Fauci: 100,000 new Covid deaths in US ‘predictable but preventable’

Richard Luscombe

“As many as 100,000 new Covid-19 deaths in the US by December is “predictable but preventable”, the leading US infectious diseases expert said on Sunday, as dozens of states reported rapidly increasing fatalities.

Amid resistance in some states to public health measures and mandates, the Delta variant of the virus has pushed up deaths in 14 states by more than 50% in a week, and by at least 10% in 28 more, according to Johns Hopkins University. Those figures follow a dire warning from the University of Washington that tens of thousands more could die, with a daily peak of 1,400 by mid-September.

On Sunday, Johns Hopkins put the US death toll from Covid-19 at almost 637,000.

“What is going on now is both entirely predictable and entirely preventable,” Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, told CNN’s State of the Union.

“We know we have the wherewithal with vaccines to turn this around, and the reason the numbers are so alarming is that we have about 80 million people in this country who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not yet vaccinated.

“We could turn this thing around and we can do it efficiently and quickly if we could just get those people vaccinated. It’s so important that people in this crisis put aside any ideological and political differences and just get vaccinated.”

Vaccine hesitancy is decreasing, figures show, with an average of about 900,000 shots being administered each day in the US, up 80% in a month. This week, Biden hailed full Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the Pfizer vaccine for those 16 and older as “a key milestone” in the coronavirus fight.

But experts say that the rate must increase further, and the public needs to continue social distancing and mask wearing, if the situation is to improve.

“We can save 50,000 lives simply by wearing masks,” said Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington. “That’s how important behaviours are.”

On NBC’s Meet the Press, Fauci said the administration would stick to its plan to offer booster shots beginning next month to those vaccinated eight months ago. Some countries, such as Israel, are offering boosters after five months, after reviewing data suggesting protection begins to decrease in a shorter timeframe.

“We’re still planning on eight months,” Fauci said. “That was the calculation we made [and] this roll out will start on the week of 20 September.

“That’s the plan that we have, but we are open to data as they come in. This will have to go through the FDA process and then the advisory committee on immunisation practices that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC]. So right now, we’re sticking with eight but we’re totally open to any variation in that based on the data.”

Asked if he believed coronavirus would become endemic, Fauci said: “In some respects, yes, but mostly no.

“We have within our power the wherewithal to really suppress this outbreak, at least in the US. We want to do it globally, and we’re playing an important role in that. But with regard to the United States, if we really got the overwhelming majority of those 80 million vaccinated, you would see a dramatic turnaround in the dynamics of the outbreak. So, it really is up to us. We have the power to do it. We just need to do it.”

Hospitals around the US are struggling to manage a significant increase in admissions due to Covid-19, the vast majority of unvaccinated patients.

“We have enough people dying that there is no room to put these bodies,” Alabama’s state health officer, Dr Scott Harris, said on Friday. “We are really in a crisis situation, I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be able to do this.”

In Mississippi, which on Sunday was under the threat from Hurricane Ida, the Republican governor, Tate Reeves, said he believed religion helped explain vaccine hesitancy.

“I’m often asked by some of my friends on the other side of the aisle about Covid, and why does it seem like folks in Mississippi and maybe in the mid-south are a little less scared, shall we say,” Reeves told a Republican fundraiser, according to the Daily Memphian.

“When you believe in eternal life, when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things. God also tells us to take necessary precautions, and we all have opportunities and abilities to do that and we should all do that. I encourage everyone to do so.”

Ron DeSantis gets dismantled on national TV

The U.S. reckons with defeat in Afghanistan

Ishaan Tharoor

Members of the Minnesota National Guard aboard a C-17 Globemaster fly to Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Aug. 23. (Minnesota National Guard/Reuters)

“In a couple of days, the Biden administration intends to wrap up its withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Not only will most U.S. military personnel be pulled out of the country by Aug. 31, but so will the entirety of the American diplomatic presence, including the U.S. ambassador. According to U.S. officials, there’s no clear time frame for a return.

