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The new CDC guidance says fully vaccinated people can:Read MoreVisit other vaccinated people indoors without masks or physical distancingVisit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks or physical distancing, if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease.

Skip quarantine and testing if exposed to someone who has Covid-19 but are asymptomatic, but should monitor for symptoms for 14 daysThis means that vaccinated grandparents may finally feel comfortable visiting their unvaccinated grandchildren and giving them a big hug, especially if they're local -- the CDC still says people should avoid travel -- and as long as none of the unvaccinated people in that household are at risk for severe Covid-19.

However, people who are fully vaccinated still need to take precautions in many scenarios. The guidelines say fully vaccinated people must:Wear a mask and keep good physical distance around the unvaccinated who are at increased risk for severe Covid-19, or if the unvaccinated person has a household member who is at higher riskWear masks and physically distance when visiting unvaccinated people who are from multiple households.

If fully vaccinated people live in a non-health care congregate setting, such as a group home or detention facility, they should quarantine for 14 days and get tested if exposed to someone with a suspected or confirmed Covid-19 case.The guidelines say that the risk of infection in social activities like going to the gym or restaurant is lower for the fully vaccinated. However, people should still take precautions, as transmission risk in these settings is higher and increases the more unvaccinated people are involved. So wear that mask on the treadmill, and if dining out, keep it on while waiting for your meal

Walensky said CDC travel guidelines will remain the same for the vaccinated until there is more data about how much or how little vaccinated people can transmit the virus to others. She added that a "larger swath" of the population will also need to be vaccinated before it's really safe. About 90% of the country is still not vaccinated, Walensky said. Travel brings too much exposure to crowds and the spread of variants is also a real concern.

"We are here in no small measure because of the safety protection that many, many Americans have taken with regard to their family, friends and neighbors," Zients said. "We ask people to continue to do that so we can get there, as quickly and as permanently as possible."There are now 30 million people in the United States who are fully vaccinated, but the United States still averaged more than 60,000 cases per day over the last seven days, according to Johns Hopkins University.

"We continue to have high levels of virus around the country, and more readily transmissible variants have now been confirmed in nearly every state, while we work to quickly vaccinate people more and more each day, we have to see this through," Walensky said Monday. "Let's stick together. Please keep wearing a well fitting mask and taking the other public health actions we know work to help stop the spread of this virus."

The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one

Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting

Even in absolute numbers, America’s unvaccinated and current-smoker populations seem to match up rather well: Right now, the CDC pegs them at 13 percent and 14 percent of all U.S. adults, respectively, and both groups are likely to be poorer and less educated.

Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.

data suggest that most of the unvaccinated hold that status voluntarily at this point

The same arguments apply to tobacco: Smokers are 15 to 30 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Quitting the habit is akin to receiving a staggeringly powerful medicine, one that wipes out most of this excess risk.

If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again.

With a vaccination timeline that stretches over years, our patience for restrictions, especially on the already vaccinated, will be very limited. But there is middle ground. We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use.

We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind. Let’s accept instead that we may make headway slowly, and with considerable effort

Long-term actions for COVID might include charging the unvaccinated a premium on their health insurance, just as we do for smokers, or distributing frightening health warnings about the perils of remaining uninoculated

And once the political furor dies down, COVID shots will probably be added to the lists of required vaccinations for many more schools and workplaces.

nother aspect of where we’re headed with COVID. Tobacco is lethal enough that we are willing to restrict smokers’ personal freedoms—but only to a degree. As deadly as COVID is, some people won’t get vaccinated, no matter what, and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated will spread disease to others.

anti-COVID actions, much like anti-smoking policies, will be limited not by their effectiveness but by the degree to which they are politically palatable.

Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu.

this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person.

Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000.

We still care for smokers when they get sick, of course, and we reduce harm whenever possible. The health-care system makes $225 billion every year for doing so—paid out of all of our tax dollars and insurance premiums

Hospitals have a well-honed talent for transforming any terrible situation into a marketable “center of excellence.”

