“Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.Kizzmekia Corbett had gone home to North Carolina for the holidays in 2019 when the headlines began to trickle in: A strange, pneumonialike illness was making dozens of people sick in China.By the first week of January 2020, the number of infected people in China had climbed to the hundreds, and Dr. Corbett, a viral immunologist, was back at her desk at the National Institutes of Health, where she served as a senior research fellow at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And that’s when the news was confirmed: The mysterious illness was a novel coronavirus, exactly the category of infection that she had been probing for the past five years in a bid to develop a vaccine.Coronaviruses can cause all kinds of illness, like the common cold or more crippling diseases like MERS and SARS. Novel coronaviruses are new strains that are identified in humans for the first time. And when it came to the race for a vaccine against Covid-19, Dr. Corbett, who was part of important work on other coronavirus outbreaks, was at the vanguard.Next month will be the three-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaring Covid-19 a pandemic, on March 11, 2020. But in those fraught first few months of 2020, Dr. Corbett helped lead a team of scientists that contributed to one of the most stunning achievements in the history of immunizations: a highly effective, easily manufactured vaccine against Covid-19, delivered and authorized for use in under a year.On Jan. 6, 2020, that goal started to take on a new urgency. As the number of sick people in China began to climb, Dr. Corbett huddled with her supervisor, Dr. Barney Graham, the deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center and chief of the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory. Both noted that this new disease bore eerie similarities to SARS and MERS, which each killed hundreds. Dr. Corbett’s work, and the work of her entire team, suddenly had urgent implications.“At the time, we had no idea it would become a global pandemic,” she said. “So what I felt was excitement about being able to prove myself and my work to the world.”Dr. Corbett, 37, was used to having to prove herself. As a Black woman in science, she is accustomed to asserting her worth in rooms filled with white men. In early 2020, she had been at the National Institutes of Health for five years, and had already published groundbreaking research about the structure of other coronaviruses, and how the viruses’ spike proteins — which form a distinctive crown shape on the surface of the virus and latch on to healthy cells in the body — act as the doorway to infection. This research was part of the foundation, laid by scientists including Dr. Graham, Katalin Kariko and Dr. Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania, for the Covid-19 vaccine, the fastest vaccine ever developed.Dr. Corbett reviews data with Dr. Christian Dzuvor, a postdoctoral fellow, in her Harvard office. Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesVaccines can take more than a decade to develop from scratch. The mumps vaccine, which was created in 1967 after four years, was considered a wild success of timing. By Jan. 10, 2020, at the urging of scientists including Dr. Graham, scientists in China shared the genetic makeup of the virus that was sweeping through Wuhan. He and Dr. Corbett immediately saw that their research on other illnesses caused by coronaviruses like SARS and MARS could be adapted relatively simply.“Over the course of five years,” Dr. Corbett said, “we had already determined which parts of the virus would excite the body’s immune system in a way that would cause protective immunity.”More on the Coronavirus PandemicCovid Vaccine Mandate: New York City will end its aggressive but contentious coronavirus vaccine mandate for municipal workers, Mayor Eric Adams announced, signaling a key moment in the city’s long battle against the pandemic.End of an Era: The Biden administration plans to let the coronavirus public health emergency expire in May, a sign that federal officials believe the pandemic has moved into a new, less dire phase.Canceled Doses: As global demand for Covid-19 vaccines dries up, the program responsible for vaccinating the world’s poor has been negotiating to try to get out of its deals with pharmaceutical companies for shots it no longer needs.Mask Rules: Many countries dropped pandemic mask requirements months ago. But in places like South Korea, which only recently got rid of its rule, masks remain common. This is why.Understanding that spike proteins were at the heart of an adequate defense against infection, Dr. Corbett and other scientists had created experimental vaccines against SARS and MERS. Now, by swapping in the genetic code for the virus that creates Covid-19 — so named by the World Health Organization because it emerged in 2019 — they had a prototype they could already use. Dr. Corbett has referred to this ability to apply a template as the “plug and play” approach.Dr. Graham credits her with playing a formative role in the vaccine’s development. “Around 2015, Kizzmekia decided that the coronavirus was the project she wanted to focus on,” he said, “and it was her work that led to what we knew about the coronavirus, and prepared us for making that vaccine so rapidly.”It took her only a few hours to prepare a modified sequence for a vaccine. By Jan. 14, the N.I.H. had shared that sequence with the vaccine developer Moderna, which used the code to create synthetic messenger RNA, the genetic material that holds instructions for how to build the spike proteins, which are recognized by the body’s immune system and teach it how to fight the virus. Messenger RNA is the backbone of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, and Pfizer’s vaccine, which also uses synthetic mRNA.By March 2020, Moderna was running the first human trials of its vaccine, and by December 2020 — less than a year after the first deaths in Wuhan were reported — it was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use.Thinking back on those intensely charged first days, Dr. Corbett, now at Harvard, said, “we weren’t racing against the pandemic.”“We were racing ourselves,” she continued. “It was all about proof of principle.” Initially, she was eager to prove that her earlier research could be widely applied. “But when hundreds of thousands of people start to die,” she said, “you realize how important the work you’re doing is.”She also felt pressure beyond the rapidly climbing death toll. Dr. Corbett, who has a sharp sense of humor and an easygoing style, grew up in Hillsborough, N.C., and earned her Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. She is still working to upend the status quo when it comes to who performs scientific research.