Instead, there’s a world of violence and chaos. On Sunday, President Biden went to an Air Force base in Delaware to participate in the transfer of the remains of 13 U.S. troops killed by Islamic State suicide bombings and offer condolences to their families. The attack on Thursday outside Kabul airport also killed at least 170 Afghans, piling on further woe as countless people still seek to flee a country in the grips of Taliban militants. In keeping with its checkered legacy in Afghanistan, the United States launched a retaliatory drone strike that, according to CNN, led to the deaths of nine Afghan civilians, including children.

Biden presides over an ignominious departure. Two decades ago, the United States invaded Afghanistan and, with local allies, toppled the Taliban government in Kabul, which had given sanctuary to terrorist group al-Qaeda. Twenty years later, the Taliban is once more in power, boosted by billions of dollars in U.S. military equipment left behind for an Afghan military that collapsed before the militants’ advance. As U.S. officials evacuated the embassy in Kabul, an internal memo directed them to burn sensitive items, including American flags, lest they fall into Taliban hands.

That least bleak act underscores an overarching reality in Afghanistan: The United States failed to defeat the Taliban, failed to establish a functioning democracy in a country into which it sank vast amounts of blood and treasure, failed to thwart (and arguably helped stoke) the spread of Islamist extremist outfits, and failed even to leave on its own terms.

In Washington, Biden’s opponents are using the occasion to score partisan points. “We’re looking at the exit, and over the next two days, our heroic military is doing the best they can with a horrible policy decision,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “This is one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history, much worse than Saigon.”

Former president Donald Trump also engaged in hyperbole. He cast the American retreat as “the greatest foreign policy humiliation” in U.S. history, no matter that Biden was following through on an exit agreement Trump brokered with the Taliban and dealing with an Afghan government that had been repeatedly sidelined and undermined by the Trump administration.

The original architects and cheerleaders of the West’s “war on terror” issued their own laments. Former British prime minister Tony Blair penned a lengthy essay decrying the “imbecilic” thinking behind the U.S. withdrawal, which he argued was “driven not by grand strategy but by politics” and widespread American fatigue and indifference toward the war effort. Prominent Republicans, including former Trump national security adviser John Bolton and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), condemned both Trump and Biden for their decision-making around Afghanistan. Karl Rove, the Republican strategist who had a role in launching both invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, told Politico that “it will be impossible for President Biden to wash this stain away.”

Kori Schake, a former official in the George W. Bush administration now at the American Enterprise Institute, pointed to America’s supposed damaged credibility. “After the U.S. surrender to the Taliban, it will be hard for anyone to take seriously the Biden administration’s posturing about promoting human rights and defending democracy — which are supposedly central features of Biden’s foreign policy,” she wrote.

Biden’s defenders may note that Afghanistan is peripheral to his worldview and the geopolitical battles he is pursuing, including a sharpening confrontation with China. They also contend that both Trump and Biden were simply reckoning with a fait accompli, as the United States and its allies could not indefinitely secure a weak Afghan government, especially as majorities of Americans in various polls showed little appetite for continuing the conflict. “Putting more soldiers and money on the line for a cause the country neither believes in nor can win will do nothing to bring back the lives lost and dollars wasted,” wrote Ian Bremmer in Time magazine. “We must honor the dead but make policy for the living.”

More broadly, analysts elsewhere despair of the U.S. delusions that surrounded the Afghan war, not least a strain of triumphalist American “exceptionalism” that shadows much of the current indignation in Washington. British journalist Anatol Lieven, a veteran Afghanistan watcher, decried the Bush-era imposition of a “good vs. evil” frame to the U.S. invasions that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “No approach was less appropriate to the fluid political allegiances and enduring kinship arrangements of Afghanistan,” he wrote. “But it warped the thinking: when I and others in Washington called for talks with the Taliban — for years, until it was too late — we were shouted down with cries of ‘the Taliban are evil’ and ‘America doesn’t talk to terrorists.’”

Many of the same doyens of the Washington establishment who are now outraged that the Taliban is back in power have been less vocal about the failures and shortcomings of the two decades spent keeping the militants at bay — years that saw hideous suffering for Afghans and widespread graft within the Afghan state that are now culminating in a devastating humanitarian and political crisis in the country.