But we shouldn’t forget the most important reason that the coronavirus isn’t like the flu: We’ve never had vaccines this effective in the midst of prior influenza outbreaks, which means we didn’t have a simple, clear approach to saving quite so many lives. Compassionate conversations, community outreach, insurance surcharges, even mandates—I’ll take them all. Now is not the time to quit.

Some German states already operate so-called 2G policies, and these will now become nationwide - 2G stands for genesen (recovered in the past six months) or geimpft (vaccinated).

Under the measures agreed by Germany's 16 states and federal leaders:Unvaccinated people will be limited to meetings with their own household and two other peopleThe 2G rule will be enforced at restaurants and cultural venues and non-essential shopsClubs will shut in areas where 350 cases have been recorded per 100,000 people in the past seven days - the national rate is over 400Up to 30 million vaccinations will be carried out by Christmas - first, second or boostersOutdoor events, including Bundesliga football, will have limited crowds of 15,000 and 2G rulesFireworks on New Year's Eve will be banned

It’s not just political factions using the issue for partisan advantage – though that is happening as Covid-19 restrictions continue to straddle the quintessentially American tension between individual freedom and the reach of government. Medical experts are engaging in an intense debate over whether the CDC is being too cautious in the way it’s loosening mask guidance or is offering the public conflicting, confusing advice.

The complications of exiting the pandemic – a process that no one currently in positions of power has ever experienced – explain why Biden’s success in getting more than 100 million Americans fully immunized doesn’t mean Covid-19 is no longer perilous or is any less politically treacherous for the White House.

The President’s remarks followed new CDC guidance last week that mean fully vaccinated people can now unmask at small outdoor gatherings or when dining outside with friends from multiple households. Unvaccinated people should still cover their faces.

fter months of stressing caution and sticking to restrictions – after a failure to do so cost thousands of lives under Trump – Biden now appears at risk of paying a political price for being too circumspect even though his initial caution proved successful.

“It’s time for the CDC to start embracing this kind of bifurcated strategy and perhaps giving the unvaccinated a hint of what life can be like if they become vaccinated,” he said.

This is a pretty dangerous time to be unvaccinated, but what (the) CDC is signaling is if you are fully vaccinated, freedoms are just becoming safer and safer for people.”

While public health experts warn that maximizing vaccinations is vital to creating the herd immunity in the population necessary to stop Covid-19 spreading

“It is America. Everybody has an individual right. I think that one of the things we have to be careful about is not shaming people or talking down to them or objecting to their way of life,” Marshall told CNN’s Pamela Brown on “Newsroom” on Saturday.

They’ve been told they don’t need a mask. They need a mask. They’ve been told that even if you have a vaccine, you have to keep wearing the mask,” Marshall said.

the best way to ease such concerns and to get rid of masks for good is to get vaccinated.

the available vaccines slash the odds that infected people will spread the virus onward by at least half and likely more. In the rare cases that the virus breaks through, infections are generally milder, shorter, and lower in viral load.

Worryingly, a recent study documented several cases during India’s spring surge in which health-care workers who were fully vaccinated with AstraZeneca’s vaccine were infected by Delta and passed it on.

If other vaccines have similar vulnerabilities, vaccinated people might have to keep wearing masks indoors to avoid slingshotting the virus into unvaccinated communities

2. The variants are pummeling unvaccinated people.

Vaccinated people are safer than ever despite the variants. But unvaccinated people are in more danger than ever because of the variants.

richer nations would be wrong to think that the variants will spare them, because ...3. The longer Principle No. 2 continues, the less likely No. 1 will hold.

Many nations that excelled at protecting their citizens are now facing a triple threat: They controlled COVID-19 so well that they have little natural immunity; they don’t have access to vaccines; and they’re besieged by Delta.

