Governors in two states announced Thursday an expansion of those eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine:

At least 11 states have either announced or expanded eligibility to vaccines to residents 16 and older, according to the New York Times.

Pennsylvania remains in Phase 1A, which includes residents 65 and older, health care personnel, educators and school staff, and people 16 and older with certain medical conditions. Gov. Tom Wolf said Thursday Pennsylvania is on track to meet the March 31 deadline for scheduling all 1A appointments.

In New Jersey, eligibility remains similar, but also includes transportation workers and first responders. More frontline essential workers will be eligible to schedule vaccine appointments on Monday.

In Delaware, all residents 50 an older are eligible to receive a vaccine, and Gov. John Carney has said the state will meet President Joe Biden’s goal of opening shots to everyone by May 1.

» READ MORE: As Pa. moves up in vaccine rankings, Wolf claims state’s rollout is going very well

— Rob Tornoe

President Joe Biden set a new goal of 200 million COVID-19 vaccinations by the end of his first 100 days in office, doubling his initial benchmark of 100 million shots.

“I know it’s ambitious — twice our original goal. But no other country in the world has even come close to what we’re doing,” Biden said Thursday during his first official press conference as president. “No other country in the world has even come close.

The United States is averaging about 2.5 million vaccinations a day, and has administered more than 130 million vaccinations through Wednesday, according to the CDC. So reaching 200 million vaccinations by April 29 is a realistic goal, assuming there are no major issues with supply or distribution.

“The problem is that at 2.5 million shots per day, we’re still five months away from herd immunity, if we’re using 70% to 75% of the population as our goal,” Jonathan Reiner, a professor at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health, told CNN. “We’re really moving in the right direction, but we need to go further and faster.”

— Rob Tornoe

A week before Pennsylvania will require vaccine providers to have at least scheduled appointments for every 1A resident who wants a shot, the state Department of Health said Thursday that providers who say they have no available appointments may be subject to enforcement. It was unclear what the enforcement would entail or how the state would monitor compliance.

The Department of Health said it may also require some providers to coordinate with their local Area Agency on Aging and Medical Assistance Managed Care Organizations in order to get these appointments scheduled.

Both measures were laid out in an amended order signed by Acting Health Secretary Alison Beam and were announced as Gov. Tom Wolf stood outside a Scranton health center touting the state’s vaccine rollout, which has its share of critics, particularly in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Wolf said Pennsylvania is on track to meet the March 31 deadline for scheduling all 1A appointments. While Beam’s order indicates providers should schedule these appointments “regardless of how far in the future” (the collar counties have said it could be months), Wolf said appointments should be scheduled within a “reasonable” time frame — " a couple weeks.”

He once again defended the state’s rollout, including its ability to get shots into the arms of the people in the most vulnerable 65-and-older population.

“Given the constraints we operate under … could we have done a better job?” Wolf said, reiterating the state’s stance that federal supply remains the most limiting factor. “I don’t think so. I think we’re doing the best we possibly can.”

Despite reports of people traveling out of state to get shots, the governor said he didn’t think residents needed to take such drastic measures.

“I think the best thing we can really do is make sure we’re doing a better job than any other state so that people don’t feel the need to go anywhere else,” Wolf said. “There really shouldn’t be much of an incentive to go anywhere else.”

— Erin McCarthy

Rutgers University will require students enrolled for the fall semester and expecting to be on campus to have the COVID-19 vaccine, the school announced Thursday.

It becomes the first college in the region to announce that its students must have the vaccine. Students can request an exemption for medical or religious reasons, the school said. Those in online-only programs will not be required to get the shots.

“We are committed to health and safety for all members of our community, and adding COVID-19 vaccination to our student immunization requirements will help provide a safer and more robust college experience for our students,” Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway said in a statement.

Colleges around the region have been weighing how best to encourage vaccination and make it accessible; whether to require it for certain groups of students, such as athletes or those who live in residence halls or study abroad; and whether monetary or other incentives could help.

Rutgers noted that the federal government has said vaccines will be available for everyone by the end of May, meaning students should be able to access them.

Antonio Calcado, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Rutgers said in a statement: “An effective vaccination program is a continuation of Rutgers’ commitment to health and safety for all members of our community of more than 71,000 students, the cities we are in and the communities we serve throughout New Jersey.”

