Overview: Thousands of New York City employees face unpaid leave as mandate deadline arrives; global death toll surpasses 5M:

Thousands of NYC employees face unpaid leave as mandate deadline arrives; global death toll surpasses 5M: COVID-19 updates New York City's vaccine mandate deadline arrives Monday. Worldwide, more than 5M people have died. Latest COVID-19 updates. Celina Tebor and John Bacon USA TODAY

More than 90% of New York City's employees have been vaccinated and half of the rest have applied for exemptions, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday. 

The mayor's vaccine mandate requires that any of the city's 300,000 workers who haven't had their first dose be placed on unpaid leave today. The exemption requests are still being processed, de Blasio said.

"A vast majority of city workers, 91%, stepped up to put the health and safety of their city first and got vaccinated," de Blasio tweeted early Monday. The number had been 83% Friday night. ...

Some other developments:

►All adults who are regularly in schools and child care centers in the District of Columbia must be vaccinated effective today. Also, students aged 12 and older must be fully vaccinated to participate in school-based extracurricular athletics. Religious and medical exemptions are available. Mayor Muriel Bowser previously had required city employees to be vaccinated.

►South Dakota has joined Missouri, Nebraska, Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Wyoming in a lawsuit against President Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors. ...

►Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s vaccine mandate for city workers survived another challenge — this one from the City Council, which voted down a proposal pushed by some of its members to repeal it.

Global deaths surpass 5 million

The devastating human toll from the coronavirus reached another major milestone when the worldwide death tally surpassed 5 million, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Nowhere else in the globe has the cost in lives been higher than in the United States, despite the country’s abundance of vaccines. Even through a decline in infections in recent weeks, the U.S. continues to experience about 1,400 daily deaths because of COVID-19, which has killed 746,000 Americans.

The U.S. death count has surpassed the estimated 675,000 Americans who died in the 1918 flu pandemic, and the emergence of vaccines toward the end of 2020 only slowed the COVID-19 pandemic’s pace. 

The U.S. produces and freely administers three COVID-19 vaccines — Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — that are highly effective at protecting people from severe illness, hospitalization and death. But about 60 million eligible people in this country remain unvaccinated, giving the virus plenty of victims to infect and kill.

 -- Nationwide, cases in children grew by 129% in the six weeks after schools opened compared with the same period before classes started, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some states appear to have reopened schools more safely than others, based on child hospitalization data – pediatric hospitalization rates were generally far lower in states with high numbers of vaccinated children. And the rise in childhood cases tended to be more pronounced in places that banned schools from enforcing mask mandates or gave districts the ability to choose. ...