While America worries about the fate of states where around 40 percent of people are fully vaccinated, barely 10 percent of the world’s population has achieved that status, including just 1 percent of Africa’s.

it’s how we might eventually face variants that can truly infect even vaccinated people.

“We have to assume that’s going to happen,” Gupta told me. “The more infections are permitted, the more probable immune escape becomes.”

We’re unlikely to be as vulnerable as we were at the beginning of the pandemic. The vaccines induce a variety of protective antibodies and immune cells, so it’s hard for a variant virus to evade them all. These defenses also vary from person to person, so even if a virus eludes one person’s set, it might be stymied when it jumps into a new host.

“I don’t think there’ll suddenly be a variant that pops up and evades everything, and suddenly our vaccines are useless,” Gupta told me. “It’ll be incremental: With every stepwise change in the virus, a chunk of protection is lost in individuals. And people on the edges—the vulnerable who haven’t mounted a full response—will end up bearing the cost.”

The discussion about vaccine-beating variants echoes the early debates about whether SARS-CoV-2 would go pandemic. “We don’t think too well as a society about low-probability events that have far-reaching consequences,”

even highly vaccinated nations should continue investing in other measures that can control COVID-19 but have been inadequately used—improved ventilation, widespread rapid tests, smarter contact tracing, better masks, places in which sick people can isolate, and policies like paid sick leave.

, when parents refuse vaccines it's usually due to concerns about children receiving too many shots or developing side effects, including autism

concluded childhood vaccines are safe, and a complete retraction of the study that spawned the fear that vaccines cause autism

One reason may be that some parents are trying to protect their children's immunity from diseases by insisting on specialized diets and natural living practices instead of vaccines, according to a different study.

"Vaccines are becoming the victims of their own success. Most people have never witnessed the infections that vaccines prevent."

If enough people get vaccinated you achieve "herd immunity" -- the bodies of so many people have been tricked that there's little chance of a widespread outbreak

"It's a life-threatening problem. Some people could die because you're not vaccinating," Yang said.

"It's an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. I'm not going to put my child at risk to save another child," Wolfson said

And on Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought that moment into clearer focus. The agency came out with its first set of guidance about what fully vaccinated people can now do.

My parents had a significant emotional burden lifted after they were vaccinated, because they are now approximately 95% protected against getting severely ill from Covid-19. But like the rest of the country, they are restless and want to do something with their newly vaccinated status. That is why they called me right after they saw the news report about new recommendations from the CDC to ask me what it all meant. I laid out the good news for them, and the caveats as well.

In a major step, the CDC said people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 can safely visit with other fully vaccinated people in private settings without masks, without social distancing and without having to be outdoors.

Additionally, however, the CDC guidance now allows for fully vaccinated people to visit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks or physical distancing, if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease. That last part is important.

It's a theme I hear from CNN readers, viewers and listeners all the time: When am I going to be able to see my grandchildren, my elderly father, my sister and her family? Most everybody has somebody they long to hug, to hold close and see in person.

As I kept digging into the guidelines and speaking with members of the Biden administration's Covid-19 task force, it became increasingly clear that a visit was looking possible, but with a few strings attached.

And, perhaps most notably, fully vaccinated people are also still being discouraged from traveling, something that throws a monkey wrench into my fantasy of an imminent family reunion.

"I think the guidelines are in a good middle ground," she said. "We're starting to go back to normal now, but it's not going to be flipping a switch... We will make that journey towards normalcy, or at least a new normal, as more people get vaccinated."

At 10% vaccinations we have this guidance. At 20-30%, we will have new guidance," he said, noting that there's going to be a distinct shift in the messaging of what people can and cannot do -- moving away from more binary messaging to one that describes activities as a range of low, medium and high risk.

Even as Walensky delivered the hopeful new guidance, she also noted the country still stands at a seven-day average of about 59,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day -- a rate that has leveled off somewhat, instead of continuing to steadily decline. And there are close to 2,000 deaths per day. So, she and other experts warn, any easing of restrictions is going to have to be gradual.