“This is the deep lacuna in America’s foreign policy conversation,” wrote Ezra Klein in the New York Times. “The American foreign policy establishment obsesses over the harms caused by our absence or withdrawal. But there’s no similar culpability for the harms we commit or that our presence creates. We are much quicker to blame ourselves for what we don’t do than what we do.”

Ron DeSantis, How Many Covid Deaths Are Enough?

Aug. 29, 2021

Brynn Anderson/Associated Press

“Republican politics have become oppositional politics: Deny the science, demean the media, own the libs. Conservatives are less defined by what they are for than by what they are against.

Donald Trump put this concept on steroids because it was beneficial to him as a strategy. He framed himself as the antithesis of Barack Obama. He was against immigrants and Muslims. He was against cultural conciliation. He was against the rapidly approaching future of America, one in which white people would lose not only their numerical advantage but also their societal primacy.

Furthermore, very few facts helped Trump, so he waged war against facts themselves. He denied, diminished and dismissed them.

And as a result, at the peak of their intransigence and callousness, his party catastrophically mishandled the pandemic. They refused to follow the science or act with caution. And, because of their reflexive opposition to the facts, untold numbers of people who didn’t have to die did.

The relationship between leader and followers in the religion of resistance was cyclical: Trump reflected the base, and they reflected him. The base began to have certain expectations from their politicians, expectations they made clear: The base must not only be followed, but also affirmed. The mob is the master.

I say peak, but there have been multiple peaks in the G.O.P.’s utter disregard for public safety — even the safety of their own supporters. It isn’t a single mountain but a range. The death dealing of Covid amounts to the Appalachians of ignorance.

Perhaps no politician has taken the reins from Trump with more vigor — and disastrous effects — than Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a man who thinks he could be the next Republican president. But to supplant the last leader of his party, he has to out-Trump Trump.

To accomplish this meteoric rise, he needed to do two things. First, become the darling of the Trump freedom fighters, fighting for the right to get sick and die. And second, he has to be the opposite of the establishment, in this case Joe Biden and his administration. If Biden swerves left, DeSantis must swerve right, even if the hospitals in his state are overrun and the funeral parlors reach capacity.

It hasn’t necessarily been easy for DeSantis to bait Biden. As The New York Times reported in March, Biden’s top advisers said they saw “no benefits in waging a culture war against Republican governors while they are fighting to contain the pandemic.”

But as the Delta variant became more of a threat and people like DeSantis became more entrenched, waging war against mask mandates in their states, Biden had no choice but to engage more directly. (Luckily, a Florida judge rejected DeSantis’s mask ban on Friday.)

Enticing Biden into open battle is what DeSantis wants and needs. It takes attention off the unbelievable tragedy playing out in his state, a tragedy in which he is complicit.

As The Times reported on Wednesday: “More people in Florida are catching the coronavirus, being hospitalized and dying of Covid-19 now than at any previous point in the pandemic.” The Times continued, “This week, 227 virus deaths were being reported each day in Florida, on average, as of Tuesday, a record for the state and by far the most in the United States right now.”

The citizens of Florida do not even support DeSantis’s politically calculated pandemic positions. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that “six in 10 Floridians support requiring masks in schools,” and “61 percent say recent rise in Covid-19 cases in Florida was preventable.”

But there are two things more important to DeSantis than those numbers. First, a different Quinnipiac poll found that regardless of how few Floridians approve of his performance, his approval rating is still higher than Biden’s in the state.

Second, DeSantis is playing to an electorate beyond the panhandle. As long as he is still mentioned in the same breath as Biden, even if the coverage is negative, he is playing well among Republicans. As long as he is fighting Washington and Democrats and experts, it doesn’t matter to entrenched Republicans that he’s not fighting the plague.

Some bodies must be sacrificed to appease the gods of partisan resistance.

To keep the spotlight, DeSantis is employing many of the same tricks as Trump: fighting with the media about coverage, deflecting blame onto Biden and convincing his followers that folding to facts is the same as forfeiting freedoms.

As DeSantis said in early August, “We can either have a free society, or we can have a biomedical security state.” He continued, “And I can tell you: Florida, we’re a free state. People are going to be free to choose to make their own decisions.”

