(NEW YORK) — Google plans to require any employee in its offices to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to an email sent by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on Wednesday.
“Even as the virus continues to surge in many parts of the world,” Pichai wrote, “it’s encouraging to see very high vaccination rates for our Google community in areas where vaccines are widely available.” He cites that high vaccination rate as being a key to the company re-opening some of its offices to employees who chose to return to work already.
“Getting vaccinated is one of the most important ways to keep ourselves and our communities healthy in the months ahead,” he continued.
The requirement will be rolled out “in the coming weeks,” in the United States, and is intended to expand to other regions in the next few months. Pichai notes that implementation of the requirement “will vary according to local conditions and regulations, and will not apply until vaccines are widely available in your area.”
The CEO also saying in his email that while the company has begun to reopen campuses, Google employees who choose to work from home will be allowed to do so through at least October 18.
“We recognize that many Googlers are seeing spikes in their communities cause by the Delta variant and are concerned about returning to the office,” Pichai said.
He also noted that the company is working to develop “expanded temporary work options” for employees with “special circumstances,” which would allow those employees to work from home through the end of 2021.
(NEW YORK) — As coronavirus cases in the U.S. begin a concerning climb upward and virus variants threaten a return to normalcy, a handful of businesses have announced COVID-19 vaccination mandates as they prepare to welcome workers back to the office.
The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission said employers can legally require COVID-19 vaccinations to re-enter a physical workplace, as long as they follow requirements to find alternative arrangements for employees unable to get vaccinated for medical reasons or because they have religious objections.
Still, the requirements have proven a hot button issue as business leaders mull over office reopening plans, in some cases sparking legal challenges and immense pushback from workers who refuse the shot. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that a mandate to require all federal employees to be vaccinated is now “under consideration.”
Tech giant Google announced a vaccine requirement Wednesday for those returning to its offices. The company has some 135,301 employees, according to SEC filings.
“Even as the virus continues to surge in many parts of the world,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in an email Wednesday, “it’s encouraging to see very high vaccination rates for our Google community in areas where vaccines are widely available.” He cites that high vaccination rate as being a key to the company re-opening some of its offices to employees who chose to return to work already.
“Getting vaccinated is one of the most important ways to keep ourselves and our communities healthy in the months ahead,” he continued.
The requirement will be rolled out “in the coming weeks,” in the United States, and is intended to expand to other regions in the next few months. Pichai notes that implementation of the requirement “will vary according to local conditions and regulations, and will not apply until vaccines are widely available in your area.”
The CEO also saying in his email that while the company has begun to reopen campuses, Google employees who choose to work from home will be allowed to do so through at least October 18.
“We recognize that many Googlers are seeing spikes in their communities cause by the Delta variant and are concerned about returning to the office,” Pichai said.
He also noted that the company is working to develop “expanded temporary work options” for employees with “special circumstances,” which would allow those employees to work from home through the end of 2021.
(LONDON, HONG KONG and JAKARTA) — A perfect storm with the coronavirus appears to be brewing across the Asia-Pacific region: surges in the highly contagious delta variant combined with slow vaccination uptake.
Tight vaccine supplies are a major factor and experts caution that unless most of the global population is vaccinated, and richer countries share more of their vaccines, the world will face a far longer bout with the coronavirus than anticipated.
The issue extends from countries at the center of the current surge, like Indonesia, to those that fared relatively well with the disease early on in the pandemic, like South Korea.
Even as countries like the U.S. and U.K. face rising cases despite their largely vaccinated populations, hospitalizations and deaths have not yet risen to the same levels as 2020 due to the success of vaccination efforts, public health experts say. Yet the vast majority of the global population remains unvaccinated (just 3.7 billion out of 10-12 billion recommended doses have been distributed).
More people have died of COVID-19 since Jan. 4, 2021 than the whole of last year, according to an ABC analysis of WHO data.
The pandemic is not just far from over — it is in a “critical moment where we are all under threat,” due to rising new variants and vaccine inequality, according to WHO spokesperson Dr. Margaret Harris. The course of the virus, she said, is that it is likely to become “endemic” — meaning it will not disappear, but eventually could become manageable like the other coronaviruses in circulation.
But a true end to the pandemic will likely only happen with the artificial immunity conferred by mass vaccination, according to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“You have countries that are making good progress toward building an immunity shield,” he told ABC News. “When you look at the rest of the world, a very small percentage of the population [is] being vaccinated.”