So where does that leave my family reunion plan? Unless my parents make the long drive to see us, we are going to hold off on a visit for now. With more than 2 million people getting vaccinated a day, however, another 20% of the country could be vaccinated by the end of the month. And, that will probably lead to a further relaxing of CDC guidelines and maybe allow my parents a plane ride instead, which means a possible visit to celebrate their wedding anniversary this spring!

On Thursday, President Biden will make his first prime-time television address, noting the first anniversary of the pandemic’s onset and highlighting “the role that Americans will play” in getting the country “back to normal,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday.

Mr. Biden has promised that there will be enough doses for every American adult by the end of May. C.D.C. officials on Monday encouraged people to be inoculated with the first vaccine available to them, emphasizing that the vaccines are highly effective at preventing “serious Covid-19 illness, hospitalization and death.”

Even so, “it’s welcome news,” he added. “It’s the first time they are saying you can do something, as opposed to saying everything you can’t do. It’s huge.”

For example, vaccinated grandparents may visit unvaccinated healthy adult children and healthy grandchildren without masks or physical distancing.

In public areas and in places like restaurants or gyms, vaccinated people should continue to wear masks, maintain social distance and take other precautions, such as avoiding poorly ventilated spaces, covering coughs and sneezes, and often washing their hands, C.D.C. officials said.

The CDC defines people who are fully vaccinated as those who are two weeks past their second dose of the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines or two weeks past a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

"That was a determination made by the CDC. It wasn't driven by or directed by the White House," Psaki said of the CDC guidelines when asked if Biden agreed on not issuing new guidance on travel for people who are fully vaccinated.

Wen, who is also a CNN medical analyst, added that she thinks people who are fully vaccinated should be able to travel "and that's one of those incentives that we can give as a way for restoring freedoms" for those who get vaccinated.

The Biden administration is ramping up vaccination efforts, and as of Wednesday afternoon nearly 93.7 million vaccines had been administered, according to the CDC. About 9.7% of the population is fully vaccinated, the CDC says.

It’s not uncommon for a vaccine to forestall severe disease but not infection. Inoculations against the flu, rotavirus, polio and pertussis are all imperfect in this way.

The research available so far on how well the vaccines prevent transmission is preliminary but promising. “We feel confident that there’s a reduction,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida. “We don’t know the exact magnitude, but it’s not 100 percent.”

a study in Scotland conducted tests every two weeks, regardless of symptoms, on health care workers who had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Investigators found that the vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing infection was 70 percent after one dose, and 85 percent after the second.

“If the case numbers are zero, it doesn’t matter whether it’s 70 percent or 100 percent,” said Zoe McLaren, a health policy expert at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, referring to vaccine effectiveness.

Mask-wearing policies also will depend on how many unvaccinated people remain in the population

“Are you wearing a mask to protect yourself from severe Covid, or are you wearing a mask for public health?” Dr. Klein said. “It’s right to do your part in the community beyond yourself.”

The agency is still urging unvaccinated Americans to socially distance from people who don't live in their home, wear masks and avoid crowds, measures that have been critical to slowing the spread of the deadly virus over the last year.

Fauci also warned that the US could see a situation similar to that in Italy, where a surge in cases due to new variants and other issues caused the government to announce a new lockdown starting Monday

"They had a diminution of cases. They plateaued and they pulled back on public health measures," he said. "They've opened restaurants. They've opened some of the bars. The younger people particularly stopped wearing masks. All of a sudden you have a surge that went right back up."

And pressed by Tapper on research that suggests no significant difference in coronavirus spreading in schools where students were six feet apart versus three feet apart, Fauci said the findings do indicate to him that three feet of distancing is good enough and that the CDC is aware of the new data.

