American life is roaring back as a slew of states eased or dropped pandemic restrictions in time for Memorial Day weekend and are preparing to lift the few remaining coronavirus control measures, from mask mandates to restaurant capacity limits, in the coming weeks.
In large areas of the country, the holiday weekend that traditionally marks the unofficial start of summer also kicked off a post-vaccine return to normalcy.
Last call in Kentucky bars stretched late into the night after the governor lifted an 11 p.m. curfew. Gamblers on a Boston casino floor counted down to 12:01 a.m. Saturday when Massachusetts restrictions ended, chanting "It's all over" as they ripped off their masks, sipped champagne and watched workers remove plastic-glass slot machine dividers. Jersey Shore revelers rushed to reopened dance floors.
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The home arenas of basketball teams including the Boston Celtics, New York Knicks, Miami Heat, Philadelphia 76ers and Milwaukee Bucks recently have been filled to near or full capacity. Most baseball parks plan to lift capacity restrictions by July 5, according to tracking by the Athletic.
The developments are happening as half of eligible Americans have received at least one vaccine dose, although President Joe Biden's goal of hitting 70% by the Fourth of July looks out of reach as the pace of shots slows drastically.
The seven-day average of daily new cases has dipped below 20,000 for the first time since March 2020, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dubbed no state as "high risk" for transmission last week. For once, public health experts don't have to be the party poopers about holiday gatherings -- at least for the vaccinated.
"You may see some vestiges of outbreaks in particular areas that have lower vaccination rates, but they'll be harder to sustain themselves and actually grow into these major outbreaks," said Dave Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
However, the virus remains a present danger, particularly for the unvaccinated.
The U.S. death toll is on the brink of crossing 600,000 as hundreds of people die daily. Unvaccinated people face higher risk of infection as the virus seeks out those without immunity, and their hospitalization rates have been steady. New virus variants remain a looming threat, though the vaccines still appear to prove an effective shield.
And the United States remains a global anomaly, given the widespread availability of vaccine doses here while regions such as Southeast Asia are in the throes of deadly spikes.
Nevertheless, governors and U.S. public health authorities in even some of the most cautious jurisdictions say the risks of overrun hospitals and uncontrolled outbreaks are so low that restrictions can end after 14 months.
Nightclubs in Boston scrambled to staff their bars and revive their sound systems in time for the Memorial Day weekend reopening -- well before the August goal originally set by Gov. Charlie Baker. Royale, the largest club in Boston's theater district, hit its 1,200-person capacity before midnight and had to turn away some customers who had waited in line for more than an hour.
"It felt like the end of Prohibition, that everyone wants to come out and celebrate," said Jamison LaGuardia, vice president for sales, operations and events at Royale Entertainment Group.
After Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam lifted all remaining business restrictions May 28, Barb and Chuck Moody returned to the neighborhood bar in Leesburg where they used to drink every week. They ordered a pinot grigio and a pilsener, chatted up the bartender they got to know before the pandemic, and regaled a couple seated nearby with their firsthand account of the streaker who slid across a rain-soaked tarp at a Washington Nationals game last week.
"It was like old times," said Barb Moody, a 66-year-old retired marketing executive. "People are friendlier than they used to be, because they are like, 'Oh, another human! We can talk!' "
As has been the case throughout the pandemic, the road to reopening looks different depending on where you live. A patchwork of inconsistent policies across and within states has left some businesses and customers confused.
Republican-run states, from Wyoming to Texas to Florida, have been fully reopened since spring. In Republican-run and Democrat-leaning states alike, major cities have lagged behind suburban and urban areas in removing restrictions.
NEW ENGLAND LEADS
Massachusetts and the rest of New England -- the most heavily vaccinated region in the U.S. -- are giving the rest of the country a possible glimpse of the future if more Americans get shots.
Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the region have been dropping steadily as more than 60% of residents in all six of the region's states have received at least one vaccine dose.
The Deep South states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, by comparison, are the least vaccinated at around 35%, and new cases relative to the population are generally running higher there. Nationally, about 50% of Americans have received at least one shot.
For Dr. Jeremy Faust in Boston, the moment he realized the pandemic no longer dominated his workday hit over Memorial Day weekend, when he didn't see a single coronavirus case over two shifts in the emergency room at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Kerry LaBarbera, an emergency room nurse a few miles away at Boston Medical Center, had a similar realization when just two patients with the virus moved through her unit, one of the busiest in New England.
"The past year and a half has been like going through a tornado or something terrible," she said. "You're holding on for dear life, and then you get past it and it's like, 'What just happened?'"
Massachusetts health officials last week determined that none of the state's cities and towns is at high risk for the first time since they started issuing weekly assessments in August.
