Happy Monday! We hope you had a fantastic Christmas weekend if you celebrated, and a fantastic regular weekend if you didn’t.

Today’s TMD is going to be on the shorter side: Remarkably few things of note transpired between Friday morning and today, and we’d be wasting your time if we pretended otherwise just to fill space. Enjoy the extra few minutes!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The White House announced Friday that on December 31, President Joe Biden will lift the travel restrictions put in place on eight African nations last month. “The restrictions gave us time to understand Omicron and we know our existing vaccines work against Omicron, [especially] boosted,” White House spokesman Kevin Munoz said.

• The Centers for Disease Control updated its guidance late last week to allow healthcare workers who contract COVID-19 to return to work with a negative test after seven days rather than 10, noting even “that isolation time can be cut further if there are staffing shortages.” New York went even further on Friday, announcing vaccinated essential workers can return to work five days after a positive COVID-19 test provided they are asymptomatic.