PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, more U.S. cities and states are removing covid-19 restrictions as vaccination rates rise and the number of infections falls. Millions of Americans are traveling over the long weekend, and airports reported some of their highest traffic since the pandemic began.
Europe also is returning to a semblance of normalcy, including the promise of summer vacations.
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Massachusetts lifted a mask requirement Saturday, a day after New Jersey dropped its mandate. In New York City and Chicago, officials reopened public beaches, though winds and cool weather kept crowds away.
"Welcome back, Chicago," Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a video announcement. "The lakefront is open."
Chicago's tourist-drawing Navy Pier also reopened its stores, restaurants, carnival rides, tour boats and cruises.
It's another sign of progress that reflects the increasingly positive health data. On Saturday, Illinois' Department of Public Health reported 802 new confirmed or probable infections, the second-lowest one-day total in six months.
For businesses nationwide, the improving outlook and long holiday weekend offered a chance to welcome customers back to in-person shopping.
Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Pa., opened its doors to customers Friday for the first time in nearly 14 months, though masks are still required. The business had switched to internet orders, sidewalk sales and virtual author events to survive the pandemic.
"We had to get creative; we had to pivot," manager Alex Brubaker said. "Our readers and our customers have been incredible. It's a rainy weekend, but the bookstore is full."
Minnesota lifted statewide coronavirus restrictions for bars and restaurants Friday, though local governments can maintain their own.
About 50% of the U.S. population has now received at least one dose of covid-19 vaccine, according to the latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 40% of the population is fully vaccinated.
Vermont boasts the nation's highest vaccination rate, with nearly 70% of its residents having received at least one shot. The governor is expected to drop all pandemic-related restrictions once 80% of Vermont's eligible population has received at least one dose, a milestone the state expects to hit this week.
In neighboring Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker lifted the mask mandate Saturday, though facial coverings are still required in certain places, including on public transportation. The state also still encourages unvaccinated people to wear masks indoors and in public areas.
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CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky threw out the ceremonial first pitch at Fenway Park before the Red Sox played the Miami Marlins on the first day that Massachusetts dropped limits on crowd sizes. Red Sox President Sam Kennedy said about 24,000 tickets were sold.
"It's such a bright moment right now," Walensky told reporters, encouraging more people to get vaccinated. "It's been a really long year, and we've seen some really, really dark times. ... I'm thrilled we're back where we are right now."
According to Massachusetts officials, 78% of all adult residents have gotten at least one shot.
"New cases have dropped by 94% since they peaked in January," Baker said Friday as he announced the end of the restrictions. "Hospitalizations are down by about 90% since their peak. This progress has made it possible for us to lift all remaining covid restrictions across the commonwealth."
Virginia relaxed its distancing and capacity restrictions Friday, and President Joe Biden celebrated the progress with a visit to a rock-climbing gym in the northern part of the state.
PROGRESS IN EUROPE
In Europe, coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths are plummeting after the continent led the world in new cases last fall and winter in waves that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, forced more rolling lockdowns and overwhelmed intensive-care units.
Now, vaccination rates are accelerating across Europe. There are hopes for a rebirth of a tourism industry that was wiped out by the pandemic.
"We don't speak of 2020. We speak of from today onward," said Guglielmo Miani, president of Milan's Montenapoleone luxury shopping district, where European and American tourists have started trickling back, wooed in part by in-person meet-ups with design teams and free breakfasts at iconic cafes. The hope is that Asian tourists will follow next year.
Europe saw the largest decline in new infections and deaths last week, while also reporting that about 44% of adults had received at least one shot, according to the World Health Organization and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
Europe's seven-day rolling average for new cases had been higher than any other region from mid-October through the beginning of December, ceding the unwanted top spot to the Americas over the new year before reclaiming it from early February through April, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.
Now, no European country is among the top 10 for new cases per 100,000 people. And only Georgia, Lithuania and Sweden are in the top 20.
But the virus is spiking in Southeast Asia and much of Latin America and is hitting the Maldives and Seychelles particularly hard. Dr. Michael Ryan, the WHO's chief of emergencies, warned that with the global situation still "fragile and volatile," Europe is by no means out of the woods.
"Relaxing measures prematurely has contributed to the surge we have seen throughout 2020 and during the first quarter of 2021," he warned. "We must stay the course while striving to increase vaccination coverage."
The biggest concern for Europe is the highly contagious variant first detected in India, which has brought that country to its knees and found a growing foothold in Britain. The British government warned Thursday that the variant accounts for 50% to 75% of all new infections and could delay plans to lift remaining social restrictions June 21.
"If we've learned anything about this virus, it's that once it starts to spread beyond a few cases, it becomes very difficult to contain," said Lawrence Young, a virologist at the University of Warwick. "Only extremely stringent local lockdowns soon after a few cases are detected will prevent the virus from spreading."
Vaccines appear to be highly effective against the variant detected in India, but it is important for people to get both doses to ensure full immunity, said Ravindra Gupta, professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge.
