Covid Live Updates: Virus and Vaccine News – The New York Times

President Biden on Thursday announced that all civilian federal employees must be vaccinated against the coronavirus or be forced to submit to regular testing, social distancing, mask requirements and restrictions on most travel.

The federal government employs more than 4 million Americans, all of whom will need to attest to being fully vaccinated in order to avoid wearing a mask on the job, regardless of where in the country they work, and comply with screening tests once or twice a week.

The president also directed the Defense Department to study how and when to add the coronavirus vaccine to the list of required vaccinations for all members of the military. The announcement marked the first time he has suggested that a mandate could come for active-duty members of the military before any of the three federally authorized vaccines receives full approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Mr. Biden’s announcement of new mandates in a pleading speech in the East Room was part of an attempt to reset expectations on the health scourge that just weeks ago he thought he had under control. But now, the Delta variant is ripping through unvaccinated communities, threatening to undo the progress to stop the spread of the coronavirus made by the Biden administration in its first six months. Recent research has shown fully vaccinated people are protected against the worst outcomes of Covid-19, including those involving the Delta variant. And cases, hospitalizations and deaths are still a fraction of their devastating winter peaks.

“Cases will go up further before they start to go back down,” Mr. Biden said Thursday, tempering expectations for what is to come. “There’s a challenge as you knew there could be.”

For vaccinated Americans worried about breakthrough cases, Mr. Biden reiterated that the pandemic was among the unvaccinated and that booster shots were not necessary. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been tracking breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization and death and the director said this week the agency is conducting outbreak investigations in clusters.

“As of now, my medical advisers say the answer is no,” he said of booster shots. “No American needs a booster now. But if science tells us there’s a need for boosters, that’s something we’ll do.”

In response, the administration is stepping up its efforts to convince unvaccinated Americans to get their shots. Mr. Biden on Thursday called on states, territories and local governments to pay $100 to Americans who remain unvaccinated to get their shots. And the administration announced Thursday that small- and medium-sized businesses will now be reimbursed for offering their employees paid leave to get their family members, including their children, vaccinated.

“It will cost you, the employer, nothing,” he said.

Some experts, especially in the early days of the vaccination campaign, have expressed concern over the idea of paying people to get vaccinated, worrying that it could be perceived as out of step with messaging that vaccines bring enormous benefits on their own.

Mr. Bidenalso called on school districts across the country to host at least one pop-up vaccination clinic over the coming weeks, with the goal of increasing vaccination rates among children 12 and older.

The president’s move was to similar to an announcement on Wednesday by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, who said that tens of thousands of state employees would be required to show proof of vaccination or submit to weekly testing. Mr. Cuomo also said that “patient facing” health care workers at state-run hospitals would be required to be vaccinated as a condition of their employment.

Other governments around the country are beginning to put in place similar arrangements as well, as the highly contagious Delta variant has caused case numbers to balloon in recent weeks. New York City announced this week that it would require all 300,000 city employees to be vaccinated or submit to weekly testing. California also unveiled a plan to require vaccinations for state employees.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services will require all workers and volunteers at state-operated facilities to be fully vaccinated or receive an approved medical or religious exemption by Sept. 30, according to a statement sent to The New York Times on Wednesday. Officials had not responded to questions about whether those with exemptions will be required to undergo testing.

And the Department of Veterans Affairs will require 115,000 of its frontline health care workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus in the next two months. But public health officials are hoping that the prospect of extra burdens for the unvaccinated will help persuade more people to get inoculated.

People familiar with Mr. Biden’s announcement said it was part of a longstanding discussion about how to bring most federal workers back to the office after nearly a year and a half in which hundreds of thousands of them worked from home because of the pandemic.

A team has been working on that plan for months, trying to juggle the concerns of employees and the need to keep the government functioning. One concern that officials confronted was how to require vaccinations without potentially prompting critical employees to quit, undermining the government’s mission.

But the president’s announcement comes as the administration is under pressure to increase the rate of vaccinations in the country. About half of all Americans have been fully vaccinated, but the pace of people getting shots has declined significantly from early spring.

On Tuesday, the C.D.C. revised its mask guidance, advising that even vaccinated people should resume wearing masks in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the virus is surging. Some states and municipalities were quick to update their own mask rules, while others expressed outrage. Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., said Thursday that an indoor mask mandate would be reimposed on Saturday to comply with new federal guidance.