Yes, Florida, DeSantis is allowing you to choose death so that he can have a greater political life.“

“The daily average for hospitalized Covid-19 patients in the United States is now more than 100,000. That average, calculated over the last seven days, is higher than in any previous surge except last winter’s, before most Americans were eligible to get vaccinated.

The U.S. reaches 100,000 average daily Covid hospitalizations for the first time since winter.

Updated 

Aug. 30, 2021, 5:30 a.m. ET18 minutes ago

The Latest News on Coronavirus and the Delta Variant 

Aug. 29, 2021

Houston Fire Department medics transporting a patient with Covid-19 to a hospital this month.John Moore/Getty Images

“The daily average for hospitalized Covid-19 patients in the United States is now more than 100,000. That average, calculated over the last seven days, is higher than in any previous surge except last winter’s, before most Americans were eligible to get vaccinated.

The influx of patients is straining hospitals and pushing health care workers to the brink as deaths have risen to an average of more than 1,000 a day for the first time since March.

Hospitalizations nationwide have increased by nearly 500 percent in the past two months, particularly across Southern states, where I.C.U. beds are filling up, a crisis fueled by some of the country’s lowest vaccination rates and widespread political opposition to public health measures like mask requirements.

In Florida, 16,457 people are hospitalized, the most of any state, followed by Texas, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

With the surge pummeling the nation and overwhelming hospitals, a shortage of bedside nurses has complicated efforts to treat hospitalized coronavirus patients, leading to longer emergency room waiting times and rushed or inadequate care.

Passengers carried luggage at the Barcelona airport, Spain, Friday, July 9, 2021.Joan Mateu/Associated Press

The European Union is set to advise member states that they should reintroduce travel restrictions for visitors from the United States, three E.U. officials said on Sunday, as coronavirus infections and hospitalizations have surged in the U.S. in recent weeks.

Starting Monday, the officials said, the United States will be removed from a “safe list” of countries whose residents can travel to the 27-nation bloc without additional restrictions, such as quarantine and testing requirements. The suggested restrictions, made by the European Council, will not be mandatory for member countries, and it will remain up to those countries to decide whether or not to impose them.

Global coronavirus cases by region

This chart shows how reported cases per capita have changed in different parts of the world.

Most European countries reopened their borders to Americans in June, more than a year after imposing a travel ban, hoping that Americans would visit this summer and help an ailing tourism industry bounce back.

In essence, the European Union gave the United States a summertime pass to encourage tourism, despite the relatively high infection rates in parts of the country.

A man receives his third dose of the coronavirus vaccine in Jerusalem, on August 15th.Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Israel on Sunday extended its booster shot campaign to all citizens aged 12 and above amid a surge of Delta variant infections that has made the number of new daily cases among the highest in the world.

After a remarkably swift vaccination campaign in the winter and spring, about 80 percent of Israel’s adult population has been inoculated with at least two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine administered three weeks apart.

But a new study by Israeli experts points to a waning of the vaccine’s protections over time for all ages, a finding that contributed to a U.S. decision to begin offering booster shots to Americans starting next month.

And a nationwide study of people over 60 completed by Israeli experts in late August demonstrates that a third shot provides significant extra protection against both infection and severe illness.

Israel began offering third booster shots on Aug. 1 to people aged 60 and above who had received a second shot at least five months earlier. The country rapidly expanded the program to include Israelis aged 30 and above. About 2 million Israelis, or half of those in the eligible groups so far, have already received a third shot.

Medics from the Houston Fire Department checked the breathing of a Covid-19 positive girl, age 2, before transporting her to a hospital in Houston, Texas, earlier this week.John Moore/Getty Images

As children’s hospitals in many parts of the United States admit more Covid-19 patients, a result of the highly contagious Delta variant, federal and state health officials are grappling with a sharp new concern: children not yet eligible for vaccination in places with substantial viral spread, who are now at higher risk of being infected than at any other time in the pandemic.

Nowhere is that worry greater than in Louisiana, which has among the highest new daily case rates in the country and where only 40 percent of people are fully vaccinated, putting children at particular risk as they return to school.

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At Children’s Hospital New Orleans, the intensive care unit has been jammed with Covid-19 patients, and nurses have raced around monitoring one gut-wrenching case after another. One child was getting a complicated breathing treatment known as ECMO, a last resort after ventilators fail, which nurses said was almost unheard-of for pediatric cases. About half a dozen others were in various stages of distress.

