More than 2,000 flights scheduled for Friday and Saturday have been canceled, as snow begins to pound the Northeast. In some areas, the snow accumulation could reach as high as two feet, and the snow and wind could yield blizzard conditions, according to the National Weather Service.

In Boston, which could see more than 18 inches of snow this weekend, at least 85% of flights out of Logan International Airport on Saturday have already been canceled. At Newark Liberty International, more than half of Saturday’s flights have been grounded.

Meanwhile, more than 400 JetBlue flights and more than 350 American Airlines flights across the country scheduled for Saturday have been canceled.

A winter storm warning is in effect Friday from Virginia to Maine, according to the National Weather Service. And blizzard warnings have been issued for parts of Maine, Massachusetts and New Jersey, among others. Cape Cod could see some of the highest accumulations.

On Friday, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu declared a snow emergency. In anticipation of heavy accumulations and high winds, Wu announced a parking ban that will take effect at 9 p.m. on Friday. Under the ban, vehicles parked on major roads and “main arteries” will be towed.

City employees have already begun preparations and the Public Works Department plans to treat roads before snow begins to fall, Wu said in the statement. The city has 38,000 tons of salt, and more than 850 pieces of equipment to use on local streets.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul on Thursday directed state agencies to prepare for the storm. The state’s transportation department has more than 1,500 large snow plows on hand. The Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services is prepared to deploy generators and sandbags, among other items.

“We are monitoring forecasts and making emergency response preparations for whatever this storm system throws our way,” Hochul said in a news release.

Farther up the coast, Maine’s emergency management agency encouraged motorists to stay off the roads. Gov. Janet Mills urged people to “be mindful of road crews and emergency responders.”

Powerful winds and blowing snow could create low visibility, making for “hazardous conditions,” said Peter Rogers, director of the state’s emergency management agency.

With sub-freezing temperatures expected, it’s a good idea to keep blankets, extra layers, and hats and gloves in the car. And if you get caught in a storm, experts encourage you to stay in the car.

ATMORE, Ala. — Alabama executed an inmate by lethal injection for a 1996 murder on Thursday after a divided U.S. Supreme Court sided with the state and rejected defense claims the man had an intellectual disability that cost him a chance to choose a less “torturous,” yet untried, execution method.

Matthew Reeves, 43, was put to death at Holman Prison after the court lifted a lower court order that had prevented corrections workers from executing the prisoner. He was pronounced dead at 9:24 p.m. CST, state Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement.

Reeves was convicted of killing Willie Johnson Jr., a driver who gave him a ride in 1996. Evidence showed Reeves went to a party afterward and celebrated the killing.

The inmate had no last words. After craning his neck to look around a few times, Reeves grimaced and looked at his left arm toward an intravenous line. With his eyes closed and mouth slightly agape, Reeves’ abdomen moved repeatedly before he grew still.

Gov. Kay Ivey, in a statement, said Johnson was “a good Samaritan lending a helping hand” who was brutally murdered. Reeves’ death sentence “is fair, and tonight, justice was rightfully served,” she added.

Prison officials said some of Johnson’s family witnessed the execution. In a written statement, they said: “After 26 years justice (has) finally been served. Our family can now have some closure.”

Reeves was convicted of capital murder for the slaying of Johnson, who died from a shotgun blast to the neck during a robbery in Selma on Nov. 27, 1996. He was killed after picking up Reeves and others on the side of a rural highway.

After the dying man was robbed of $360, Reeves, then 18, went to a party where he danced and mimicked Johnson’s death convulsions, authorities said. A witness said Reeves’ hands were still stained with blood at the celebration, a court ruling said.

While courts have upheld Reeves’ conviction, the last-minute fight by his lawyers seeking to stop the execution involved his intellect, his rights under federal disability law and how the state planned to kill him.

The Supreme Court on Thursday evening tossed out a decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had ruled Wednesday that a district judge didn’t abuse his discretion in ruling that the state couldn’t execute Reeves by any method other than nitrogen hypoxia, which has never been used.

Reeves’ attorneys criticized the Supreme Court’s failure to explain its decision to let the execution proceed. “The immense authority of the Supreme Court should be used to protect its citizens, not to strip them of their rights without explanation,” they said.

In 2018, Alabama death row inmates had a chance to sign a form choosing either lethal injection or nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method after legislators approved the use of nitrogen. But Reeves was among the inmates who didn’t fill out the form stating a preference.

Suing under the American With Disabilities Act, Reeves claimed he had intellectual disabilities that prevented him from understanding the form offering him the chance to choose nitrogen hypoxia — a method never used in the U.S. — over lethal injection, which the inmate’s lawyers called “torturous.”

Reeves also claimed the state failed to help him understand the form. But the state argued he wasn’t so disabled that he couldn’t understand the choice.

It was a divided court that let the execution proceed. Justice Amy Coney Barrett said she would deny the state’s request, while Justice Stephen Breyer, who just announced his retirement, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined with Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent that said the execution shouldn’t occur.

The state had previously asked the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to lift a lower court injunction and allow the execution, but the panel on Wednesday had refused. Alabama then appealed, sending the case to the nation’s highest court.

Alabama switched from the electric chair to lethal injection after 2002, and in 2018 legislators approved the use of another method, nitrogen hypoxia, amid defense challenges to injections and shortages of chemicals needed for the procedure. The new method would cause death by replacing oxygen that the inmate breathes with nitrogen.

A poor reader and intellectually disabled, Reeves wasn’t capable of making such a decision without assistance that should have been provided under the American With Disabilities Act, his lawyers argued. A prison worker who gave Reeves a form didn’t offer aid to help him understand, they said.