Rebecca Robbins and Dan Levin contributed reporting.

President Biden is pushing Congress for a second one-month extension of the moratorium on residential evictions, a long-shot request needed to buy time to stand up a $47 billion rental relief program plagued by delays and red tape.

The decision to throw responsibility to Congress — just two days before the freeze expires — took Democratic leadership by surprise, and a rushed attempt to pass an extension by a voice vote this week is expected to fail, according to several people close to the situation.

White House officials, under pressure from tenants’ rights groups, agreed to a one-month extension of the ban, which was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just ahead of its previous expiration date of June 30. The freeze is now set to expire on Saturday.

Last month, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge by landlords, saying it would allow the moratorium to continue until July 31, as planned, to give the Treasury Department and the states time to disburse cash to landlords to cover back rent accrued that tenants did not pay during the pandemic.

But Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion that any future extension of the moratorium would require Congressional action.

On Thursday, Mr. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, citing the steep rise in coronavirus infections around the country, pressed Congress to extend the freeze for another month to avoid a health and eviction crisis.

“Given the recent spread of the Delta variant, including among those Americans both most likely to face evictions and lacking vaccinations, President Biden would have strongly supported a decision by the C.D.C. to further extend this eviction moratorium,” she wrote in a statement. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has made clear that this option is no longer available.”

Mr. Biden “calls on Congress to extend the eviction moratorium to protect such vulnerable renters and their families without delay,” she added.

The last-minute timing of the request virtually ensures such an effort will not succeed, Democratic congressional aides said. The one fast-track method of quickly passing an extension, through a procedure known as unanimous consent, can be blocked by a single dissenting vote.

“There’s no way I’m going to support this. It was a bad idea in the first place,” said Sen. Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, reflecting the view of many Republicans in the chamber. “Owners have the right to action. They need to have recourse for the nonpayment of rent.”

The Biden administration’s effort to head off a crisis when the federal moratorium expires gained modest momentum in June, with 290,000 tenants receiving $1.5 billion in pandemic relief, according to Treasury Department statistics released last week.

But the flow of cash provided under two pandemic relief packages remains sluggish and hampered by confusion at the state level, potentially endangering tenants who have fallen behind in their rent over the past year. So far, only about $3 billion of the $47 billion program has been allocated, assisting about 600,000 tenants.

In recent days, White House officials have been working the phones to pressure officials in New York, and other states that have not yet begun to allocate the aid, to move more quickly.

“There can be no excuse for any state or locality not to promptly deploy the resources that Congress appropriated to meet this critical need of so many Americans,” Ms. Psaki said.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is calling on states, territories and local governments to pay $100 to Americans who remain unvaccinated against the coronavirus to get their shots. The move comes as concern has grown about rising cases across the country, and the administration has shifted its strategy to focus on more personalized approaches.

The Treasury Department said Thursday that the money to pay for the vaccine incentive payments could come from the $350 billion of relief funds that is being given to states and cities as part of the economic rescue package that Congress approved in March. The incentive is intended to “boost vaccination rates, protect communities, and save lives.”

The administration is also stepping up efforts to get to companies to give their employees time off to get the vaccine.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service said that employers can claim tax credits to cover wages paid to workers who take family members to get vaccinated or care for members of their households who are recovering from the vaccination. Self-employed workers are also eligible to receive the tax credits.

The initiative expands on a program that was rolled out in April that offered a paid leave tax credit to offset the cost to companies with fewer than 500 workers incurred by giving paid time to workers getting vaccines.

The Biden administration has been tussling with some states over how the relief money can be used, but earlier this year issued guidance that made clear it can go toward programs that are expected to increase the number of people who choose to get vaccinated. The Treasury Department said it will provide technical assistance for states and cities to help them use the money to boost vaccinations in their communities and it will be working with the Department of Health and Human Services.

States and cities have been taking creative approaches, such as lotteries, to encourage people to get vaccinated. Some experts, especially in the early days of the vaccination campaign, have expressed concern, though, over the idea of paying people to get vaccinated, worrying that it could be perceived as out of step with messaging that vaccines bring enormous benefits on their own. Opponents of the idea have also questioned whether paying people is the best use of funds to encourage people to get vaccinated.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City said this week that the city will begin offering $100 payments as part of an incentive plan to spur more people to get vaccinated. The program is expected to start on Friday.

