WASHINGTON — In a significant revision of its school reopening guidelines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday that students can be spaced 3 feet apart in classrooms.

“Physical distancing of at least 3 feet between students can safely be adopted in classroom settings where mask use is universal and other prevention measures are taken,” the CDC said in a statement.

The previous guidance, of 6 feet between desks, was widely seen as hampering school reopenings because many schools simply did not have the space or staff to make that accommodation and still have all students learning in person at the same time.

Mask use is critical to the new

You wouldn’t know it by following the news from the United States, where daily COVID-19 cases have fallen by 80 percent over the last 10 weeks — and where they continue to fall.

You wouldn’t know it by following the news from the United Kingdom, either. There, daily cases have plummeted 90 percent over the same period.

And you certainly wouldn’t know it by following the news from Israel, where normal life has all but resumed.

But despite the rosy view from a few select countries, the total number of COVID-19 cases worldwide is actually rising right now. In fact, after peaking on Jan. 11 and dropping by half over the next

The Daily Beast

Joe Biden Just Might be the Democrats’ Ronald Reagan

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyMaybe it’s time we conservatives start taking Joe Biden seriously. After steamrolling Republicans and passing a $1.9 trillion COVID-relief package on a party-line basis, Biden is now pushing for $2.3 trillion in infrastructure spending along with a proposed corporate tax hike to pay for it.If we ignore that much of this so-called infrastructure spending is for things like “human infrastructure,” not roads and bridges, we are still talking about a HUGE amount of money—and it’s only the first half of a two-part plan. But it’s not just the massive scale of spending that

The Daily Beast

Joe Biden Just Might be the Democrats’ Ronald Reagan

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyMaybe it’s time we conservatives start taking Joe Biden seriously. After steamrolling Republicans and passing a $1.9 trillion COVID-relief package on a party-line basis, Biden is now pushing for $2.3 trillion in infrastructure spending along with a proposed corporate tax hike to pay for it.If we ignore that much of this so-called infrastructure spending is for things like “human infrastructure,” not roads and bridges, we are still talking about a HUGE amount of money—and it’s only the first half of a two-part plan. But it’s not just the massive scale of spending that

Last week, all the living former U.S. presidents, Democratic and Republican, joined together for an ad campaign touting the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines — except Donald Trump.

At the same time, a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that a full 50 percent of unvaccinated 2020 Trump voters now say they will “never” get vaccinated for COVID-19, up 6 percent from last month.

According to the survey of 1,629 U.S. adults, which was conducted March 4-8, no other unvaccinated group is nearly as likely to say they will “never” get inoculated: not Biden supporters (8 percent), not Black Americans (33 percent) and not Hispanic Americans (22 percent), all of

The New York Times

They Died Saving Others From COVID. Will Anyone Count Them?

Dr. Claire Rezba is exhausted from counting the dead. An anesthesiologist in Virginia, Rezba, 41, has spent the past year running a Twitter feed that memorializes American health care workers who have died of COVID-19. So far, she has published more than 2,500 tributes to the doctors, emergency room nurses, respiratory therapists and mental health counselors cut down in their prime. Although she knows there are at least a thousand other deaths that remain unrecognized, Rezba plans to discontinue the project at the end of March. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times