandemic precautions this term, all students will initially be charged $500 for the fall term to offset continual weekly antigen testing and quarantining,” the university stated on its website. “Students who are fully vaccinated prior to the beginning of the fall term will receive an immediate $500 rebate.”

Despite being a campus of just 1,283 students, the local backlash to the update was swift and aggressive in the state that CDC data indicates has the lowest vaccination rate. Just 35% of the population in Alabama is fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.

The College Republican Federation of Alabama called the small campus’ decision a “blatant attack meant to shame students who are not vaccinated,” in a statement on Twitter. The group called vaccines a “vital tool” in the fight against COVID-19, but added, “We are still a free society where one should not be held at ransom to the tune of $500 if they do not feel the vaccine is the best course of action for them.”

Alabama lawmakers have been especially resistant to vaccines, and had already implemented a law prohibiting vaccine requirements at universities.

Shortly after the university’s website update was posted, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office issued a “Public Notice.” The notice did not name Birmingham-Southern College, but stated that the burden of paying a fee essentially rises to the level of requiring proof of vaccination and violates the state law.

The university did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment on the notice.

At Indiana University, a group of students sued to block the school’s vaccine mandate. On Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied the plea, the first case pertaining to vaccine mandates to come before the Supreme Court, without comment.

“IU students are adults entitled to make medical treatment decisions for themselves, unless IU can prove in court that their COVID vaccine mandate is justified, which they have not done and that the courts have not required them to do,” attorney James Bopp Jr., who is representing the students who sued, said in a statement. He vowed to continue to fight the mandate.

More than 700 college campuses in the U.S. are requiring vaccines of at least some students or employees, according to data compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education. A handful have separately announced vaccine incentives programs. Alabama’s Auburn University, which also isn’t able to mandate the shot, is offering prizes ranging from an unlimited meal plan upgrade to a $1,000 scholarship through its COVID-19 Vaccination Incentive Program.

In the private sector, a growing number of employers from Google to Disney have announced vaccine requirements. Late last month, President Joe Biden announced a vaccine requirement for all federal government employees, and said anyone not fully vaccinated will be required to wear a mask, social distance and get tested once or twice a week.

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(HOUSTON) — The largest school district in Texas is among those poised to defy the governor’s ban on school mask mandates as students prepare to head back to school this month amid a surge in COVID-19 cases.

The Houston Independent School District board is set to vote on a mask mandate Thursday evening, though approval isn’t required for the policy to go into effect, the district confirmed to ABC News.

Superintendent Millard House expects the board to support his mandate, according to local reports, ahead of the first day of school on Aug. 23.

The mandate — which would require all students, staff and visitors to wear masks while in school and on district buses except while eating — goes against Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order barring government entities in Texas, including school districts, from requiring the use of masks.

“The last thing I want as a brand new superintendent in the largest school district in the state is any smoke or heat with the governor,” House, who officially became the superintendent of the school district in June, told Houston ABC station KTRK this week. “That’s not my intent here. My intent was solely focused on what we felt was best in Harris County and HISD.”

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo have voiced support for leaders instituting mask mandates despite the governor’s order.

“I commend everyone — school superintendents, and elected judges alike who are taking whatever steps are needed to protect the lives of the people they serve,” Hidalgo said on Twitter this week while announcing that the Harris County attorney was authorized to file a lawsuit challenging the governor’s order. “Protecting the community during an emergency is a duty, not an option for government leaders.”

Houston joins other school districts in Texas, including those in Austin, Dallas and Spring, in issuing mask mandates.

On Wednesday, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins signed an order requiring masks indoors in certain public spaces, including public schools.

In response, Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said they will fight the county mask mandate in court.

“Under Executive Order GA-38, no governmental entity can require or mandate the wearing of masks,” Abbott said in a statement. “The path forward relies on personal responsibility — not government mandates. The State of Texas will continue to vigorously fight the temporary restraining order to protect the rights and freedoms of all Texans.”

Statewide, the seven-day average of daily COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have reached their highest points since January, when Texas was emerging from its winter surge. COVID-19 hospitalizations rose by nearly 3,000 in the last week, the state health department said on Twitter Wednesday, warning that “risk of infection is very high.”

Pediatric cases have been surging in particular, with 94,000 reported in the last week, or 15% of all reported new infections, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association. Also, pediatric COVID-19-related hospital admissions are at their highest level since the beginning of the pandemic.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden said he stood with officials defying state mandates barring masks in schools.

“To the mayors, school superintendents, educators, local leaders, who are standing up to the governors politicizing mask protection for our kids, thank you,” he told reporters. “Thank God that we have heroes like you. And I stand with you all, and America should as well.”

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