“I try to make sure that my lab and the people I hire come from diverse backgrounds so that our thoughts and the way that we do our science shakes the table a little bit,” she said.On March 3, 2020, Dr. Corbett, who was then at the National Institutes of Health, talked to a group including President Donald J. Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci as they toured the laboratory where she worked.Evan Vucci/Associated PressShe first came on the radar of many Americans on March 3, 2020, when photos circulated of her standing in the N.I.H. laboratory, in a crisp white lab coat, amid a crowd of influential white men: President Donald J. Trump; Dr. Anthony Fauci; Dr. Graham; John Mascola, director of the Vaccine Research Center; and Alex Azar, then the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.But just out of the frame, two other young Black women scientists — Cynthia Ziwawo and Olubukola Abiona, both researchers on Dr. Corbett’s team — were watching their leader carefully.“I had never seen a Black woman scientist before working with Dr. Corbett,” said Ms. Ziwawo, 25, who is now in medical school at Indiana University. “It definitely impacted how I view minorities in science, especially those running the room.”Ms. Abiona, 27, who is now in a dual M.D./Ph.D. program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, also said she continued to emulate Dr. Corbett as she pursued her own training.“Seeing Kizzmekia in a leadership role expanded how I see myself, and how I move through this space,” she said. “I use her as a role model.”Dr. Corbett said she understood that in her work, she was still held accountable not just for herself, but also for hundreds of other scientists who look like her.“There are people who I have out-published and out-successed, who are 60 years old and who have the nerve to ask me what I’m going to do next and what’s my expertise,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘You took my vaccine.’”In May 2021, Dr. Corbett joined the faculty at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she is now an assistant professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases. But she still carries the same kind of pressure she felt racing the clock in early 2020.“If I fail as a Black woman, this department at Harvard will overlook Black women until infinity,” she said. “People at the N.I.H. would have overlooked Black women if I failed. Being the first in so many kinds of these spaces has so much pressure.”She receives 10 to 20 emails a week from Black women and girls, she said, and whenever she talks to them, she makes a point to let them know that if they, too, want to be a scientist, “I will risk my all to make sure to stand up for them, as long as they are committed.”“Women need people to stand up for them,” she continued. “Especially Black women.”And in visits with Black churches, at community forums and on her active Twitter page, where she has more than 160,000 followers, she is vocal about combating vaccine hesitancy and decreasing barriers to health care, particularly among communities of color.Playing a pivotal role in the creation of a Covid-19 vaccine, she admits, is her own hard act to follow. So now she is also focused on paving a path to help other Black women scientists shatter boundaries.“At some point, you get to the point where you can’t beat what you already did,” she said. “But then you get to have a voice in spaces that you generally wouldn’t be able to. That’s where my mission and purpose is.”

Officials at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego had already begun work on a $1.2 billion transformation of its campus when the pandemic hit, forcing them to switch gears. As hospitals nationwide struggled to deal with surging cases, it became clear that the facility’s new design would need to evolve.“When the pandemic came along, it really changed the lens of how we do health care design,” said Dr. Nicholas Holmes, chief operating officer of Rady, the only children’s hospital in San Diego County and the largest in California. “And what we learned over the past few years, first and foremost, is to be as flexible in the design process as we can.”The early waves of the pandemic came crashing into hospitals, revealing intensive care units without enough beds, hallways and waiting rooms that forced the healthy and sick to commingle, and ventilation systems that became conduits for airborne pathogens. Given that hindsight, many hospitals are remodeling with a philosophy of flexible design, the idea that spaces should be adaptable for different purposes at different times. When the next pandemic comes, they’ll be able to better meet the moment.Traditional hospital design calls for sections that sequester the most vulnerable and contagious patients, with features not found in ordinary inpatient rooms. These include changeable airflow systems to keep microorganisms from traveling beyond the room’s walls; headwalls behind beds for electric, gas and equipment mounts; and, in general, a larger floor plan to accommodate specialized equipment like ventilators.In times of crisis, hospitals require more of these specialized spaces, with different protocols of isolation for different diseases.At Rady Children’s Hospital, where a new seven-story tower will house an intensive care unit as well as an emergency department, designers looked at the lessons learned from the pandemic and scrapped the tower’s original rectangular floor plan. In its place, they created one shaped like an X, with a 60-bed floor plan that can be converted into 20 fully isolated rooms for infectious-disease patients, should the need arise.The rooms at Doylestown are clustered in pods of eight.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesThe I.C.U. will be the second wing with flexible design.Hannah Yoon for The New York Times“Rather than looking at it on a single-room basis, when you think about maximum flexibility, you think about banks of rooms,” Dr. Holmes said. “Seeing it through that lens allows you to not have to transfer patients who are moderately sick into critically intensive care units.”Much of the shift in hospital design revolves around surge capacity, which is how health care workers adapt inside their buildings when the number of sick patients jumps substantially. In March and April 2020, the sudden rise in contagious patients meant some hospitals were scrambling to find beds, setting up overflow tents in parking lots and rationing equipment.