"In populations where there's partial immunity, either from previous infection or low levels of antibody (from a single shot), then the virus will have that nice sort of sweet spot of an advantage of immune evasion, plus greater transmission," he said.
But that hasn't stopped countries from trying to woo back tourists, even from Britain.
At least 12,000 people from Britain descended on Porto, Portugal, for the Champions League soccer final between Manchester City and Chelsea. Visitors had to show a negative covid-19 test to get into the stadium, but no quarantine was required on either end of the trip.
"Luckily, I've had two vaccines," said Casper Glyn, a 51-year-old lawyer from London who went to Porto to cheer on Chelsea with his two young sons. "They are young and healthy, so I feel good."
On Monday, Spain lifted entry requirements -- including the need for a negative virus test -- for visitors from 10 countries, including the U.K. British travelers are highly sought after at Spanish beach resorts because they tend to spend freely.
Spain lifted the measures after its two-week contagion rate dropped below 130 new infections per 100,000 people, down from a record 900 at the end of January.
Fernando Simon, head of Spain's health emergency coordination center, said he would prefer that authorities "shouted that Spain is open to tourism in 20 days, not now, when we still need to be cautious."
"I think we should lower the tone of euphoria a little," he said.
Greece, too, was voicing caution even after it recently allowed domestic travel and reopened most economic activity. About a third of the population has received at least one shot, but new infections and deaths remain high.
"Yes, hospitalizations are dropping; yes, deaths and intubations are down, (but) there are still people entering hospital who could have been vaccinated and weren't," Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said. "And some, unfortunately, are losing their lives. It's a tragedy."
FRENCH EXPERIMENT
Thousands of people, masked and tested, packed into a Paris arena for a concert Saturday as part of a public health experiment to prepare France to host big events again.
The show at AccorHotels Arena in eastern Paris featured 1980s French rock band Indochine and DJ Etienne de Crecy. But the attention was mostly on the concertgoers.
The city's public hospital authority helped organize the event to determine whether it's safe to allow 5,000 masked people to dance together in the open pit of an indoor concert arena without social distancing.
Revelers saw the show for free but were required to take three virus tests -- two before and one after. And organizers allowed only people 18-45 without underlying health conditions, according to the hospital authority.
France has not allowed such concerts since early 2020.
Similar test concerts have been held in other European countries recently, including Spain, the Netherlands and Britain.
VARIANT IN VIETNAM
Meanwhile, Vietnam's Health Ministry announced Saturday that it had detected a highly transmissible new variant that has helped fuel a recent wave of infections in the country.
Genetic sequencing indicated that the variant is a mix of the strains first detected in the United Kingdom and India, said Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long, according to the VnExpress newspaper.
The health minister said the variant was particularly contagious through the air and that viral cultures have revealed that it replicates extremely quickly, the newspaper reported.
"The new variant is very dangerous," Long said.
Scientists said further study was needed to determine its effect in "real-world settings."
"A lot of different mutations happen as the virus is transmitted, and most of them are not of clinical significance," said Todd Pollack, a Hanoi-based infectious-disease expert at Harvard Medical School. "Just because they say [the new variant] has features of one and the other ... doesn't mean they got together in one patient and spit out some combined hybrid 'supervirus.'"
Vietnam, which has reported about 6,400 covid-19 infections and 47 deaths, has been one of the world's success stories. A well-run public health care system, quarantine camps operated by the military and strict, targeted lockdowns kept case numbers low until late April, when a spike began.
Many of the recent infections were detected in two industrialized provinces in northern Vietnam, where factory employees often work in close proximity. Plants there, which manufacture for global brands such as Apple, have implemented social distancing measures, Reuters reported.
Restrictions are also in place in Hanoi, the capital, and Ho Chi Minh City, the country's economic hub.
Singapore and Taiwan, which had effectively eliminated transmission at the start of the year, recently reintroduced curbs as infections returned.
CHINESE CASES
In China, the southern city of Guangzhou on Saturday shut down a neighborhood and ordered residents to stay home for door-to-door coronavirus testing after a surge in infections that has rattled authorities.
The business and industrial center of 15 million people north of Hong Kong has reported 20 new infections over the past week. The number is small compared with India's thousands of daily cases, but the outbreak alarmed Chinese authorities who believed they had the disease under control.
The spread was "fast and strong," the official Global Times newspaper cited health authorities as saying.
The order to stay home applied to residents of five streets in Liwan District in the city center.
Outdoor markets, child care centers and entertainment venues were closed. Indoor restaurant dining was prohibited. Grade schools were told to stop in-person classes.
People in parts of four nearby districts were ordered to limit outdoor activity.
The city government earlier ordered testing of hundreds of thousands of residents after the initial infections. It said some 700,000 people had been tested by Wednesday.
China reports a handful of new cases each day but says almost all are believed to be people who were infected abroad. The mainland's official death toll stands at 4,636 out of 91,061 confirmed cases.
Information for this article was contributed by David Klepper, Ken Powtak, Nicole Winfield, Frank Jordans, Colleen Barry, Aritz Parra, Helena Alves, Nicky Forster and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Katerina Ang of The Washington Post.
