What You Can and Can’t Do Once You’re Vaccinated

In a major recovery milestone, the CDC finally announces its guidelines.

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As vaccination rates pick up across the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday issued its much-anticipated guidelines for the more than 30 million people now fully-vaccinated for COVID-19. Those recommendations include how vaccinated people can gather with those who have yet to receive the COVID vaccine and mask-wearing.

Perhaps most notably, the new guidelines greenlight fully-vaccinated people gathering in private, small scenarios where everyone is fully-vaccinated without masks or social distancing. The CDC defines fully-vaccinated people as those who are two weeks out of their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines and two weeks out of receiving the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Fully-vaccinated people are also safe to interact with those who are not vaccinated, but those gatherings are limited to one household where members do not belong to a high-risk COVID category. “Here’s an example,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a White House virtual event announcing the guidelines. “If grandparents have been vaccinated, they can visit their daughter and her family, even if they have not been vaccinated, so long as the daughter and her family are not at risk for severe disease.”

Fully-vaccinated people are also okay to refrain from quarantine measures if exposed to a potential outbreak, as long as they do not exhibit symptoms. Public mask-wearing and keeping physical distance in large gatherings should still be observed. 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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