“During the pandemic, they were doing hopscotch or leapfrog; they had to adapt on the fly,” said Douglas King, vice president of health care at Project Management Advisors, a real estate consulting firm. “Now hospitals are identifying wards, usually of 24 to 32 beds, and they can stack some of those wards together to become pandemic wards.”Read More on the Coronavirus PandemicEducational Declines: Test results show the pandemic’s effect on U.S. students: The math and reading scores of 9-year-olds dropped steeply, erasing two decades of progress.Heavy Toll: The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021. The decline, largely driven by the pandemic, was particularly pronounced among Indigenous communities.Boosters: An influential panel of expert advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended updated coronavirus booster shots to the vast majority of Americans, clearing the way for health workers to begin giving people the redesigned shots within days.Paxlovid Study: The Covid-19 medication Paxlovid reduced hospitalizations and deaths in older patients, but made no difference for patients under 65, new research from Israel found.To prepare for that shift, designers are thinking about how traditional rooms can quickly morph into isolation wards by upgrading or overhauling their heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems. Fabrics and finishes, too, are being reconsidered, with an eye toward durable materials that can withstand industrial-level scrubbing.Finally, the pathways that lead to these wards need to be rethought, Mr. King said, “so the transportation for patients and staff allows these spaces to be isolated and operated independently from the rest of the hospital.”A new I.C.U. at Doylestown Hospital in Doylestown, Pa., which opened in 2021, has private rooms meant to flex between intensive care and step-down care. The rooms are clustered in pods of eight to reduce traffic in corridors.It will be the second new wing with flexible design at Doylestown. After realizing that a new wing for heart and vascular care that opened in January 2020 could be used for critically ill Covid-19 patients during the pandemic, hospital administrators leaned into flexible design.“The pandemic proved the need to have flexible space,” said Jim Brexler, chief executive of Doylestown Health. “The impact of having adequate critical care space was essential, and you don’t want to build all that out and not be able to use it for other purposes.“This is the future of hospitals,” he added.CannonDesign, an architecture firm in New York, was involved in two hospital expansion projects.At Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, workers broke ground on a 16-story inpatient tower in 2021, including acute-care rooms that can morph into I.C.U. rooms. To achieve that flexibility, designers included additional outlets for medical gas and electricity, and larger clearances around beds to accommodate extra equipment. The upper half of doors will be made of glass to allow practitioners to observe highly contagious patients without entering the room.A whiteboard in an I.C.U. room at Doylestown.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesA private bathroom inside an I.C.U. room in the hospital.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesAnd at WellSpan Health in York, Pa., an eight-story surgical and critical care tower being built as part of a $398 million hospital expansion will have oversize patient rooms that can function as spaces for critical care.“The general sense that I get is that this is not a one-time situation that we just went through with Covid,” said Jocelyn Stroupe, co-director of health interiors for CannonDesign. “It’s just one of many infectious disease conditions that we’re going to be experiencing in the coming decades.”Preparations for those disease conditions can be seen on other construction sites across the nation.Ballantyne Medical Center, a 168,000-square-foot hospital in Charlotte, N.C., scheduled to open next year, will feature dual headwalls for more capacity in patient rooms and ventilation systems that allow rooms to be converted to negative pressure ones that prevent harmful airborne particles from flowing into other spaces. An outpatient center being built as part of a $151 million renovation at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta will have flexible rooms with mobile equipment that can quickly be transferred from space to space.And in Los Angeles, CHA Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center plans to open a new patient tower in 2023 with larger waiting rooms that allow for distancing, more rooms with negative pressure ventilation and a tripled capacity for blood-oxygen monitoring systems. Thirty-three private rooms are being added as well, all of which can be reconfigured for surge capacity.The focus on flexible design is not unique to hospitals, said John Swift, who leads the health care sector at the engineering and design consulting firm Buro Happold. Three years into the pandemic, it has become an almost universal concern.“We’re seeing these trends not just in health care but in all the facilities we do work in, from laboratory buildings to institutional buildings on college campuses,” he said.The shift to flexible design will mean that, in the short term at least, some hospitals are better equipped than others to handle the next pandemic. And it will also exacerbate the gap between the haves and have-nots in health care, said Armstead Jones, a strategic real estate adviser for Real Estate Bees.“You have hospitals that are barely holding on in rural areas, and they can’t afford flexibility in architecture. So what does it look like to them?” he said.But in the long term, designers expect the lessons from the coronavirus to resonate. Pandemic modifications, they say, are likely to eventually be written into law, much like access for those in wheelchairs and structural requirements for earthquakes.“This is no different from the code updates we go through every time there is an earthquake in California,” said Carlos L. Amato, a health care architect with Cannon Design. “The lessons learned postpandemic will eventually make it into building codes.”Much of the shift in hospital design revolves around surge capacity, but other businesses and institutions are beginning to think more about how to make their spaces more flexible, too.Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