“I think when someone says here’s $100 for you, that’s going to make a big impact,” Mr. de Blasio said.

Dr. Elisa Sobo, an anthropologist at San Diego State University who studies vaccine hesitancy, said that the payment could be an incentive but suggested it was unlikely to sway every unvaccinated person. “Some folks will find the offer insulting; others will use it as ‘proof’ that the vaccine is no good,” she said. But, she added, “There are lots of people who will say ‘why not’ to $100. Some people who have until now been on the fence will see $100 as a good reason to get off of it.”

In guidance that was issued in May, the Treasury said that the relief funds can be used to encourage vaccinations “so long as such costs are reasonably proportional to the expected public health benefit.”

Rebecca Robbins and Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.

The 27 member states of the European Union altogether have now administered more coronavirus vaccine doses per 100 people than the United States, in another sign that inoculations across the bloc have maintained some speed throughout the summer, while they have stagnated for weeks in the United States.

E.U. countries had administered 102.66 doses per 100 people as of Tuesday, while the United States had administered 102.44, according to the latest vaccination figures compiled by Our World in Data. This month, the European Union also overtook the United States in first injections; currently, 58 percent of people across the bloc have received a dose, compared with 56.5 percent in the United States.

The latest figures provide a stark contrast with the early stages of the vaccination campaigns this year, when E.U. countries, facing a shortage of doses and delayed deliveries, looked in envy at the initially more successful efforts in the United States, Britain and Israel.

But the European Union is now vaccinating its populations at a faster pace than most developed countries. More than 70 percent of adults in the bloc have now received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said the achievement put E.U. countries “among the world leaders.”

“The catch-up process has been very successful,” she said in a statement on Tuesday.

As inoculation campaigns in many American states have been marred by widespread anti-vaccine sentiment, E.U. countries have been able to immunize their populations with less pushback.

Around 75 percent of residents in the bloc agree that vaccines are the only way to end the coronavirus pandemic, according to a public survey conducted across the European Union in May.

Furthermore, 79 percent said they intended to get vaccinated “sometime this year.”

Yet the spread of the Delta variant has added new urgency. Cases have soared in countries such as the Netherlands and Portugal, and hospitalizations have increased in France and Spain, among others, driving officials to try to speed up vaccination campaigns that have slightly slowed in recent weeks.

“Countries have tried in the first half of the year to stretch the interval between the first and the second doses, but now they have to reduce it to the minimum, with the shortest possible interval,” Andrea Ammon, director of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, said this month.

The center said last week that the Delta variant was now dominant in a majority of countries in the bloc.

Countries including France and Italy have announced new vaccine requirements to try to speed up inoculations, with proof of vaccination or a negative test set to be required to gain access to most public indoor venues. The goal, President Emmanuel Macron of France said in announcing the measures this month, is to “put restrictions on the unvaccinated rather than on everyone.”

As campaigns have slightly decreased or plateaued in some E.U. countries, health officials have also urged younger age groups to get vaccinated.

“We have focused a lot on the elderly, and it’s left a very strong perception among younger people that they’re not at risk, or that if they are, it’s very mild,” said Heidi Larson, an anthropologist and founder of the London-based Vaccine Confidence Project, which tracks opinions about immunization across the world.

Vittoria Colliza, a Paris-based epidemiologist at Inserm, the French public-health research center, said that vaccine saturation levels were high among many populations, but that large pockets had yet to even receive one dose.

She added that new lockdown restrictions may have to be reimposed to stem the spread of the Delta variant if immunization fails to keep up.

“They’re increasing already,” Dr. Colliza said about inoculations, especially among younger people. “But the fear is that the Delta variant will begin to fully impact our lives by the end of August.”

Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington said on Thursday that an indoor mask mandate would be reimposed in the nation’s capital on Saturday, becoming the latest jurisdiction to change public health protocols after new federal guidance advised even vaccinated people in coronavirus hot spots to resume wearing face coverings in indoor public spaces.

The announcement from Washington came as some states and municipalities were quick to update their own mask rules, while others expressed outrage, another example of the political tensions that have often accompanied public health precautions during the pandemic.