Appearing later on the program, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, weighed in on the slow pace of his state's vaccine rollout, telling Tapper that Maryland can meet Biden's plan to order states to allow all adults to receive vaccines by May 1 only if they receive more doses from the federal government.

In announcing his plan last week, Biden laid out new steps the administration believes makes the May 1 timeline realistic, including expanding the types of professionals who are able to administer vaccine shots. Dentists, veterinarians and paramedics will all be included in the new approved list.

citing the high number of Austrians who had refused to get a shot and the divisive political climate that supported them.

the lead-time of several months was needed to prepare for the mandate, including clarifying the legal situation.

will last for at least 10 days and affect both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

A handful of countries in Asia have imposed mandatory vaccinations against coronavirus for their adult populations

Current rates of vaccinations, albeit among the highest in the world, have not been enough to prevent a surge of infections as winter sets in and more people remain indoors.

Most inoculated people have been protected from hospitalization in intensive-care units and death from the virus.

"And for people who continue to hesitate or to choose not to get vaccinated, they are losing privileges to do certain things, whether it's get on a train or a plane, whether it's travel internationally, whether it's move forward with a job in the public service," said Trudeau

Last week, Quebec, where nearly a quarter of all Canadians live, announced that residents would have to be vaccinated to buy alcohol or cannabis. Proof of vaccination is required in order to eat in restaurants, go to the gym or attend sporting events.

"We have also demonstrated at the federal level that vaccine mandates work, 99% of public servants, almost 99% of public servants at the federal level are either fully vaccinated or soon to be fully vaccinated,"

Covid deaths, though always concentrated in older people, have in 2022 skewed toward older people more than they did at any point since vaccines became widely available.

That swing in the pandemic has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to protect older Americans, with health officials in recent weeks encouraging everyone 50 and older to get a second booster and introducing new models of distributing antiviral pills.

But the mortality gap between older and younger people has grown: Middle-aged Americans, who suffered a large share of pandemic deaths last summer and fall, are now benefiting from new stores of immune protection in the population as Covid deaths once again cluster around older people.

among people 65 and older, 13 percent are unvaccinated, 3 percent have a single Moderna or Pfizer shot and another 14 percent are vaccinated but not boosted.

“The government wasn’t sure about the booster shot,” he said. “If they weren’t sure about it, and they’re the ones who put it out, why would I take it?” Mr. Thomas said Covid recently killed a former boss of his and hospitalized an older family friend.

“In 2021, you see the mortality impact of the pandemic shift younger,” said Ridhi Kashyap, a lead author of that study and a demographer at the University of Oxford.

That changed last summer and fall, during the Delta surge. Older people were getting vaccinated more quickly than other groups: By November, the vaccination rate in Americans 65 and older was roughly 20 percentage points higher than that of those in their 40s. And critically, those older Americans had received vaccines relatively recently, leaving them with strong levels of residual protection.

As a result, older people suffered from Covid at lower rates than they had been before vaccines became available. Among people 85 and older, the death rate last fall was roughly 75 percent lower than it had been in the winter of 2020, Dr. Stokes’s recent study found.

The rebalancing of Covid deaths was so pronounced that, among Americans 80 and older, overall deaths returned to prepandemic levels in 2021, according to a study posted online in February.

But scientists warned that many older Americans remained susceptible. To protect them, geriatricians called on nursing homes to organize in-home vaccinations or mandate additional shots.

For some people, even three vaccine doses appear to become less protective over time against Omicron-related hospital admissions.

During the Omicron wave, Covid death rates were once again dramatically higher for older Americans than younger ones, Dr. Stokes said. Older people also made up an overwhelming share of the excess deaths — the difference between the number of people who actually died and the number who would have been expected to die if the pandemic had never happened.

Long-ago Covid cases do not prevent future infections, but reinfected people are less likely to become seriously ill.