For some parents who share custody, the Covid vaccine has created a minefield of issues that initial divorce decrees could not have anticipated.In late 2021, Adele Grote, a divorced mother of two in Minneapolis, took her children to a vaccination clinic at the Mall of America. But when her 13-year-old daughter called her father to let him know they were getting the shot, Ms. Grote knew they would have to leave without it.Just over a quarter of children between ages 5 and 11 in the United States are fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database; among older kids, ages 12 to 17, the rate is 59 percent. For parents who have yet to vaccinate their children, the reasons for hesitation vary. In an October 2021 survey from the Kaiser Foundation, many cited concerns about long-term side effects, including how vaccines might later affect their child’s fertility (though there is no evidence indicating that the vaccines impact fertility). And after a widely shared study about the risk of myocarditis and the Covid-19 vaccine, the C.D.C. affirmed that the vaccine is safe and cases of heart inflammation after vaccination are rare.In most cases, whether they have decided to vaccinate now, later or never, doctors say the parents they counsel have agreed with each other. But when they do not, the battle is part of a new pandemic front in divorce custody battles, one that is poised to expand with the imminent approval of vaccines for children under 5. Last month, Moderna announced plans to seek emergency authorization of their coronavirus vaccine for babies and toddlers after seeing promising results in a clinical study.Ms. Grote, who wants to vaccinate her children, while her ex-spouse does not, has been divorced since 2019. She and her ex share custody of their daughter and 11-year-old son. As a nurse in an intensive care unit, Ms. Grote has cared for many critically ill Covid-19 patients, but her children remain unvaccinated, a status, she said, that is a result of how her custody proceedings continue to unfold in family court.“I’m a single mom. I don’t have a ton of money,” she said. “But the money I’ve spent battling this, I could have taken my kids to Disney World, twice.”Her custodial agreement with her ex-husband, drawn up before the pandemic, stipulates that when it comes to medical decisions for the children, both parents follow the recommendations of their pediatrician. If either disagrees with what the doctor says, they need to see a court-appointed mediator, who can write up contracts that are enforceable in court. The process is slow, Ms. Grote said, and often spirals into demands put forth by one parent and thrown out by the other. So when the vaccine became available for children under 12, she tried just taking them to the clinic, an approach that didn’t work out.“So we still exist in this limbo. I’m fully vaccinated, and I pray to God that they don’t get sick,” Ms. Grote said. The court’s stance, which requires processes to stall when one parent contests the medical decisions of another, she said, has given her ex-husband de facto veto power on getting vaccinated. “He’s making all of the decisions, because anytime the doctors try to do anything for our kids, he says no,” she said.Her ex-husband, Jamey Groethe, sees it differently. “I want what’s best for our children no matter what,” said Mr. Groethe, who stressed that while he is opposed to his children receiving the Covid-19 vaccine because he is worried about how safe it is, he is not anti-vaccine in general.Joshua Rogers, a small-business owner in Los Angeles, is the father of two boys. He and his ex-girlfriend had only recently begun custody proceedings for the boys last year when a vaccine was cleared for children ages 5 and up, making their older son eligible. But while he was anxious to get him inoculated, his ex was not.As soon as the shot was made available, Mr. Rogers filed an application for a family court hearing and marked it ex parte, or urgent. The judge didn’t agree on the urgency.“It was rubber-stamp denied, quite literally, with a stamp on it that said ‘no exigent circumstances,’” Mr. Rogers said. “And I was like, of course there are exigent circumstances. We have a global pandemic, we have to get these kids vaccinated ASAP.”When contacted, Mr. Rogers’ ex-girlfriend declined to comment.But at a court hearing in mid-February, the judge granted Mr. Rogers decision-making power over issues of vaccination, and the boy is now vaccinated. “It’s really whatever the judge says. Whatever this one man thinks, that’s what goes,” Mr. Rogers said, pointing out that he still doesn’t fully understand why he was able to move forward.That sort of clarification is necessary, said Tim Miranda, founding partner of Antonyan Miranda, a family law firm in San Diego. “If the court doesn’t make a specific order about things like medical care, then both parents can individually take whatever action they would like in that realm.” Parents who are currently navigating the custody process should be clear with their legal teams if they disagree with the vaccination stance of their ex, said Mr. Miranda, and be prepared to argue as to why they, and not the other parent, should be vested with medical decision-making powers for their child. They should also be sure that their pediatrician or therapist has views that align with their own.“The courts give a lot of credence to the treating therapist or doctor, because they’re the ones dealing within the realm of the patient,” Mr. Miranda said. “The standard is to decide what is in the best interest of the child.” If parents can’t come to a mutual agreement over what “best interest” means, however, courts generally opt to grant one parent power to make the decision, as they did with Mr. Rogers.Laws vary slightly from state to state, Mr. Miranda said, but in general, “it’s a pretty high bar with something like a vaccination. If you’re going to oppose it, you’d have to have a pretty good reason, like a religious conviction or a medical condition.”The American Academy of Pediatrics does not have an official stance on vaccinating children in situations of custodial disputes, said Dr. Tiffany Kimbrough, an A.A.P. member and medical director of the mother-infant unit of the medical center at Virginia Commonwealth University. (They do, however, state, “It is prudent for the physician to inquire about marital status and custody issues when relevant” in this 2017 report.)“This has become such a hot-button issue,” she said. “We’re seeing a lot more difference of opinion than with traditional medical therapies and preventative care.”In New York, the courts will almost always favor vaccination, said Naomi Schanfield, a New York City lawyer specializing in family and marriage law.“Our office has been inundated with calls from parents saying, ‘I’m boosted and triple vaxxed, but I’m opposed to the vaccine for my child. What can you do to help me?’” The answer, at least in New York State, is not much, said Ms. Schanfield. “If the pediatrician recommends the vaccine, that’s what the court will rule.”In situations where custody agreements are not yet clear-cut, however, the process to wrest power over vaccine decisions can feel frustratingly slow for an anxious parent. Those who opt to bypass court regulations and — as Ms. Grote tried to do — take their child to be vaccinated without the consent of their ex-partner run the risk of being held in contempt of court. But the likelihood of losing custody over such an action is slim, Mr. Miranda said.“They’d have to determine that the parent was acting detrimentally to the health, safety or welfare of the child,” said Mr. Miranda, who added that it would be a tough sell in court.