The stark vaccine disparity is far from lost on people in Indonesia, who in the last few months have seen the delta variant rip through their communities, overrunning hospitals, filling graveyards and leaving family and friends who’ve lost loved ones in anguish.
In scenes reminiscent of when India was at its devastating peak earlier this year, there is a clamor for oxygen canisters in Indonesia — now the coronavirus epicenter of the region. Afflicted families, turned away from hospital wards, are taking treatment into their own hands. For two weeks, Defitio Pratama, 27, a marketing salesman based just outside Jakarta, took care of his sick mother at home.
“We had no idea what to do at that time since we did not have oxygen tank at hand,” he told ABC News in Jakarta, where there are long lines for scarce oxygen cylinders. “I started contacting friends and families for oxygen tank, I even went all the way to other city when I found my mother’s friend offering to lend theirs. We could not take my mother to hospital because they kept rejecting us, we had no choice but to treat her at home.”
While Pratama has received one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, his mother, who is asthmatic, remains unvaccinated. In the week ending July 19, 9,696 deaths were recorded, an increase of 36% from the week before, according to the WHO. Just under 16% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
In Indonesia, a combination of a lack of supply, vaccine hesitancy and concerns over the Chinese manufactured Sinovac have contributed to the slow rollout, but the country is by no means alone in the region.
Thailand, Australia, Vietnam and South Korea — all countries that were praised last year for their swift containment strategies — have reintroduced restrictions to deal with outbreaks of the Delta variant, which is estimated to be 60% more transmissible than the alpha variant, in recent months. According to Harris, the world’s richest countries are “basically holding the rest of the world hostage by not insisting that their manufacturers share.”
“This is why you’ve got massive outbreaks going on around the world,” she told ABC News. “But people don’t seem to hear it. What they’re hearing is possibly what they want to hear is ‘I’m vaccinated, now, I can go back to normal.’ You can’t. Not until you sort it out in the rest of the world.”
The Biden administration has pledged to donate more than 80 million doses to countries in need, with 23 million going to Asia. Some 3 million doses of Moderna arrived in Indonesia from the U.S. on July 11 — but the rollout needs to significantly increase in order to meet the WHO’s target to vaccinate at least 10% of every country in the world by the end of September.
For the pandemic to end and the virus to become manageable on a global level and COVID-19 to become manageable as with other coronaviruses, between 10 and 12 billion doses need to be administered around the world, Huang said, ideally with high effectiveness. That number currently stands at around 3.7 billion, according to the WHO.
“The best case scenario is that through these vaccination efforts that by the end of next year we have produced enough vaccines that can vaccinate a majority of the population worldwide, and that vaccination is effective in terms of preventing severe cases of death,” Huang said. “Previously I was more optimistic about how and when the pandemic is going to end. “But now, with that divide in terms of vaccine access, in terms of the strategies adopted by countries, in terms of the continued emergence of the new variants, I’m not that optimistic anymore.”
(LONDON) — Beginning next month, the United Kingdom will allow fully vaccinated U.S. citizens to enter the country without quarantining.
In a statement, the U.K. Department for Transport says the policy will apply to travelers from countries on their “green” and “amber” lists, but not for those from several dozen nations on the “red list.” It will go into effect on August 2, and will cover vaccines that have been approved by the European Medicines Agency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or the Swiss vaccination program.
Those arriving in the U.K. will still be required to complete a pre-departure test before landing in England, as well as a PCR test for COVID-19 within their first two days there. Separate rules apply for those entering the U.K. from France.
The plan is expected to help the British economy, as well as enable fully vaccinated people from other nations to reunite with family and friends.
“We’ve taken great strides on our journey to reopen international travel,” said U.K. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps. “Whether you are a family reuniting for the first time since the start of the pandemic or a business benefiting from increased trade – this is progress we can all enjoy.”
More than 70 percent of adults in the U.K. have received both shots of a COVID-19 vaccine. Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid credited that fact with helping to build “a wall of defence against this virus so we can safely enjoy our freedoms again.”
(NEW YORK) — New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday announced that all patient-facing health care workers in hospitals run by the state will be required to get vaccinated. He said, “There will be no testing option.”