Medical staff throughout the hospital said the causes of illness in children were often simple: parents, family members and friends who were unvaccinated and not wearing masks.

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Louisiana’s Covid Surge Complicates Its Response to Hurricane Ida

As the Category 4 storm slammed the state, Gov. John Bel Edwards said that evacuating hospitals was not an option because of the high number of coronavirus patients.

We’re going to see a very, very powerful storm that will travel across southeast Louisiana and will exit into Mississippi, probably still at hurricane strength. And this is not the kind of storm that we normally get. This is going to be much stronger than we usually see. And quite frankly, if you had to draw up the worst possible path for a hurricane in Louisiana, it would be something very, very close to what we’re seeing. We’re in a very dangerous place with our hospitals, as you know. Yesterday’s count, we still have 2,450 in our hospitals with Covid, on top of all of the other individuals who are in a hospital. And quite frankly, evacuating our Tier 1 hospitals is not going to be an option. There aren’t hospitals with the capacity to take them. And so making sure that they can maintain power and water, have access to all of the food that they need and oxygen and other things, that’s going to really consume a lot of our time and attention because we know that the lights could be out, power could be out for weeks. I know the storm is focused on southeast Louisiana, but we’re going to be sheltering people across the state in big numbers and for quite a time, it appears. And the challenge there, are the challenges you always have, but additionally, Covid. Because you don’t really want to keep people in a congregate shelter any longer than absolutely necessary.

As the Category 4 storm slammed the state, Gov. John Bel Edwards said that evacuating hospitals was not an option because of the high number of coronavirus patients.Mario Tama/Getty Images

Louisiana hospitals scrambled Sunday to deal with two severe challenges, the landfall of Hurricane Ida and a surge of Covid that has stretched hospital capacity and left daily deaths at their highest levels in the pandemic.

Louisiana’s medical director, Dr. Joseph Kanter, had asked residents on Friday to avoid unnecessary emergency room visits to preserve the state’s hospital capacity, which has been vastly diminished by its most severe Covid surge of the pandemic.

And while plans exist to transfer patients away from coastal areas to inland hospitals ahead of a hurricane, this time “evacuations are just not possible,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said at a news conference.

“The hospitals don’t have room,” he said. “We don’t have any place to bring those patients — not in state, not out of state.”

Frank Welch, medical logistics, working inside the field hospital in the parking garage at UMMC in Jackson, Miss.Emily Kask for The New York Times

On the ground floor of a parking garage at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, there are coronavirus patients where the cars should be — about 20 of them on any given day, laid up in air-conditioned tents and cared for by a team of medical personnel from a Christian charity group. Another garage nearby has been transformed into a staging area for a monoclonal antibody clinic for Covid-19 patients.

These scenes, unfolding in the heart of Mississippi’s capital city, are a clear indication that the health care system in the nation’s poorest state is close to buckling under the latest avalanche of cases triggered by the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus.

“We have reached a failure point,” LouAnn Woodward, the medical center’s top executive, said late last week. “The demand has exceeded our resources.”

The current coronavirus spike has hit the South hard, but a combination of poverty and politics made Mississippi uniquely unprepared to handle what is now the worst coronavirus outbreak in the nation. The state has fewer active physicians per capita than any other. Five rural hospitals have closed in the past decade, and 35 more are at imminent risk of closing, according to an assessment from a nonprofit health care quality agency. There are 2,000 fewer nurses in Mississippi today than there were at the beginning of the year, according to the state hospital association.

The staff works inside the Emergency Department at Asante Three Rivers Medical Center in Grants Pass, Ore. on August 19th.Pool photo by Mike Zacchino

During the first 18 months of the pandemic, Oregon’s Tillamook County reported five deaths from Covid-19. But from Aug. 18 to Aug. 23, it had six. And now the county has asked the state for a refrigerated truck to help store an overflow of bodies from the morgue.

In a letter published in the local newspaper, the Tillamook County Board of Supervisers pleaded with residents to “please get vaccinated,” noting that 86 percent of new cases are among the unvaccinated. The local funeral home is at capacity — the surge “has put a strain on our ability to store the bodies of the deceased,” the commissioners wrote.