For travel-starved Americans, the Delta variant has brought the return of a practice well-honed by the pandemic: waiting.As the fourth wave of the coronavirus swells across the United States, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, travelers who had booked late summer travel are now facing a familiar quandary: Should they once again cancel their plans?For many — among them, those who are vaccinated, headed to high-risk areas and concerned about breakthrough infections — the answer is yes. New data shows that although vaccines provide strong protection against severe illness and hospitalization, even vaccinated people are at risk of contracting the virus and spreading it, and getting sick themselves.But while the slowdown is puncturing hopes of a rebound after the travel industry’s worst year in recent history, the dip in bookings is — for now — relatively small, according to travel advisers and hospitality companies. The hope is that the current situation will be more of a speed bump than a stoplight.TripActions, a travel management company, reports that while new domestic bookings remain strong, cancellations for same-week travel have been steady at 26 percent for the past month, an uptick from an 18 percent average over the summer, before the Delta variant pushed virus cases up in every state. The airfare app Hopper is seeing a surge in demand for flexible bookings, with a 33 percent increase since early July in tickets that can be canceled for any reason. The company predicts domestic airfare prices will drop 10 percent in the coming weeks, a forecast supported by data from the Transportation Security Administration, which has seen the number of passengers it screens daily dip by about 30,000 since July.Dolores Halls, a human relations coordinator and plus-size fashion blogger in Chicago, has adjusted three upcoming trips because of fears about the Delta variant. She nixed a planned November vacation in Italy with her husband; has put an October girls’ trip to New Orleans on hold, and switched a September visit to Florida, which leads the nation in new coronavirus cases, to California, where she will land in Los Angeles and take a ferry to Catalina Island in hopes of avoiding crowds.“Covid has really kicked us in the butt,” said Ms. Halls, 28. Early in the pandemic, her mother was hospitalized with Covid-19 pneumonia. And despite now being vaccinated, “I’m definitely scared of breakthrough infections,” she said. “I’m also a plus-size girl, and I see the stories and statistics where something like that could impact how Covid affects you.”In a recent survey by Scott’s Cheap Flights, a travel site that alerts subscribers to airfare deals, 74 percent of members said that the Delta variant had impacted their travel plans, with 35 percent not booking any new trips right now and 24 percent choosing to book only domestic travel.“Of those who are booking new international trips, the vast majority are booking for 2022,” said Andrew Hickey, senior public relations manager for Scott’s Cheap Flights. “People are also determining where they’ll go based on Covid.”Just three weeks ago, Mr. Hickey himself pulled the plug on a November trip to Portugal, deciding the Delta variant made it unsafe to travel internationally as a family. He had booked tickets to Lisbon for himself, his wife and their two children, 8 and 11, in April. “We felt so confident at the time,” Mr. Hickey, who is vaccinated, said. “I now have over $1,000 in travel credits to use over the next two years, and some of that credit was from a trip we had canceled in 2020.”Despite hospital I.C.U.s once again buckling and death counts already surpassing 2020 numbers, public officials are hesitant to bring back lockdowns. The result is haphazard restrictions that vary by city: Chicago on Tuesday issued an indoor mask mandate, joining Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.; New York City will require proof of vaccination for indoor dining; while in Las Vegas, event organizers are excused from the state’s indoor masking requirement if they can prove all attendees are fully vaccinated.But with sporting events forging ahead, restaurants continuing to seat diners both indoors and out, and music festivals, like the recent Lollapalooza in Chicago, deciding the shows will go on, the decision of whether or not to travel is now a personal one.As a result, reactions in the face of the Delta variant are varied. Zeta Global, a marketing technology company that has been tracking American travel behavior, reports an inverse trend based on vaccination status: Hotel stays in states with high vaccination rates have dropped in recent months, and travel to hot spots like Florida has decreased among those who are inoculated against Covid-19 but has increased among those who are not.Southwest and Frontier Airlines, meanwhile, have lowered their profit expectations this quarter as demand for flights diminishes. Many air carriers were banking on increased business travel this fall, which was only just beginning to rebound. But with companies, including Facebook and Coca-Cola, rolling back their return-to-office plans in the face of the variant, there is fear that business travel will return to a full-on stall.“There are two distinct consumer behaviors that we’re observing. One is if you’re making a decision with your own dollars, and one is if you’re making a decision with your company’s dollars,” said Jan Freitag, senior vice president of lodging insights for STR, a hospitality analytics company.Ron Bension, president and chief executive of ASM Global, the world’s largest event management company, said that since conventions and large-scale business events have such a long lead time, Delta simply extended the status quo created in March 2020. “Most everything had already been canceled. What we’re seeing is not a lot of rebooking yet,” he said.For travel-starved Americans, the Delta variant has brought the return of a practice well-honed by the pandemic: waiting.“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” said Dr. Ravi Starzl, an epidemics expert and chief executive of BioPlx, an advanced microbiomics company. “As a country, we wanted to tell ourselves that getting back to normal was a possibility. But the virus had other plans.”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation.