Additionally, as of Labor Day, all state employees must either be vaccinated or get tested on a weekly basis.
Governor Cuomo said the decision was made due to the “dramatic action” needed to control a surge in COVID-19 cases linked to the Delta variant. He said school districts in areas of high transmission should also consider taking a more aggressive approach.
“I understand the politics, but I understand if we don’t take the right actions, schools can become super-spreaders in September,” Cuomo said.
Calling on private sector businesses, Cumo said they should incentivize vaccinations by only allowing vaccinated people in.
75% of adults in New York state have been vaccinated.
(BENTONVILLE, Ark.) — America’s largest private employer announced on Tuesday that it will pay for college tuition and books for associates, in full.
In a press release, Walmart says it will also eliminate the $1 per day fee from its Live Better U education program, which provides workers with access to training or a degree. The company says with these changes, “approximately 1.5 million part-time and full-time Walmart and Sam’s Club associates in the U.S. can earn college degrees or learn trade skills without the burden of education debt.”
Lorraine Stomski, the company’s senior vice president of learning and leadership, said the move would create “a path of opportunity for our associates to grow their careers at Walmart, so they can continue to build better lives for themselves and their families.”
The company also noted it will add four academic partners, bringing the total number of institutions it works with to ten. The new partners include Johnson & Wales University, the University of Arizona, the University of Denver, and Pathstream.
Earlier this year, Walmart announced it would raise its starting pay to $11 per hour. That move, which affected approximately 425,000 employees, brought the company’s average pay to $15 per hour.
(AURORA, Colo.) — Two Colorado officers from the Aurora Police Department are facing charges after body camera footage purportedly shows one hitting a suspect in the head and then choking him.
Officers John Haubert and Francine Martinez responded to a reported trespassing, attempting to arrest 29-year-old Kyle Vincent and two other adult men.
Martinez learned that they all had felony warrants, and the officers tried to take them into custody. When two of the men fled, Haubert drew a pistol and directed it at Vincent.
Haubert grabbed the back of his neck and pressed the gun against Vincent’s head.
The man denied having a warrant and attempted to avoid being handcuffed. Police say Haubert came on top of the man and grabbed the side of his neck, hitting him with the gun 13 times.
Haubert is facing three felony charges; attempted first-degree assault, second-degree assault and felony menacing. There is also misdemeanor charges of official oppression and official misconduct.
“This is not the Aurora Police Department, this is criminal,” said Aurora Police Chief Vanessa Wilson.
Officer Martinez faces criminal charges for not intervening.
(NEW YORK) — As contentious debates over vaccine mandates continue with new coronavirus cases on the rise among the unvaccinated, elected officials are starting to fine-tune the idea of a new incentive by requiring public employees to get a coronavirus test until they get their shots.
Barun Mathema, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News that the plan is a very effective incentive on paper, and it will have a bigger impact outside of the public sector when it comes to confidence in the vaccines.
“This is saying the government, unambiguously, supports vaccination. One can try things like lotteries to entice individuals, but to me, this is a serious and thoughtful approach,” he told ABC News.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last week that employees of the city’s public hospital system, which included medical centers like Elmhurst Hospital, the epicenter of the first wave of hospitalizations in 2020, would have to show proof of vaccination or submit a weekly test until they got their shot. Exemptions are allowed for religious medical reasons.
De Blasio expanded that order on Monday to all city public employees, which included police officers, firefighters and teachers. Even though 59% of the city’s entire population and 70% of its adult population has at least one dose of the vaccine as of Tuesday, the numbers were lagging among the ranks of some New York agencies, city data showed.
The NYPD had a 43% vaccination rate, the Department of Correction had a 42% vaccination rate, the FDNY had a 55% vaccination rate, and public school employees and city hospital employees each had a 60% vaccination rate, according to data from city officials. Nationally, 56% of all residents and 69% of all adults have at least one shot, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The testing mandate will go into effect for unvaccinated public hospital workers next week, and goes into effect on Sept. 13, the first day of schools in New York, for other public employees.
De Blasio stressed that the delta variant is causing cases to rise in unvaccinated neighborhoods in the city and he wanted to ensure New Yorkers that their public employees were vaccinated or proven safe.
“We’re going to keep climbing this ladder and adding additional measures as needed mandates and strong measures, whenever needed to fight the delta variant,” the mayor said during a news conference Monday.
