Coronavirus daily news updates, March 12: What to know today about COVID-19 in the Seattle area, Washington state and the world

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has directed his administration to order another 100 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine, growing a likely U.S. surplus of doses later this year while much of the rest of the world struggles with deep shortages.

Even before Wednesday’s order, the U.S. was to have enough approved vaccine delivered by mid-May to cover every adult and enough for 400 million people total by the end of July. Enough doses to cover 200 million more people are on order should vaccines from AstraZeneca and Novavax receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The new J&J doses, which would cover another 100 million people, are expected to be delivered in the latter half of the year.

White House aides said Biden’s first priority is ensuring that Americans are vaccinated before considering distributing doses elsewhere.

Biden’s announcement comes as the White House has rebuffed requests from U.S. allies, including Mexico, Canada and the European Union, for vaccine doses produced in the United States, where months of production runs have produced vaccine solely for use in the country.

PORTLAND — Oregon made national headlines when it placed teachers ahead of its oldest residents in the line for a scarce supply of COVID-19 vaccine and then again when a committee advising the governor on vaccine equity flirted with making race a determinant for when a person could get inoculated.

Now, three months into the vaccine rollout, the state has begun a pilot program that allows some federally qualified health centers to offer shots to anyone they serve, even if that patient does not fall into any currently eligible categories.

These centers must still prioritize patients who are currently eligible under Oregon rules, but the pilot program gives health care providers for the most at-risk populations more latitude and resolves a conflict between federal and state priorities on vaccine equity.

President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, signed on Thursday, includes the largest relief package for families in recent U.S. history. After an agonizing year of school and child-care closures, the aid offers many parents and children the help they have been waiting for.

Single parents making less than $75,000 and couples making less than $150,000 will receive a monthly tax credit of $300 per month for every child under 6 and $250 for every child 6 and over — with some level of support extending to families who earn up to $400,000. Experts say the bill could slash child poverty by almost 50%.

Unlike previous welfare programs, parents will receive the child tax credit regardless of their employment status. Especially after a year in which millions of American parents have lost their jobs, or have had to leave the workforce to care for kids who are suddenly at home, the sweeping nature of the tax credit is “revolutionary,” said Katherine Goldstein, journalist and creator of “The Double Shift,” a podcast about women and work. Working parents, and especially working mothers, can use this money to get their careers back on track.

“It’s basically the first time that the federal government is saying to parents, ‘You’re not totally on your own,’ ” Goldstein said. “That is a huge shift in the American mentality.”

JUNEAU, Alaska — Alaska state Sen. Lora Reinbold was allowed to participate in a floor session Friday after special accommodations were made for the Republican who legislative leaders say has refused to comply with protocols meant to guard against the spread of COVID-19 at the Capitol.

Before the session started, the chamber doors were closed, which is unusual, and the sergeant at arms stood in front. When Reinbold approached, holding her phone to record the interaction, she was directed to a visitors’ gallery, where she sat alone. Roll, typically called with lawmakers pressing buttons at their desks, was called orally.

Two days earlier, senators voted to allow leadership to restrict access by Reinbold to the Capitol until she complies with rules aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus. Reinbold continued Friday to wear the type of clear face shield she has worn since the session started in mid-January, which leaders say does not comply with the rules.

She also said she was working from her Capitol office and showed up before the start of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which she chairs, before turning the gavel over to her vice chair and participating by video conference.

SAN FRANCISCO — Most of California’s 40 million residents will be able to enjoy limited indoor activities such as dining inside or watching a movie at a theater by mid-week as coronavirus case rates continue to stay low, state officials said Friday.

Officials said that 13 counties, including Los Angeles, would be able to open restaurants, gyms and museums at limited capacity on Sunday, the result of the state hitting a 2 million equity metric aimed at getting more vaccines into low-income communities. Another 13 counties are expected to reopen Wednesday under a different metric.

Also next week, the state expands eligibility for the still-scarce vaccine.

Read the full story here.

Joyce Smith, who stocks the shelves at a BJ’s Wholesale outlet in Virginia, ignored a Jan. 20 text from management that store employees qualified as essential workers and could register for the coronavirus vaccine.

After working for nearly a year without getting sick, Smith was more afraid of the vaccine’s potential side effects than the virus. Two weeks later, her temperature rose to 103, her head pounded, and she tested positive.

"‘Oh my God, am I going to make it to 60?’ ” Smith, 59, recalled asking herself as she lay in bed, gasping for air. She also feared she had infected her husband, who had just been hospitalized after suffering a heart attack.

From its beginning, the coronavirus has been a terrifying game of chance, requiring moment-to-moment calculations about whether the most mundane decision — entering an elevator, perhaps, or using a public restroom — is worth risking one’s life.

For those infected in recent weeks, as vaccinations were becoming available and experts began talking of an impending return to normalcy, the bad timing is the pandemic’s latest cruel twist.

Amazon.com has been ordered to close a facility outside Toronto for two weeks as public health officials worry about rising COVID-19 cases inside the complex.

While the rate of COVID-19 infection has been falling in the Peel region in the past few weeks, the rate inside the Brampton, Ontario, fulfillment center “has been increasing significantly,” the local health authority said Friday in a statement. Every employee at the site may have experienced “high-risk exposure,” the agency said.