Newly vaccinated families are opting for private jets, luxury resorts and guided tours in elaborate new twists on the old-fashioned family reunion.Jeff Belcher, 41, wouldn’t necessarily have chosen Williamsburg, Va., as the destination for his family’s first vacation since travel restrictions began to ease. But when his extended family decided to travel to the American Revolution-era town for a reunion this summer, he knew that he, his wife and their three children wouldn’t miss it.Their group of 18, which will include his parents, his sister, his aunt and uncle, and his mother-in-law and sister-in-law, will gather at the end of July and stay in several adjoining rented condos. There are plans to visit historical battlefields, check out the recreations of Jamestown Settlement ships, and enjoy outdoor meals while the family’s youngest generation — eight kids in total — play together after more than a year apart.Far-flung families are combining traveling and being together — two of the most longed-for practices during more than a year of pandemic lockdowns — into elaborate new twists on the old-fashioned family reunion. In a recent survey by Wyndham Destinations, the nation’s largest timeshare company, 75 percent of respondents said they were planning to travel for a family reunion in 2021; in a March survey from American Express Travel, 71 percent of respondents said they planned to travel to visit loved ones they hadn’t been able to see during the pandemic, and 60 percent said a 2021 family reunion was in the works.At Woodloch, a Pennsylvania family resort in the Pocono Mountains, bookings for 2021 are outpacing 2019.Properties that cater to large-scale gatherings are feeling the windfall. At Woodloch, a Pennsylvania family resort in the Pocono Mountains, multigenerational travel has always been their bread and butter. But bookings for 2021 are already outpacing 2019, with 117 reservations currently on the books (2019 saw 162 bookings total). “Demand is stronger than it has ever been,” said Rory O’Fee, Woodloch’s director of marketing.Salamander Hotels & Resorts, which has five properties in Florida, Virginia, South Carolina and Jamaica, has seen 506 family reunions already booked in 2021, accounting for $2.47 million in revenue. In the full calendar year of 2019, they saw only 368 events total, worth about $1.31 million. Club Med said that 16 percent of its 2021 bookings are multigenerational, compared with 3 percent in 2019.Guided tours are also newly becoming more popular with families looking to reunite: Guy Young, president of Insight Vacations, launched several new small private group trips — which can be booked for as few as 12 people and include a private bus and travel director — after noting that extended families accounted for 20 percent of his business in March and April, compared to a prepandemic average of 8 percent. “Coming out of Covid, with families separated for many months, we saw a significant increase in demand for multigenerational family travel,” he said.Reuniting at long lastMr. Belcher hopes his family’s reunion trip to Williamsburg, which will require a nearly nine-hour drive from his home in Livonia, Mich., will offer an opportunity to mend some of the tensions that have built up in the past year. Mr. Belcher and his wife, Stephanie, a financial educator, have been strict about mask-wearing for themselves and their children, who are 9, 5 and almost 6 months. Other family members have been more relaxed, which is one of the reasons they have spent so many months apart. “I am hoping to make some post-Covid memories, starting to hopefully put some of this behind us,” Mr. Belcher said, noting that all the adults attending the reunion will be vaccinated, and as long as there are no additional strangers in the room, they will allow their children to be unmasked, just like the adults, at indoor family events. “Before all of this happened, we were a very close family.”Traveling together will also offer families a chance to reconnect offline after many months of Skype and screen time.Esther Palevsky, 70, lives in Solon, Ohio, and hasn’t seen her 7-year-old grandson, Sylvester, since before the pandemic. So this summer, she and her husband, Mark, 71, will fly to Reno, Nev. — their first flight in more than a year — and then drive to California’s Lake Tahoe. Ms. Palevsky’s daughter, Stacey, and her son-in-law, Ben Lewis, will drive with Sylvester from San Francisco to meet them, and the family will spend several nights at an Airbnb in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It will be a new experience for Mr. and Ms. Palevsky, who prefer to take cruises when they have vacation time. Neither has ever been to Lake Tahoe, and they have limited experience with Airbnb. The location and accommodations, said Ms. Palevsky, didn’t matter much. She just wants to squeeze her grandson.“Just thinking about hugging him again, I get teary-eyed,” said Ms. Palevsky, who has been reading chapter books with Sylvester over video chat throughout the pandemic in order to stay in touch. “I’m sure I’ll see Sylvester and think about how big he looks. On the tablet, you just can’t tell.”Sandy Pappas, the owner of Sandy Pappas Travel, said that on an average year, 5 percent of her clients are booking family reunion trips. This year, that number is already between 15 and 20 percent.“I do a lot of family travel but it’s usually just a family of four or five. Now I’m getting two adult kids and their families and grandparents, and sometimes both sets of grandparents. And everyone is spending more money because nobody ate out or traveled in 2020, so they have funds left over,” she said.In the Caribbean, the Mandarin Oriental on Canouan is a popular destination for family reunions.Not your old-fashioned family reunionDomestic destinations are popular, Ms. Pappas said, but so is the Caribbean.On Canouan, a tiny crescent-shaped island in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the Mandarin Oriental is fielding frequent requests for family reunions from Americans as well as travelers from Britain and Germany. The groups range from eight to 11 guests, said the general manager, Duarte Correia. “Many of our guests want to reunite with loved ones they have only been able to connect with by phone or on the virtual video platforms, like Zoom, for a year or more,” he said.At ÀNI Private Resorts’s property in the Dominican Republic, 11 of the 16 bookings for this summer, which are all property buyouts, are for family reunions. The resort says that’s a 35 percent increase over 2019’s traffic. At the Four Seasons Resort in Anguilla, four- and five-bedroom villas were totally sold out over spring break, and reservations for this summer are 25 percent higher than they were in 2019. The Tryall Club, meanwhile, an all-villa property in Jamaica, has seen a 294 percent increase in overall bookings, and says 70 percent of those are for families or multigenerational groups.While the demand for travel across all sectors is high, family travel was predicted to eventually lead the way for the industry’s rebound after a staggering collapse. Travel advisers spent most of 2020 creating socially distanced itineraries for nuclear families that were already living together during lockdown. But now, they say, the most popular type of family trip is the reunion that brings far-flung relatives back into the fold. Kate Johnson, the owner of KJ Travel in Houston, says she has seen a sixfold increase in family reunion travel compared to last year, and she expects the number to continue to climb. She is also planning her own family reunion trip with 17 family members, including her daughters, their grandparents, cousins and aunts, to Disney World in Florida, in November.