The new federal guidance also suggested masks for all children, staff members and visitors in schools, regardless of their vaccination status and community transmission of the virus.

The mayors of Atlanta and Kansas City, Mo., both Democrats, reinstated mask mandates; Atlanta’s took effect immediately and Kansas City’s will start on Aug. 2. Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada, a Democrat, ordered that residents in counties with high rates of transmission — including Clark County, home to Las Vegas — wear masks in public indoor spaces starting on Friday. In Minnesota, health and education officials urged all students, staff and visitors to wear masks in schools, but held off making the guidance a state requirement.

Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, a Democrat, announced a mask requirement for state employees and visitors in public areas of state government buildings, starting on Aug. 2. She also recommended masks for all residents in counties with high transmission rates, while acknowledging the frustrations of vaccinated people.

“I take no pleasure in asking you to put a mask on again,” she said at a news conference on Wednesday, the same day a mask requirement went into effect in a central Kansas school district.

On Wednesday, at least six Republican governors, Greg Abbott of Texas, Doug Ducey of Arizona, Brian Kemp of Georgia, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, and Ron DeSantis of Florida, signaled their opposition to the recommendation.

​​ “It’s very important that we say unequivocally, no to lockdowns, no to school closures, no to restrictions, and no mandates,” Mr. DeSantis said in a speech at a gathering held by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative lobbying group.

Nine states — Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — had already banned or limited face mask mandates, leaving cities and counties with few options to fight the virus spread.

Some municipalities in states that have resisted mandates faced headwinds even before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its new guidance. On Monday St. Louis County, Mo., reinstated a mask mandate, only to face a lawsuit hours later from Eric Schmitt, the state’s Republican attorney general.

Major employers are also struggling with how best to interpret the new mask recommendations. Apple announced that it would require masks for customers and employees in more than half of its U.S. stores and in some corporate offices, and MGM Resorts International, the casino and hotel giant, said it would require all guests and visitors to wear masks indoors in public areas.

Other companies have pushed back their return-to-office dates, while some that have already relaxed mask restrictions, like WalMart and Kroger, had not indicated their plans as of Wednesday.

Lauren Hirsch and Jack Nicas contributed reporting.

Federal regulators have approved the reopening of a troubled Baltimore vaccine-making plant that has been closed for more than three months over contamination concerns that delayed the delivery of about 170 million doses of coronavirus vaccine.

The turnabout came after a two-day inspection at the plant this week by the Food and Drug Administration and weeks of effort by Johnson & Johnson and its subcontractor, Emergent BioSolutions, to bring the site up to standard.

The F.D.A. had halted production at the factory in late March after it was discovered that workers had accidentally contaminated a batch of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine with a key ingredient used in AstraZeneca’s, then made at the same site.

The federal government also stripped Emergent of the responsibility to manufacture AstraZeneca’s vaccine and instructed Johnson & Johnson to assert greater control over Emergent’s operation.

“The American people should have high expectations of the partners its government chooses to help prepare them for disaster, and we have even higher expectations of ourselves,” Robert Kramer, the chief executive of Emergent, said in a statement on Thursday.

“We have fallen short of those lofty ambitions over the past few months but resumption of manufacturing is a key milestone, and we are grateful for the opportunity to help bring this global pandemic to an end,” he added.

The development, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, is welcome news for Johnson & Johnson. Because of Emergent’s failures to meet manufacturing standards, Johnson & Johnson has fallen behind on its contractual pledges to deliver vaccine to the United States government and to Europe.

The F.D.A.’s decision that the Baltimore plant can resume operation does not mean that the agency has broadly authorized Johnson & Johnson to distribute doses made by Emergent on an emergency basis. In a statement, Johnson & Johnson said it is continuing to work toward that F.D.A. authorization.

Without it, Johnson & Johnson has been unable to distribute Emergent-produced doses without specific, batch-by-batch clearance by regulators. The equivalent of up to 75 million doses have been cleared since production was halted, but tens of millions of doses still remain in limbo.

It remains unclear whether the federal government would deploy additional Johnson & Johnson doses at home, export them or both. So far, the vast bulk of the nation’s vaccine stock has came from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the two other vaccine developers. The federal government has purchased huge quantities of those vaccines for the future.

Before it halted operations, Emergent said that the plant had the capacity to produce about a billion doses of vaccine a year. Production will need to gear up in stages, officials said.