Eventually, her family had to arrange a trip to a pharmacy on their own for a second booster.“It just seems that now the onus is put completely on the individual,” she said. “It’s not like it’s made easy for you.”

The new study will include more than 12,000 college students immunized with the Moderna vaccine at more than 20 universities across the United States. Half of the students will be randomly selected to receive the vaccine right after they are enrolled, while the other half will get the vaccine four months later.

By monitoring the students so closely, the scientists expect to be able to track infections in the first 24 or 48 hours, and determine how long an infected person may transmit the virus to others, Dr. Corey said.

College students are an ideal population in which to study transmission after vaccination. They have among the highest rates of coronavirus infection, in large part because they live in tightly packed dormitories and have more social contacts than older adults do, while fortunately, hospitalizations and deaths are comparatively low.

"We can't claim victory prematurely," he said. "Everybody, including myself, has some degree of Covid-19 fatigue, but the thing we try and emphasize is that this will end."

The agency said it still advises fully vaccinated people to wear masks outdoors and to take precautions until more is known about how vaccines protect against coronavirus.

Fauci's comments echoed those of President Joe Biden from earlier this week. Biden said Monday that "now is not the time" to ease social restrictions

People who have had both Covid-19 shots can gather indoors without wearing masks, meaning that the celebration can be held with some semblance of normality.

The spike is causing tension between the White House and some state governors who are pushing ahead with relaxed restrictions. Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Tuesday he was lifting the state's mask mandate, while Alabama's Kay Ivey plans to do the same next week. New Orleans city leaders said Wednesday that they were relaxing capacity limit caps on gatherings. Meanwhile, Florida has welcomed crowds of spring breakers -- many of whom are unvaccinated and maskless.

The protection offered by the Pfizer and Moderna coronavirus vaccines is likely to last longer than six months, and maybe even years, vaccine experts told CNN, after data was released showing good protection half a year after people were inoculated.

The British medicines watchdog has identified 30 cases of rare blood clots in people who have received the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine -- 25 more than previously reported -- but none with the Pfizer/BioNTech shot.

the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said it received 22 reports of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis and eight reports of other thrombosis events, out of a total of 18.1 million doses of the vaccine

The MHRA said people should continue to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, because the benefits greatly outweigh the risks.

Germany has this week limited the AstraZeneca vaccine to people over 60, following reports of a rare blood clot in the brains of 31 people who had received a first dose in the country.

Side effects from Covid-19 vaccines won't last long

The US has lost more than 529,000 people to the virus, Johns Hopkins University data shows. It's more than the number of Americans killed in World War I and World War II combined. And the death toll is rising by the thousands each week.

Now, the country is at a pivotal point.

"While these trends are starting to head in the right direction, the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths still remain too high and are somber reminders that we must remain vigilant as we work to scale up our vaccination efforts across this country," Walensky said.

So far, almost one in 10 Americans have been fully vaccinated -- a number that is still too low to suppress the spread of the virus. And some experts have warned another possible surge could be weeks away, fueled by a highly contagious variant spreading across the country.

"We must continue to use proven prevention measures to slow the spread of Covid-19," Walensky added. "They are getting us closer to the end of this pandemic."

For Americans who have been fully vaccinated, the new guidance released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this week marks a small first step toward a return to pre-pandemic life, the agency's director and other colleagues wrote in a JAMA Viewpoint article published Wednesday.

"As vaccine supply increases, and distribution and administration systems expand and improve, more and more people will become fully vaccinated and eager to resume their prepandemic lives," Walensky and CDC officials Drs. Sarah Mbaeyi and Athalia Christie wrote.

"With high levels of community transmission and the threat of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, CDC still recommends a number of prevention measures for all people, regardless of vaccination status," they wrote.

"What we have seen is that we have surges after people start traveling. We saw it after July 4, we saw it after Labor Day, we saw it after the Christmas holidays," Walensky said in the briefing. "Currently 90% of people are still unprotected and not yet vaccinated. So we are really looking forward to updating this guidance as we have more protection across the communities and across the population."

More than 62 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, CDC data shows. Roughly 32.9 million are fully vaccinated.

As vaccination numbers climb, more state leaders are loosening the requirements for who can get a shot.

At least 47 states plus DC are allowing teachers and school staff to receive Covid-19 vaccines. By next Monday, teachers will be eligible in all 50 states.

In Georgia, officials announced the state will expand its vaccine eligibility starting March 15 to include people 55 and older as well as individuals with disabilities and certain medical conditions.

"Provided supply allows, vaccine eligibility is expected to open to all adults in April," Gov. Brian Kemp's office said in a statement.

Other states also announced expanded vaccine eligibility this week, including Alaska, who took it the furthest by making vaccines available to everyone living or working in the state who is at least 16. It's the first state in the nation to do so.

The guidance allows for indoor visitation regardless of the vaccination status of the resident or visitor, with some exceptions.

For example, visitations may be limited for residents with Covid-19 or who are in quarantine or for unvaccinated residents living in facilities where less than 70% of residents are fully vaccinated, in a county that has a Covid-19 positivity rate greater than 10%.

"CMS recognizes the psychological, emotional and physical toll that prolonged isolation and separation from family have taken on nursing home residents, and their families," CMS Chief Medical Officer Dr. Lee Fleisher said in a statement.

"That is why, now that millions of vaccines have been administered to nursing home residents and staff, and the number of COVID cases in nursing homes has dropped significantly, CMS is updating its visitation guidance to bring more families together safely."

Just-released data shows the available vaccines provide strong protection against infections, easing fears that vaccinated people could pass on the virus to others. But the data is new, and the vaccinated have spent months wondering whether their newfound freedoms, like trips to the movie theater or dinner with friends, could bring the virus home to loved ones.

He added: “It takes a lot from the relationship.”

The new President, Joe Biden, will deliver his first prime-time address on Thursday to mark the yearlong mark in the country's struggle with the coronavirus. In addition to giving the country a morale boost and highlighting the light on the horizon, he will hope to showcase his $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, expected to finally pass Congress the day before.

Under the new protocols, vaccinated people can visit other vaccinated people indoors without masks or physical distancing. They can also see unvaccinated people from a single household without either precaution if those yet to get the injection are at low risk for severe disease.

These guidelines will allow a real -- if qualified -- return of freedoms once taken for granted for millions of people. They apply two weeks after a second dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and 14 days after the single-dose Johnson & Johnson injection.

Already, 60 million Americans know that moment of euphoria that comes with getting a first dose. And more than 30 million are fully protected -- a figure that has just overtaken the total number of US Covid-19 cases.

The announcement on Monday could have an important public health impact in itself. To the majority of Americans who are still waiting, the glimpse of post-vaccination liberation could offer a new incentive to buckle down with social distancing and masking for just a few months longer.

The proven promise of vaccines and the accelerating pace that they are going into American arms -- at a rate of about 2 million or more a day -- offers something like the prospect of a normal summer.

"There is so much that's critical riding on the next two months," CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday. "How quickly we will vaccinate versus whether we will have another surge really relies on what happens in March and April."

"The good news is that it was coming down. The sobering news is that it's starting to plateau a bit," Fauci told a National League of Cities Conference. "The history with this virus has told us when you start to plateau at a level as high as this, which is about 60 to 70,000 cases a day, that you are by no means out of the woods."

"I actually would go further and say that people who are fully vaccinated should be able to travel -- should be encouraged to travel, and that's one of those incentives that we can give as a way for restoring freedoms, that you now are able to travel and go visit your loved ones and go to museums and cultural institutions once you're fully vaccinated," Wen said.

"I think they really haven't gone far enough," Reiner told CNN's Erin Burnett, while suggesting that the CDC was worried about sending a message that might convince non-vaccinated Americans to start taking to the skies.