“When I get requests and I see how tight availability is for accommodation, it definitely makes me feel a sense of urgency to get my own family to start planning,” she said.Properties are leaning into the trend, rolling out packages geared toward family reunions and even hiring dedicated staff to shepherd the events.After noticing that a nearly 20 percent spike in bookings was coming from seniors looking to reconnect with younger family, the Deer Path Inn, in Lake Forest, Ill., relaunched its Gramping Getaway Package, which includes an outdoor scavenger hunt and an afternoon tea that can be enjoyed by all ages, including little ones as well as Gram and Gramps.Meanwhile, the Westin Cape Coral Resort at Marina Village created a new staff position to oversee such group trips: Chief Reunion Officer. Tosha Wollney, who was promoted to the position from her previous post of senior catering sales executive, will be busy: In 2019 the property had two family reunions, and in the last five weeks alone, they’ve booked five.The average size of the groups, she said, is between 30 and 40 family members. Her work involves customizing dinner menus to incorporate family recipes, creating specialty cocktails named after the family, and planning recreational activities like cornhole, fishing and golf tournaments.“It’s not like 20 years ago, when families would run around with potato sacks,” she said. “It’s more sophisticated.”Private jets, budget-busting plansAnd after using the act of planning for future travel to get many isolated families through the darkest months of the pandemic, many of the reunions on the books are truly budget-bustingPrivate jet travel, which surged during the pandemic, is increasingly popular among large families. Jessica Fisher, the founder of the aviation marketplace Flyjets, said private jet bookings for families on her site have doubled since last year. “There is this readiness to ‘move’ in safe ways among groups, especially for those who are choosing to reunite with extended family,” she said in an email.Spending is up, as well, as families splurge on longer and more elaborate trips together than they might have prepandemic. “During the worst of Covid, when people were unable to see their grandparents, what started happening was clients planning these epic, complex itineraries for the future,” said Brendan Drewniany, the communications director for the luxury travel company Black Tomato. “The rise of multigenerational is the biggest trend we can track.”The company has seen a 70 percent increase in multigenerational bookings over the past two months, and a 55 percent increase in average spending for family trips. Last month, they debuted five new travel itineraries called “Take Me On a Story,” each offering real-world immersions in scenes from classic children’s books and aimed directly at children and grandparents traveling together.“People want to make up for lost time,” Mr. Drewniany said. “They’re really open to where they go. They just want to be together.”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2021.

Amid the chatter of travel’s long-awaited rebound one year into the pandemic, many families with children feel largely left out of the conversation.Nearly every summer, Ada Ayala, a teacher, and her husband, Oscar Cesar Pleguezeulos, travel with their children to visit Mr. Cesar Pleguezeulos’s parents in Spain. But this year, even though they will both soon be fully vaccinated in their home state of Florida, they are changing their plans. The reason? There is still no pediatric Covid-19 vaccine available for their kids.The travel industry, buoyed by news of vaccine rollouts, is anticipating a summer rush after a year of devastation. But amid the chatter of travel’s long-awaited rebound, many families with children — who comprise roughly 30 percent of the global travel market — say they are largely being left out of the conversation.In a March survey on Bébé Voyage, an online community for traveling families, 90 percent of respondents said that amid unclear guidelines on Covid-19 testing, they were searching for flexible bookings. The topic also comes up often on Bébé Voyage’s Facebook page, particularly among parents in the United States. “It’s the Americans in the group that are the most nervous traveling with kids,” said the Bébé Voyage chief executive, Marianne Perez de Fransius.Ms. Ayala, 44, is among those nervous parents. “If it wasn’t for the kids, we would definitely be flying this summer,” she said. Ms. Ayala already received her shot as a teacher. Her husband, also 44, will soon receive his shots, too, because Florida recently opened vaccinations to those age 40 and up. But their children, Charlise, 6, and Oscar, 2, will have to wait many more months to be inoculated.“My 2-year-old isn’t going to wear a mask for 10 hours on a flight, and I don’t know if I want to expose him for a 16-hour trip with layovers,” Ms. Ayala said. “I’ll feel more confident when vaccination reaches more people worldwide, or at least in the destinations we want to go.”Nearly one in three adults in the United States have now received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. But a full pediatric Covid-19 vaccine currently isn’t expected until the end of 2021 at the earliest, and while they wait, parents are struggling to figure out how they, too, can travel safely this summer, and even where their children are welcome as rules on quarantine and testing continue to shift.