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The strain in Tillamook is being felt elsewhere in the state, with other local jurisdictions seeking help storing the deceased, according to The Associated Press.

The challenges reflected a 990 percent increase in Covid hospitalizations since July 9 in Oregon, where leaders have deployed the National Guard to hospitals, dispatched crisis teams to the hardest-hit regions of the state and ordered educators and health care workers to get vaccinated or lose their jobs.

Parishioners during Thursday evening Spanish mass at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Harlem. Many pews are blocked to create spacing due to Covid-19.Anna Watts for The New York Times

The weekly rhythms of Catholic life have started to return at Our Lady of Lourdes in Harlem. The pews are packed on Sunday mornings, prayer groups meet after work and the collection plate is almost as full as it was before the coronavirus pandemic began.

But parishioners are starting to worry about the virus again.

“For a little while, everyone felt more free, not using masks and things like that,” said the Rev. Gilberto Ángel-Neri, the pastor. “But now that we hear all the news about the Delta variant, everyone is using masks again.”

The progress made at Father Ángel-Neri’s church, and at houses of worship across New York City, may be threatened by a rise in virus cases in the past month and by an uneven patchwork of rules governing vaccination.

New rules to curb the spread of the virus’s more contagious Delta variant require New Yorkers to show proof of vaccination to participate in many indoor activities, including sitting inside restaurants or bars, going to a gym or nightclub and visiting a museum or zoo. But they do not apply to religious services, and most churches in the city do not require worshipers to be vaccinated, though approaches vary from place to place.

Caleb Wallace addressed a public meeting in the city of San Angelo, Texas, in November.City of San Angelo, Texas

Caleb Wallace, a leader of the anti-mask movement in Texas who became infected with the coronavirus and spent three weeks in an intensive care unit, has died, his wife, Jessica, said on Saturday.

“Caleb has peacefully passed on. He will forever live in our hearts and minds,” Mrs. Wallace wrote in a post on GoFundMe, where she had been raising money to cover medical costs.

Mrs. Wallace had said recently that her husband’s condition was declining and that doctors had run out of treatment options. On Saturday, he was to be moved to a hospice at Shannon Medical Center in the city of San Angelo so that his family could say their goodbyes, she said.

Mrs. Wallace, who is pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, recently told the San Angelo Standard-Times that when her husband first felt ill, he took a mix of vitamin C, zinc, aspirin and ivermectin — a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms in both people and animals that has been touted as a coronavirus treatment but was recently proved to be ineffective against the virus.

Mr. Wallace, 30, who campaigned against mask mandates and other Covid policies that he saw as government intrusion, lived in San Angelo for most of his life and worked at a company that sells welding equipment. He checked into the Shannon Medical Center on July 30.

A member of the staff assisted guests in checking in at the PUBLIC Hotel in Manhattan on Wednesday.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

As travelers prepare for their next vacation, among the essentials to take along — like a toothbrush, wallet and phone charger — could be proof of vaccinationfor Covid-19, depending on where they are booked to sleep.

As coronavirus cases surge again across the country, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, a small number of hotels in the United States have announced that they will require proof of vaccination from guests and staff.

Accommodations such as PUBLIC Hotel, Equinox Hotel and Wythe Hotel, all in New York City, Urban Cowboy Lodge in Big Indian, N.Y., a hamlet in the Catskill Mountains, and Pilgrim House in Provincetown, Mass., are among the first in the United States to announce that they will require evidence of vaccination, via a physical card or a digital verification, from their guests.

The precedent for hotels requiring vaccination is already being set beyond the contiguous United States. In August, Puerto Rico issued an island-wide vaccine mandate that requires guests and staff at all hotels, guesthouses and short-term rentals, including Airbnb, to provide proof of vaccination or a negative PCR or antigen test taken within 72 hours before their visit. If a person is staying longer than a week, they will need to present negative tests to hotel staff on a weekly basis.

Elite Island Resorts, a Florida-based company that runs a collection of all-inclusive Caribbean resorts stretching from Antigua to Panama, announced that all guests over the age of 12 would be required to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination upon arrival beginning on Sept. 1.”