With Reeves contending he would have chosen nitrogen hypoxia over a “torturous” lethal injection had he comprehended the form, the defense filed suit asking a court to halt the lethal injection. U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker, Jr. blocked execution plans, ruling that Reeves had a good chance of winning the claim under the disabilities law.

A defense expert concluded Reeves had a first grade reading level and the language competency of someone as young as 4, but the state disagreed that Reeves had a disability that would prevent him from understanding his options.

An Alabama inmate who was put to death by lethal injection last year, Willie B. Smith, unsuccessfully raised claims about being intellectually unable to make the choice for nitrogen hypoxia.

Stavros Lambrinidis, the European Union ambassador to the U.S., had sent a letter both condemning Johnson’s killing and asking the governor Ivey to block the execution.

When the results of his study came in, Kondwani Jambo was stunned.

He’s an immunologist in Malawi. And last year he had set out to determine just how many people in his country had been infected with the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

Jambo, who works for the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, knew the total number of cases was going to be higher than the official numbers. But his study revealed that the scale of spread was beyond anything he had anticipated — with a huge majority of Malawians infected long before the omicron variant emerged. “I was very shocked,” he says.

Most important, he says, the finding suggests that it has now been months since Malawi entered something akin to what many countries still struggling with massive omicron waves consider the holy grail: the endemic stage of the pandemic, in which the coronavirus becomes a more predictable seasonal bug like the flu or common cold.

In fact, top scientists in Africa say Malawi is just one of many countries on the continent that appear to have already reached — if not quite endemicity — at least a substantially less threatening stage, as evidenced by both studies of the population’s prior exposure to the coronavirus and its experience with the omicron variant.

The Malawi mystery

To understand how these scientists have come to hold this view, it helps to first consider what the pandemic has looked like in a country such as Malawi.

Before the omicron wave, Malawi didn’t seem to have been hit too hard by COVID-19. Even by July of last year, when Malawi had already gone through several waves of the coronavirus, Jambo says it appeared that only a tiny share of Malawians had been infected.

“Probably less than 10% [of the population], if we look at the number of individuals that have tested positive,” says Jambo.

The number of people turning up in hospitals was also quite low — even during the peak of each successive COVID-19 wave in Malawi.

Jambo knew this likely masked what had really been going on in Malawi. The country’s population is very young — it has a median age of around 18, he notes. This suggests most infections prior to omicron’s arrival were probably asymptomatic ones unlikely to show up in official tallies. People wouldn’t have felt sick enough to go to the hospital. And coronavirus tests were in short supply in the country and therefore were generally used only for people with severe symptoms or who needed tests for travel.

So to fill in the true picture, Jambo and his collaborators turned to another potential source of information: a repository of blood samples that had been collected from Malawians month after month by the national blood bank. And they checked how many of those samples had antibodies for the coronavirus. Their finding: By the start of Malawi’s third COVID-19 wave with the delta variant last summer, as much as 80% of the population had already been infected with some strain of the coronavirus.

“There was absolutely no way we would have guessed that this thing had spread that much,” says Jambo.

Similar studies have been done in other African countries, including Kenya, Madagascar and South Africa, adds Jambo. “And practically in every place they’ve done this, the results are exactly the same” — very high prevalence of infection detected well before the arrival of the omicron variant.

Jambo thinks the findings from the blood samples in Malawi explain a key feature of the recent omicron wave there: The number of deaths this time has been a fraction of the already low number during previous waves.

Less than 5% of Malawians have been fully vaccinated. So Jambo says their apparent resistance to severe disease was likely built up as a result of all the prior exposure to earlier variants.

“Now we have had the beta variant — we have had the delta variant and the original,” notes Jambo. “It seems like a combination of those three has been able to neutralize this omicron variant in terms of severe disease.”

A promising pattern

And now that the omicron wave has peaked across Africa, country after country there seems to have experienced the same pattern: a huge rise in infections that has not been matched by a commensurate spike in hospitalizations and death.

Shabir Madhi is a prominent vaccinologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

“I think we should draw comfort from the fact that this has been the least severe wave in the country,” he says.

The most likely reason, he says, is that — like Malawi — South Africa gained immunity through prior infections, he says.

One difference is that in South Africa’s case, this immunity came at a high price. South Africa’s population is substantially older than Malawi’s, and during the delta wave last summer, hospitals in the country were swamped.

Still, the upshot, says Mahdi, is that “we’ve come to a point where at least three-quarters — and now after omicron, probably 80% — of South Africans have developed immunity and at least protection against severe disease and death.”

Will the protection last?

Of course, whether Africa is truly now in a less dangerous position depends on a “key question,” says Emory University biologist Rustom Antia. “How long does the immunity that protects us from getting ill last?” Antia has been studying what would need to happen for the coronavirus to become endemic.

But Mahdi says there’s reason to be optimistic on this front. Research suggests this type of protection could last at least a year. So Mahdi says in African countries — and likely in many other low- and middle-income countries with similar experiences of COVID-19 — the takeaway is already clear: “I think we’ve reached a turning point in this pandemic. What we need to do is learn to live with the virus and get back to as much of a normal society as possible.”

What does that look like? For one thing, says Mahdi, “we should stop chasing just getting an increase in the number of doses of vaccines that are administered.” Vaccination efforts should be more tightly targeted on the vulnerable: “We need to ensure that at least 90% of people above the age of 50 are vaccinated.”

Similarly, when the next variant comes along, Mahdi says, it will be important not to immediately panic over the mere rise in infections. This rise will be inevitable, and any policy that’s intended to stop it with economically disruptive restrictions, such as harsh COVID-19 lockdowns, isn’t just unnecessarily damaging — “it’s fanciful thinking.” Instead, officials should keep an eye out for the far more unlikely scenario of a rise in severe illness and death.