“This is the elephant in the room right now,” said Cate Caruso, an adviser for Virtuoso, a network of luxury travel agencies, who also owns her own travel planning company, True Places Travel. The potential that a child could become infected with Covid-19 while abroad and not be allowed on a return flight, she said, is a major deterrent for parents. “Anywhere you go outside of the U.S. right now, you’ve got to think about how you’re going to get back in,” she said. “It’s leaving behind a whole bunch of people who are ready to go.”In Ms. Ayala’s case, a compromise has been struck: If and when Spain — which is currently closed to American travelers — opens its borders, Mr. Cesar will travel to Spain with their daughter, Charlise, while Ms. Ayala will remain in Florida with Oscar. “She goes to school and is very good with wearing her mask, cleaning her hands and keeping distance,” Ms. Ayala said of her daughter. “So I think she can be safe. But it’s just not possible with a baby.”But she doesn’t plan to stay home all summer. Whether or not her husband and daughter make it to Spain, Ms. Ayala is planning a family road trip at some point this summer, likely within Florida.After a year of road trips, R.V.s and rental cottages, many Americans are now ready to fly again: Online searches for late-summer flights are up as much as 75 percent, and hotels on both coasts are reporting that they are sold out through October. But families, more than any other travel sector, continue to play it safe.Family travel plans for this summer are more low-key than two years ago, with bookings to Mount Rushmore National Memorial, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, reported to be significantly up.Tannen Maury/EPA, via ShutterstockRovia, a membership-based global travel agency that works with both travelers and travel agents, reports that beach and camping destinations within driving distance are the most popular choices for families this summer. An exception? Disney World, which is seeing an uptick in reservations for summer from families looking to visit while capacity remains limited (and lines, as a result, remain shorter).“The rate of couples traveling by air has increased faster, whereas families are still leaning toward travel by car and R.V. rentals,” said Jeff Gwynn, Rovia’s director of communications.Montoya and Phil Hudson, who showcase their travels as a Black family on their popular blog, The Spring Break Family, are among them. “Most years we go pretty far — Spain, Italy, France, as far as we can go. This year it was about what’s reachable by car,” Ms. Hudson said. She and Mr. Hudson, who both work in the health care industry, are vaccinated, but admit they probably won’t be willing to fly with their two daughters, Leilah, 11, and Layla, 8, for several more months.That’s because they want to wait for herd immunity to help keep their daughters safe. “The goal is to wait until the majority of the population is vaccinated, or has at least had the opportunity to become vaccinated,” Ms. Hudson said.In addition to preferring driving over flying this summer, travel analysts say families with children will also continue to opt for rental homes over hotel rooms.In fact, when it comes to the vacation cottage market, parents are booking faster than anyone else. “Families are the number one group expected to travel in 2021,” said Vered Schwarz, the president and chief operating officer of Guesty, a short-term property management platform which reports that its summer reservations are already 110 percent higher than 2020, with families comprising more than 30 percent of those booking. “For families with unvaccinated children, private rentals are appealing — they are comfortable and they avoid hotels chock-full of crowded common areas,” she said.The question of how to treat unvaccinated children who may be traveling with their parents is also presenting a legal and ethical minefield for American travel operators.The European Union is considering a vaccine passport that will allow free travel within the bloc for those who can show proof of inoculation. In Israel, a green pass has been established for those who have been vaccinated, granting holders not just the ability to cross a border but also check into a hotel or eat inside a restaurant, but children are not exempt — so parents with unvaccinated children must dine outside at restaurants and find babysitters before heading to the gym or a show.But in the United States, such policies are unlikely to take hold, said Chuck Abbott, the general manager of the InterContinental San Diego. “Most hotels would not ask for that information, because it violates the privacy of the guest,” he said. “Even putting vaccinated guests on a different floor than other guests would likely present a legal issue.”Compared with summer 2019, families’ plans for summer 2021 are more low-key: Travelocity reports that bookings to Mount Rushmore and Nashville are significantly up over two years ago; internationally, family bookings to London, Paris and Rome, destinations that were top family sites in 2019, but have still not reopened to U.S. travel, are way down, while Cancún, which is currently open to American travelers without quarantine requirements, is up nearly 50 percent.Some European countries, like Iceland, have begun inching open their borders, but only to passengers who are vaccinated. That means individuals who can present proof of the Covid-19 jab can bypass quarantine when they arrive — unless they are parents traveling with children.“Unvaccinated children would still need to quarantine for five days, and the parents, of course, must stay with the child,” said Eric Newman, who owns the travel blog Iceland With Kids. “Iceland’s brand-new travel regulations are not friendly to families hoping to visit with children.”After a year of virtual schooling and working from home, parents have no desire to quarantine with their kids, said Anthony Berklich, the founder of the travel platform Inspired Citizen. “What these destinations are basically saying is you can come but your children can’t,” he said.Instead, families are opting for warm-weather destinations closer to home.When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in January that proof of a negative PCR test would be required of all air passengers arriving in the United States, many tropical resorts — including more than a dozen Hyatt properties — began offering not just free on-site testing, but a deeply discounted room in which to quarantine in case that test comes back positive. That move, said Rebecca Alesia, a travel consultant with SmartFlyer, has been a boon for family travel business.“What happens if the morning you’re supposed to come home, you get up and Junior has a surprise positive test?” she said. “A lot of my clients have booked this summer because of this policy.”For parents struggling to decide how and when to return to travel, there is good news on the horizon, said Dr. Shruti Gohil, the medical director of infection prevention at the University of California, Irvine.“The chances of a good pediatric vaccine coming soon are high,” she said, noting that both Pfizer and Moderna are already running pediatric trials on their vaccines. “There is no reason to think that the vaccine will have any untoward effects on children that we haven’t already noted in adults.”In the meantime, she said, parents with children need to continue to be cautious. That doesn’t mean families shouldn’t travel at all, but she recommends choosing to drive rather than fly; to not allow unvaccinated children to play unmasked with children from other households; and to remain vigilant about wearing masks and regularly washing hands while on the road.“We can’t keep saying that you can’t go anywhere,” she said. “At some point we have to have some kind of nuance around this. But this is a game we are all still playing until the virus is gone.”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation.