COVID: Children 5 to 11 must have at least one vaccine dose to enter restaurants in NYC

By Peter Szekely and Barbara Goldberg

NEW YORK, Dec 6 (Reuters) – New York City expanded its
toolkit of COVID-19 mandates on Monday, setting vaccine
requirements for children as young as 5 years old and for
workers at all private-sector companies as the highly
transmissible Omicron variant pushes into more U.S. states.

The most populous U.S. city set a Dec. 27 deadline for all
184,000 businesses within its limits to make their employees
show proof that they have been vaccinated, Mayor Bill de Blasio
said.

In addition, children 5 to 11 years old must get at least
one dose by Dec. 14 and those 12 and older need to be fully
vaccinated by Dec. 27 to enter restaurants and to participate in
extracurricular school activities, such as sports, band and
dances.

“Vaccination is the way out of this pandemic, and these are
bold, first-in-the-nation measures to encourage New Yorkers to
keep themselves and their communities safe,” de Blasio, who
leaves office next month, said in a statement.

De Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams, will evaluate the mandate
and other strategies to combat the pandemic when he takes office
in January, his spokesperson Evan Thies said.

The mandate means that many young people, or their parents,
will need to scramble to get a shot to keep eating out or
participating in after-school activities. Only about 27% of New
Yorkers ages 5 to 12 have taken at least one dose and just 15%
are fully vaccinated, according to the city’s website https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.page.

For adult New Yorkers, vaccination rates are much higher.
About 89% have received at least one vaccine dose, topping the
national rate of 83.5% reported by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total.

Many companies, including several Wall Street banks
headquartered in New York, such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc
, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, already
require vaccines for anyone coming into their offices.

A nationwide vaccine mandate issued earlier this year by
President Joe Biden for companies with 100 workers or more was
put on hold last month by a U.S. appeals court https://www.reuters.com/world/us/federal-appeals-court-affirms-stay-biden-vaccine-mandate-2021-11-12
in New Orleans.

An administration request to a U.S. appeals court in
Cincinnati to reinstate the mandate https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-govt-asks-court-immediately-lift-stay-covid-vaccine-rule-2021-11-23
is pending.

The new requirements, which The Greater New York Chamber of
Commerce supports, come as new coronavirus infections are
accelerating nationwide https://tmsnrt.rs/2WTOZDR, especially in
northern states, where colder weather is prompting social events
to move indoors.

Over the last week, the country has averaged more than
120,000 new infections a day, up 64% from the prior week,
according to a Reuters tally. Deaths, which lag infections, have
averaged 1,300 a day over the last seven days, up from a rate of
800 a week ago, according to Reuters data.

Omicron, first detected last month in southern Africa, has
spread around the globe and shows signs of being more contagious
than the Delta variant, which is still dominant in the United
States.

Several dozen Omicron cases have been found in 18 out of 50
U.S. states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii,
Maryland, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi,
Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah,
Washington and Wisconsin, according to a Reuters tally.

Louisiana has also reported a probable Omicron case in a
crew member on a cruise ship that disembarked in New Orleans
over the weekend. At least 17 COVID-19 cases https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/least-17-covid-cases-found-aboard-cruise-ship-new-orleans-2021-12-06
were detected on the ship, state health officials said.

De Blasio, a Democrat and strong proponent of mandates who
has issued them for several sets of municipal workers, expressed
confidence that his latest order would withstand legal scrutiny,
as his previous orders did.

Anne Dana, an attorney at the King & Spalding law firm, said
the mayor’s private-sector mandate stands a better chance of
going into effect than the Biden mandate because a similar city
rule for restaurant, gyms and other private employers has
already survived legal challenges.

Some 94% of 378,000 city employees are vaccinated, up from
86% in late October, just before the city began enforcing its
mandate for emergency responders, a spokesperson for the mayor
said. Another 1,339 workers are on unpaid leave and 12,200 have
medical or religious exemption requests pending, he said.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely in New York and Barbara Goldberg in
Maplewood, New Jersey; Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien
in Chicago, Elizabeth Dilts in New York and Susan Heavey in
Washington; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Lisa Shumaker)