In Rhode Island, hospitalizations have hit their lowest levels in about eight months. New Hampshire is averaging about a death a week after peaking at about 12 a day during the virus's winter surge. And Vermont, the most heavily vaccinated state in the U.S. at more than 70%, went more than two weeks without a single covid reported death.
"It's an incredible change over such a short period of time," said Dr. Tim Lahey, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington.
Public health experts say the rest of the country could take some cues from New England.
One thing the region appears to have done right: It was generally slower than other parts of the country to expand vaccine eligibility and instead concentrated more on reaching vulnerable groups of people, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director.
New England leaders for the most part also embraced the recommendations of public health experts over economic priorities throughout the pandemic, said Dr. Albert Ko, who chairs the epidemiology department at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Conn.
That parts of the region were among the hardest-hit in the early days of the outbreak also played a significant role.
"We really went through it in those early moments," Ko said. "That's left a big imprint on the population generally."
Some of the improvement in covid-19 numbers also can be attributed to warmer weather that is allowing New Englanders to socially distance outdoors more, experts say. And racial disparities in vaccinations persist in the region, as they do in many other corners of the country.
"So if you are in a high vaccination state, your job is not done," tweeted Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University's School of Public Health in Providence, R.I. "Because across America, there are too many people and communities for whom vaccines still remain out of reach."
EUROPE CAUTIOUS
Across the ocean in Britain and the European Union, it is quite a different story.
Despite plunging infection levels and a surging vaccine program, parts of Europe are maintaining limits on gatherings, reimposing curbs on travel and weighing local lockdowns. In Britain, the spread of a new highly contagious variant first detected in India has scrambled calculations just as the country planned to return to something more like pre-pandemic life.
Parts of Britain have decided to extend lockdown restrictions. Last week, the government tightened its travel rules, including for the fully vaccinated, by removing Portugal -- the most popular remaining European tourist destination -- from the list of places where Britons could fly without stringent quarantines.
And scientists are heatedly debating whether to go ahead with a June 21 reopening, with some saying the costs of delaying it by a few weeks would pale in comparison to the damage that could be wrought by giving the new variant, known as delta, extra opportunities to spread while people are still acquiring immunity.
Although vaccinations got off to a slow start in much of Europe, they have since helped drive down cases, as in the United States. Nevertheless, on the fundamental question of how to approach an end to restrictions, America and Europe have diverged.
"We're now looking at a variant where we have less knowledge about its properties," said Theo Sanderson, a researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. "It just means we have less certainty about what things will look like going forward."
Britain has become the world's most sophisticated laboratory for the virus's evolution, with 60% of England's coronavirus cases being analyzed through genomic sequencing. That has allowed the country to pick up on the earliest signs of dangerous variants and made Britain a harbinger of the challenges facing even heavily vaccinated nations as newer versions of the virus reach the unvaccinated.
While scientists are at odds over exactly how serious a threat the delta variant poses to Britain, fears over its potential to undo some of the country's hard-won progress have crescendoed.
"The British are worrying more than any other country," said Tim Spector, a professor of genetic public health research at King's College London. "We seem to be much more receptive to the doomsday scenarios than they are in the U.S."
Since the delta variant arrived in Britain in March, it has rapidly outspread other versions of the virus, including the very contagious variant first identified in Britain that contributed to deadly waves around the world this winter. That, in turn, has created localized outbreaks that have nudged covid cases up.
A top scientific adviser to the British government estimated Friday that the delta variant was roughly 60% more contagious than the earlier one from Britain. Health officials also warned that cases caused by the delta variant might lead to a higher risk of hospitalization, although it was too early to say for certain.
The divergent strategies of European nations and the United States also reflect broader differences in how Western governments are thinking about their responsibility to unvaccinated people, scientists said.
They worry that the variant soon could gain ground in unvaccinated pockets of the U.S., where the virus continues to sicken and kill people. The Biden administration is still searching for ways to overcome that vaccine hesitancy.
In Britain, even with more than 90% of people older than 65 having been fully vaccinated, health officials have resisted as speedy a reopening as they seek to expand inoculation rates in lower-income and nonwhite areas.
"We know the virus predominantly hits poorer communities and people of color hardest," said James Naismith, a structural biologist and director of Britain's Rosalind Franklin Institute, a medical research center. "The U.S. strategy perhaps reflects a more deep-rooted commitment to individualism. The U.K.'s vaccination campaign is highly managed and mirrors more a sense of being our brother's keeper."
Information for this article was contributed by Fenit Nirappil, Brittany Shammas, Eva Ruth Moravec, Maura Ewing, Sheila Regan, Alexandra Baumhardt and Ben Guarino of The Washington Post; by Philip Marcelo, Lisa Rathke, Patrick Whittle, Kathy McCormack and Mark Pratt of The Associated Press; and by Benjamin Mueller and Marc Santora of The New York Times.