Students who are under 18 will be advised to get the Pfizer vaccine, which can be given to 16 and 17-year-olds, the school said.

The university also is urging faculty and staff to get the vaccine.

» READ MORE: Should college students be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine?

— Susan Snyder

More city students will be eligible to return to Philadelphia School District classrooms in late April.

Students in grades 3 through 5 and complex needs students in grades 6 through 8 can opt in to hybrid learning beginning April 26, officials said in an email sent to staff Thursday morning. Parents will have the option to keep their children learning fully virtually, as they have been since last March, if they choose.

About 9,000 children in grades prekindergarten through second grade in all but one elementary school - Spruance, in the Northeast - have returned to face-to-face learning two days a week.

Keeping the next phase of reopening to elementary-age children and kids with special needs up to eighth grade “ensures that we are able to maintain all health and safety protocols, including six-foot social distancing,” district officials said in the staff email.

» READ MORE: More kids will be eligible to return to Philly schools in late April, district says

— Kristen A. Graham

Plenty of Pennsylvanians have gotten shots — the state ranks above average in percentage of residents with first doses — and many New Jerseyans by turn have been frustrated by the process. But by most measures, New Jersey is ahead of its neighbor when it comes to delivering vaccinations.

New Jersey has a phone hotline for people without internet access; Pennsylvania has a website with limited utility — as Tribuini discovered — that offers only information and no appointments. New Jersey has had mass vaccination sites for months; Pennsylvania is only now planning them.

New Jersey is regularly ranked in the top 10 in the nation in dose-use efficiency, with data showing the state typically administers more than 86% of doses received by the government.

The same scale has consistently ranked Pennsylvania in the bottom half of the country, with the commonwealth at times using less than 75% of available doses. The state has matched the national average in terms of overall vaccinations given but remains below the national average in terms of how many people are fully inoculated. This week, the state jumped from 30th to 17th in the nation for the number of people who received first shots.

» READ MORE: New Jersey’s vaccine rollout is mostly working. In Pennsylvania, it’s more complicated.

— Allison Steele, Erin McCarthy and Jason Laughlin

The Wolf administration is refusing to disclose details of wasted coronavirus vaccine doses, including how many have been discarded by each provider, citing a decades-old law that it has frequently used to shield the public from scrutinizing its pandemic response.

The state Department of Health recently denied a public records request by Spotlight PA seeking documentation of vaccine doses that providers did not administer because of expiration, damage, or other factors. The request did not seek any patient information.

Providers are required to self-report to state health officials whenever a dose of vaccine is “compromised,” and explain why. Those discarded for any reasons other than expiration or broken vials must also be accompanied by an incident report.

State health officials declined to provide any of those records in response to Spotlight PA’s request, citing the Disease Prevention and Control Law.

» READ MORE: Wolf administration refuses to release details of wasted COVID-19 vaccine doses

— Ese Olumhense, Spotlight PA

The number of people seeking unemployment benefits fell sharply last week to 684,000, the fewest since the pandemic erupted a year ago and a sign that the economy is improving.

Thursday’s report from the Labor Department showed that jobless claims fell from 781,000 the week before. It is the first time that weekly applications for jobless aid have fallen below 700,000 since mid-March of last year. Before the pandemic tore through the economy, applications had never topped that level.

Still, a total of 18.9 million people are continuing to collect jobless benefits, up from 18.2 million in the previous week. Roughly one-third of those recipients are in extended federal aid programs, which means they’ve been unemployed for at least six months.

» READ MORE: U.S. unemployment claims dropped last week to 684,000, fewest since pandemic began

— Washington Post

An international team of scientists has found evidence COVID-19 infects cells in the mouth, findings that might help explain symptoms like a loss of taste and dry mouth.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill say the findings, published Thursday in Nature Medicine, point to the possibility saliva from the mouth plays a role in transmitting the virus to the lungs or digestive system.

“Based on data from our laboratories, we suspected at least some of the virus in saliva could be coming from infected tissues in the mouth itself,” Blake Warner, a clinical investigator at the NIH who helped lead the study, said in a statement.

The findings also raise the possibility that people without symptoms might transmit the virus to others through saliva. Researchers exposed saliva from eight people with asymptomatic COVID-19 to healthy cells grown in a dish, which became infected.

