School districts move back online

Boston, Detroit, Indianapolis, Michigan, and Philadelphia have closed classrooms or nixed plans to hold in-person classes later this year due to rising coronavirus case counts and hospitalizations. New York City gave students the option to come back in person this fall, but Mayor Bill De Blasio said he may suspend in-person learning if the city’s COVID-19 positivity rate reaches toward 3 percent. On Saturday, it was 2.47 percent.

Are we headed back to lockdown? New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham ordered residents to shelter in place for two weeks starting Monday, but most other governors have opted to tighten restrictions without going back to full lockdown mode. States such as California, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Virginia have issued new travel advisories ahead of Thanksgiving or put limits on the size of gatherings. The United States logged more than 139,000 new infections on Sunday, and the number of people in the hospital with the coronavirus reached an all-time high of more than 69,000, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Dig deeper: Read Laura Edghill’s report in Schooled about why schools don’t seem to be the COVID-19 superspreaders everyone feared.

Editor’s note: WORLD has updated this report since its initial posting.