A few hours later, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he would place a similar testing mandate for any state employee who can’t provide proof of vaccination. The mandate affects 249,000 employees and also provides exemptions for religious or medical reasons.
“California has committed to vaccination verification and or testing on a weekly basis,” Newsom said at a news conference.
California’s policy will take effect on Aug. 9.
Mathema said the policy will be most effective at swaying unvaccinated employees who were on the fence about getting the shot and needed an incentive to do so.
In this case, time spent on taking a COVID-19 test, submitting the paperwork to a boss and getting their OK week after week would take its toll, Mathema said.
“There will certainly be some people who find the constant testing inconvenient,” he said.
Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor, said the testing requirement will put extra pressure on an unvaccinated employee to get their shot.
“They’ll have to quarantine and put themselves out of two weeks of work,” he said.
Brownstein predicted that more states will follow New York City and California’s lead and there appears to be momentum at the federal level. President Joe Biden is expected to announce Thursday that all federal employees show proof of vaccination or submit to regular testing, ABC News has learned.
Brownstein added that some businesses have begun to implement rules that provide more benefits for customers. Some cruise ships, he noted, restrict their non-vaccinated passengers from the more popular dining areas and attractions.
“It’s a hybrid carrot and stick situation. You’re giving benefits to people who are vaccinated and punishing people who aren’t,” he said.
Mathema warned that there are likely to be a number of public employees who will submit to the weekly testing rather than get their shots. He reiterated that elected officials and businesses that implement a testing mandate for the unvaccinated needed to supplement their policy with a focused educational plan.
“I do believe this needs to be met with outreach, strong outreach and consistent outreach,” Mathema said. “We do need to be tactful, show empathy and address real issues that are out there: people’s concerns over the vaccine.”
Anyone who needs help scheduling a free vaccine appointment can log onto vaccines.gov.
(SALINA, Kan.) — NASA recently began new research to investigate how extreme summer weather may be affecting the upper layers of earth’s atmosphere.
Kenneth Bowman, Ph.D., the principal investigator for the Dynamics and Chemistry of the Summer Stratosphere (DCOTSS) research project, spoke to reporters about the project during a press briefing on Tuesday. He said their goal is to understand how intense summer thunderstorms over the U.S. affect the stratosphere — the second layer of earth’s atmosphere as you move toward space — especially as climate change causes severe thunderstorms to occur more often.
“Most thunderstorms occur in the lower layer of the atmosphere, which we call the troposphere. But when we get particularly intense thunderstorms, the updrafts — the rising air in the storm — can actually overshoot into the layer above, which is the stratosphere,” Bowman said.
He said that when this happens, the air in the troposphere can rise up to the stratosphere in as little as 20 to 30 minutes. Those updrafts can transport pollutants and water that might not normally reach this level of the atmosphere in such a short amount of time.
The stratosphere is usually dry, according to the project’s website, and the water and pollutants may “have a significant impact on radiative and chemical processes” in the atmospheric layer.
David Wilmouth, Ph.D., a scientist at Harvard University who is working on the project, said the updrafts could potentially “change the chemical composition of the stratosphere, a process that would not otherwise happen.” Their work will determine if that’s the case.
Bowman explained that the stratosphere is important because it contains the Earth’s ozone layer, which protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation that comes from the sun. About 90% of the world’s ozone layer exists within the stratosphere, according to Wilmouth.
Wilmouth said the ozone layer is “critical” for protecting life on earth. If its protective shield was to weaken, humans would be more susceptible to skin cancer, cataracts disease and an impaired immune system, according to NASA.
Dan Csziczo, Ph.D., a professor and head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University, said during the briefing that their goal is specifically to understand the composition and size of the particles that make their way up to the stratosphere, and how they might influence the earth’s climate. Csziczo said the research would also help scientists understand the process of cloud formation and subsequent precipitation.
Understanding the relationship between climate change and particulate matter in the air is critical because, ultimately, each of them might exacerbate the impact of the other on humans’ health and way of life.
For the project, NASA is working with several universities across the country, as well as the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The mission consists of three eight-week-long deployments over the course of the 2021 and 2022 summer seasons. The DCOTSS will be using NASA’s ER-2 high-altitude research aircraft for the mission.