The scientists collected saliva from a group of 35 NIH volunteers with mild or asymptomatic COVID-19. Of the 27 people who experienced symptoms, those with virus in their saliva were more likely to report loss of taste and smell, suggesting that oral infection might underlie oral symptoms of COVID-19.

More research is needed, but the scientists said the findings suggest the mouth plays a bigger role in COVID-19 infection than previously thought, with infected saliva potentially transmitting the virus further into our throats, lungs, and even our guts.

“By revealing a potentially underappreciated role for the oral cavity in SARS-CoV-2 infection, our study could open up new investigative avenues leading to a better understanding of the course of infection and disease,” Warner said. “Such information could also inform interventions to combat the virus and alleviate oral symptoms of COVID-19.”

— Rob Tornoe

Pennsylvania and New Jersey are experiencing a surge in new COVID-19 cases, a trend seen nationwide and across the globe experts say is due to the rapid spread of variants of the virus.

The Department of Health reported 4,467 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, exceeding 4,000 cases for the first time in a month and the most infections reported in a single day since the beginning of February. Pennsylvania is now averaging nearly 3,500 new cases a day, up 41% over the past two weeks.

As of Wednesday, Pennsylvania had 198 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant first detected in the United Kingdom, according to data from the CDC, up from 168 cases on Monday. The variant can spread more easily than the original strain of coronavirus, and is thought to be driving up infection rates in Europe, where many countries have been forced into shutdowns.

New Jersey has the highest rate of new COVID-19 cases in the country, with more than 23,000 residents testing positive over the last seven days. The state is averaging 3,341 new cases a day, and the CDC reports 389 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant.

COVID-19 hospitalizations have also topped 2,000 for two straight days across the state, causing Gov. Phil Murphy to implore residents to continue wearing masks, social distancing, and washing hands.

“Only all of us together control the direction in which these numbers move,” Murphy said during a press briefing Wednesday.

— Rob Tornoe

The end of this pandemic finally feels within view, but some experts would like to see the country get closer to herd immunity before returning to indoor dining. Herd immunity is considered to be achieved when between 70% to 90% of the country has been vaccinated or recovered from COVID-19 infection.

“The vaccines are very effective but they’re not 100-percent, and we do have variants that are circulating and still being researched,” says Darren Mareiniss, an emergency medicine doctor at Einstein Medical Center. “If our case numbers and our positive tests rates were significantly lower, let’s say below two- or three-percent, then I might be more apt to eat inside, but the positive test rate in Philadelphia County is over five-percent, which is still pretty high.”

On the other hand, some experts say you don’t need to wait, given the vaccines’ effectiveness, both in clinical trials and in emerging real world studies. This is assuming health department guidelines are being followed, like table distancing and mask wearing.

“I would feel comfortable indoor dining with a small group, and by small group, I mean one other person or family that’s at low risk of having any complications,” says Neal Goldstein, an assistant research professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Drexel University. “This is based on the effectiveness of the vaccination and the current minimal risk. And that’s the fine line. I’d love to say that there’s no risk here, and I can’t say that. But there’s minimal risk, and that’s what we’re going to have to deal with for the near future.”

» READ MORE: Is indoor dining safe once you’ve had the COVID-19 vaccine? Experts are split on the risk.

— Grace Dickinson

AstraZeneca insists that its COVID-19 vaccine is strongly effective even after counting additional illnesses in its U.S. study, the latest in an extraordinary public dispute with American officials.

In a late-night news release Wednesday, the drugmaker said it had analyzed more data from that study and concluded the vaccine is 76% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, instead of the 79% it had reported earlier in the week.

Just a day earlier, an independent panel that oversees the study had accused AstraZeneca of cherry-picking data to tout the protection offered by its vaccine. The panel, in a harsh letter to the company and to U.S. health leaders, said the company had left out some COVID-19 cases that occurred in the study, a move that could erode trust in the science.

“AstraZeneca may have just been too hasty in submitting the earlier, incomplete interim analysis rather than waiting to analyze and submit the full data set,” said Julian Tang, a virologist at the University of Leicester who was not connected to the research. He said the updated details didn’t look substantially different from what was published earlier this week.

» READ MORE: AstraZeneca confirms strong vaccine protection after US rift

— Associated Press