JERUSALEM — Israel will begin administering a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine those 60 and older, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced on Thursday, citing the rising risk of a virus surge fueled by the Delta variant.

The health ministry has instructed the country’s four main health care providers to begin giving on Sunday a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to Israelis in that age group who received a second dose more than five months ago. President Isaac Herzog, 60, will be the first to get a booster shot on Friday, Mr. Bennett said.

“The battle against Covid is a global effort,” Mr. Bennett said.

Whether booster shots are needed by older citizens is an issue that is far from settled among scientists. Most studies indicate that immunity resulting from the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna is long-lasting, and researchers are still trying to interpret recent Israeli data suggesting a decline in efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine months after inoculation.

Pfizer on Wednesday offered up its own study showing a marginal decline in efficacy against symptomatic infection with the coronavirus months after immunization, although the vaccine remained powerfully effective against severe disease and death. The company has begun making a case for booster shots in the United States, as well.

The latest government decision in Israel, an early leader in administering vaccines, follows an analysis by the health ministry that estimated that the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in preventing serious illness remained higher than 90 percent — but that its ability to stop infection had fallen over time.

Some experts have pushed back against a rush to approve a booster in Israel. The data are too uncertain, they say, to estimate of how much efficacy has waned. For example, the Delta-driven outbreak hit parts of the country with high vaccination rates first and has been hitting other regions later.

Since June, there has been a steady rise in Israel’s daily rate of new virus cases, and the seven-day average is 1,670 a day. The figure exceeded 2,300 one day this week, a spike that health experts have attributed to the spread of the more contagious Delta variant.

The daily rate is still far lower than at the height of Israel’s third wave of infections in January, when number of new daily cases rose briefly above 11,000. But it is far higher than in mid-June, when the figure fell to single digits and the government eased almost all antivirus restrictions to allow daily life to return to normal.

The number of coronavirus patients in hospitals nevertheless remains relatively low; a total of 159 people were hospitalized on Thursday, much less than the figure of more than 2,000 at the height of the third wave in January.

In the United States, Biden administration health officials increasingly think that vulnerable populations may need additional shots even as research continues into how long the coronavirus vaccines remain effective.

There is growing consensus among scientists, for example, that people with compromised immune systems may need more than the prescribed two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Earlier this month, Israel began administering a third shot of the Pfizer vaccine to people with compromised immune systems. The country has already given 2,000 of those people a third dose with no severe adverse events, Mr. Bennett said Thursday.

Though Israel’s vaccination rate has dwindled in recent months, it was an early leader in the race to vaccinate against the virus, allowing the country to return to ordinary life faster than most other places.

Nearly 60 percent of Israelis are fully vaccinated, mostly with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and the country is seen as a test case for a post-vaccine world.

Israeli health care leaders welcomed the decision to administer an extra shot to older citizens, while emphasizing that the original two doses still remained protective against serious illness and death.

Gadi Segal, the head of a virus ward at Sheba Medical Center in central Israel, told Kan radio that vaccinated patients admitted to the hospitals were much less likely to need ventilators.

Prof. Segal said: “There is no doubt the number of ill is rising. The vaccine’s ability to prevent infection is less, but it is very effective in preventing patients from reaching the point of respiratory failure.”

He added: “I’m under 60, and when I am offered a third dose, I will take it happily.”

Israel has faced scrutiny for its initial reluctance to offer vaccinations to significant numbers of Palestinians living under differing levels of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel initially said the diplomatic agreements signed in the 1990s with the Palestinian leadership, known as the Oslo Accords, gave the Palestinian health authorities responsibility to procure their own vaccines. Rights campaigners said other clauses of the accords, as well as the Fourth Geneva Convention, gave Israel a legal duty to assist.

But when Israel offered about a million vaccines in June to the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited autonomy in parts of the West Bank, the authority pulled out of the deal because it said the vaccines would have expired before officials would have had time to administer them. Some of the excess vaccines were later given to South Korea.

Sharon LaFraniere and Carl Zimmer contributed reporting.

AstraZeneca has released one billion coronavirus vaccine doses to 170 nations this year, the company said on Thursday, an important milestone despite the many challenges that its low-cost vaccine has faced — including legal fights with the European Union, slashed deliveries and hesitancy in many countries.

The AstraZeneca vaccine, which was developed with Oxford University, was once earmarked for broad use throughout Europe and other continents, including Africa.

But the vaccine has been held back by various problems. AstraZeneca has been embroiled in a legal dispute with the European Union after the company said this year that it could deliver only a third of the 300 million doses it was expected to provide to the bloc.

Several European countries, as well as Australia and Canada, stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine for young people after reports of extremely rare but serious blood clots. Denmark and Spain have stopped using it altogether because of the blood clot risk. South Africa stopped using the vaccine after it was found to be ineffective on a variant there. And the United States has not authorized its use. (AstraZeneca said on Thursday that in the second half of the year, it would seek full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a process that can take many months to complete.)

Experts say they fear that the negative publicity the vaccine has received in some countries — President Emmanuel Macron of France called the vaccine “quasi-ineffective” among those over 65 — may have also affected others that are in critical need of doses.

“We are definitely seeing that hesitancy in high-income countries can affect low-income countries,” Andrew Pollard, a professor of pediatric infection and immunity who leads the group at Oxford University that developed the vaccine with AstraZeneca, said on the BBC on Thursday.

Dr. Pollard added that he believed most people across the world were desperate to receive the vaccines and that the main issue remained the inequitable distribution of doses.

AstraZeneca, which has pledged not to make any profit from the shots, said on Thursday that its Covid vaccine sales for the first half of the year had reached $1.2 billion. In comparison, Pfizer, which created a shot with the German company BioNTech and has made no such promise, said it predicted its Covid vaccine sales to reach more than $33 billion by the end of the year.

Companies are rushing to revisit their coronavirus precautions, with some mandating vaccines and pushing back targets for when employees are expected to return to the office, as cases rise across the United States, fueled by the Delta variant and slower pace of vaccinations.

Lyft said on Wednesday that it would not require employees to return to the office until February, while Twitter said it would close its newly reopened offices in San Francisco and New York and indefinitely postpone other reopening plans.

Their actions follow announcements by authorities in California and New York City that they will require hundreds of thousands of government workers to get inoculations or face weekly testing. And President Biden is set to announce that all civilian federal workers must be vaccinated or submit to regular testing, social distancing, mask requirements and restrictions on most travel.

• Apple will start requiring employees and customers to wear masks regardless of their vaccination status in more than half of its stores in the United States, it said on Wednesday, a new sign that shopping in the country may soon resemble earlier days of the pandemic.

• Google will require employees who return to the company’s offices to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. It also said it would push back its official return-to-office date to mid-October from September. Google has more than 144,000 employees globally.

• Netflix will require the casts of all its U.S. productions to be vaccinated, along with anyone else who comes on set. It’s the first studio to establish such a policy.

• Facebook will require employees who work at its U.S. campuses to be vaccinated, depending on local conditions and regulations. Facebook, which has roughly 60,000 workers, said in June that it would permit all full-time employees to continue to work from home when feasible.

• The Durst Organization, one of the largest private real estate developers in New York City, is requiring all of its employees in nonunion positions to be vaccinated by Sept. 6 or face termination. Durst has about 350 nonunion employees and about 700 union workers.

• The Walt Disney Company said Wednesday that it would require cast members and guests older than 2 to wear face coverings in all indoor locations at its Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort, effective July 30.

• Citigroup is reinstating mask requirements in common areas for employees across its U.S. offices, a person familiar with the situation said.

Olympic organizers on Thursday reported 24 new coronavirus infections among personnel, including three athletes. A total of 198 people connected to the Games have tested positive since July 1.

Among them are 23 athletes, including six from the United States, which is fielding the largest Olympic delegation in Tokyo and also has the most members who have tested positive. They include the pole-vaulter Sam Kendricks, the reigning world champion and a bronze medalist at the 2016 Rio Games, who was forced to withdraw from competition, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee said on Thursday.

Outside the Olympic bubble, coronavirus cases are rising. Tokyo recorded 3,177 new infections on Wednesday, setting a record for the second consecutive day as health experts warned that tougher restrictions might be needed to control the spread of the Delta variant.

Across Japan, the average number of daily cases is up by 149 percent from two weeks ago, according to New York Times data. On Thursday, Japanese officials reported more than 9,500 cases nationwide, a new daily high.

— The New York Times