DCOTSS will be operated out of Salina, Kansas, a site chosen by the researchers due to its central location within the U.S. It’s also a region of the country that’s particularly prone to severe and intense thunderstorms during the summer.
The ER-2 aircraft is equipped with fully robotic, pre-programmed instruments that can measure the gases and particles that come out of the overshooting tops of the thunderstorms, as well as meteorological information, such as water vapor, Wilmouth said.
The aircraft can only transport its pilot, who must wear a pressurized suit to withstand the high altitudes, which can go as high as 70,000 feet — about twice the altitude of typical commercial airlines, according to the project’s website.
(PORTLAND, Ore.) — After a full school year during the COVID-19 pandemic, elementary and middle school students are heading into the fall with lower rates of achievement gains in reading and math than they would have during a typical school year, new research shows.
The researchers say the results were worse in high-poverty areas and could have been even worse overall had thousands of students “missing” from school systems been counted. Separately, they say that it would take “unprecedented” levels of growth to make up for the past school year.
NWEA, a Portland-Oregon-based education research organization that develops pre-K-12 assessments, expedited research on test scores from the 2020-21 school year to help spotlight student needs ahead of the fall.
Researchers compared gains in student achievement in grades 3-8 across the school year to pre-pandemic levels — specifically, the 2018-19 school year — based on the average results of its MAP Growth assessments in reading and math.
They found that, looking at the results of 5.5 million test-takers, students did make modest progress overall over the course of the school year — but not as much as during a typical year. Compared to 2018-19, average achievement gains declined 3 to 6 percentile points in reading depending on the grade level. There was an even steeper decline in math, between 8 and 12 percentile points.
Unexpectedly, the gains in math and reading decelerated between winter and spring relative to a typical school year, researchers found.
“I think many of us expected to maybe start to see some signs of hope closer to the spring, when more kids were returning to the classroom,” Karyn Lewis, a senior research scientist with NWEA, told ABC News. “So that that’s when learning really stalled more was surprising to me.”
Lewis pointed to “pandemic fatigue” as possibly being behind the unanticipated results.
“When I think back and reflect on my own experiences in the winter, that’s I think when pandemic fatigue really started to set in,” she said. “I think that it’s starting to show in these data that kids were also affected.”
When they dug deeper into the data, researchers found that there were even greater declines in math and reading progress for disadvantaged students. Those attending high-poverty schools showed more than double the declines of students attending low-poverty schools for many grades. This was especially pronounced at the elementary level: Third graders in high-poverty schools showed 11-percentile-point declines in reading and 17 percentile-point-declines in math, the report found.
“We know that the pandemic was not an even crisis across families in our country, and families in high-poverty situations were impacted in different ways,” Lewis said. “Parents were less likely to be able to stay home and support virtual learning opportunities because of the way their jobs were structured. These homes may have had less reliable internet access or less reliable access to a dedicated computer. … It’s just layer upon layer of different factors that I think are probably attributing to this.”
The recent findings don’t show the complete picture, Lewis said, due to a higher attrition rate than normal — and so-called “missing” students likely adding to the lower achievers. The overall attrition rate for the 2020-21 school year was about 20%, researchers said — meaning 1 in 5 students who tested the prior year did not test this year. For 2018-19, the overall attrition rate was 13%.
“The kids that went missing are not the random sample of students but are more likely to be in schools that serve a high proportion of kids in poverty, that were lower achieving in prior years and that were from communities of color,” Lewis said. “This may actually be kind of the best-case scenario because we are missing the voices of many of the students in these groups that were most impacted.”
Researchers also emphasized that their work didn’t specifically address the impact of remote learning on performance.
“This national data is fantastic for giving us the lay of the broad landscape, but we really need as districts and schools come back to lean into the local context and look at our own data and see how that compares with the trends that we’re seeing nationally,” Brooke Mabry, strategic content design manager for NWEA’s Professional Learning Design team, told ABC News.
With students going into the fall with, on average, lower gains in math and reading, there would need to be “unprecedented” levels of growth to catch up, Lewis said. The delta variant may also throw a “big curveball” for schools this fall, as COVID-19 cases rise across the country. But there are signs of hope, researchers said.
“We do know that what we learned from what happened with kids over the summer months, when they are out of school altogether, the kids that seem to lose the most across the summer period are also those that tend to rebound the quickest when they’re back in the classroom,” Lewis said.