“This Amazon facility is in a vulnerable community and employs thousands of people,” Lawrence C. Loh, medical officer of health for the Peel region, said in the statement. “This was a difficult decision but a necessary one to stop further spread both in the facility and across our community.”

Amazon disagreed with the health authority’s conclusions. “We just completed our most recent round of mandatory testing with less than a 1% positivity rate, and there appears to be little risk of spread within our facility,” a company spokesperson said in an email. “We do not believe the data supports this closure and we will appeal this decision.”

The United States, India, Japan and Australia pledged Friday to jointly manufacture and distribute up to 1 billion doses of coronavirus vaccine before the end of next year, as the Biden administration comes under increased pressure to provide more vaccine help to poorer nations.

The vaccine would be supplied to Southeast Asian nations and potentially elsewhere as act of charity that represents a workaround for President Joe Biden, who has said he cannot yet divert any U.S. supply despite a projected surplus, given that many Americans are still urgently awaiting their immunizations.

The announcement, which came out of the first summit among leaders of the four democracies informally called “the Quad,” also hints at the Biden administration’s larger aim of linking like-minded governments to counter Chinese expansionism, including using pandemic aid as a springboard.

“At this moment, it’s a purpose that I think we all are concerned about,” Biden said as he welcomed the three leaders via video call. “A free and open Indo-Pacific is essential to each of our futures, our countries.”

They leaders also pledged to meet in person by the end of the year.

The state Department of Health (DOH) reported 636 new coronavirus cases and 16 new deaths on Friday.

The update brings the state's totals to 348,516 cases and 5,123 deaths, meaning that 1.5% of people diagnosed in Washington have died, according to the DOH. The data is as of 11:59 p.m. Thursday.

In addition, 19,788 people have been hospitalized in the state due to the virus — 41 new hospitalizations. In King County, the state's most populous, state health officials have confirmed a total of 86,002 COVID-19 diagnoses and 1,439 deaths.

Since vaccinations began in mid-December, the state and health care providers have administered 2,267,958 doses and 10.98% of Washingtonians have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to vaccination data, which the state updates on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Providers are currently giving an average of about 44,610 vaccine shots per day.

The DOH says its daily case reports may also include duplicate test results, results assigned to the wrong county, results that are reported for today but are actually from a previous day, occasional false positive tests and other data discrepancies. Because of this, the previous day’s total number of cases plus the number of new daily cases does not add up to the new day’s total number of cases. State health officials recommend reviewing the dashboard's epidemiologic curves tab for the most accurate representation of the state's COVID-19 spread.

President Joe Biden’s promise that all of the nation’s 255 million adults will be eligible for coronavirus vaccines by May 1 means the U.S. needs to move fast.

Within the next seven weeks, the federal government must deliver doses to hundreds of new vaccination sites and recruit a new wave of health care workers to administer the shots.

Simply distributing the vaccines will not be enough, though. The government also aims to simplify the often-frustrating sign-up process and bring shots to communities that are having the hardest time getting vaccinated.

Here’s how public health officials intend to meet the president’s deadline and the challenges that lie ahead.

Read the story here.

As a growing list of countries halts administration of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine amid as-yet-unsubstantiated concerns about fatal blood clots, the World Health Organization has offered assurances that the vaccine’s safety is being investigated and that there is no cause for alarm.

“More than 335 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally so far, and no deaths have been found to have been caused by COVID-19 vaccines,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing Friday in Geneva.

“We should continue immunization until we have clarified the causal relationship,” said Mariangela Simao, WHO’s assistant director general, adding that regulators are investigating and that the body is expected to release a statement on the matter by the middle of next week.

Read the story here.

Deepa Bhojwani recalled feeling lucky her 2-year-old cancer patient with COVID-19 bounced back quickly after being seen for a fever in the emergency department at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. But in the months that followed, an unnerving thing happened.

The toddler’s condition flip-flopped from sick to well to sick again and so on, resulting in six hospitalizations over 196 days — and each time, the boy was positive again for the coronavirus.

Bhojwani, a leukemia specialist, wondered whether the lab results might be a mistake or — terrifyingly — a rare case of reinfection. But when the medical team dived deeper, it found evidence the original virus had been inside the boy all along, evolving into more efficient forms.

The child’s case report, shared online last week, is one of about 15 similar ones involving immunocompromised patients and recently published in medical journals or preprint servers that have become an important puzzle piece for researchers seeking to understand the origins of the coronavirus variants taking over the world. Those reports lend support to an intriguing theory that some individuals with weakened immune systems due to cancer, HIV or other illnesses may act as incubators for new mutations.

Read the story here.

PARIS (AP) — By the time his parents rushed him to the hospital, 11-year-old Pablo was barely eating and had stopped drinking entirely. Weakened by months of self-privation, his heart had slowed to a crawl and his kidneys were faltering. Medics injected him with fluids and fed him through a tube — first steps toward stitching together yet another child coming apart amid the tumult of the coronavirus crisis.

For doctors who treat them, the pandemic’s impact on the mental health of children is increasingly alarming. The Paris pediatric hospital caring for Pablo has seen a doubling in the number of children and young teenagers requiring treatment after attempted suicides since September.

Doctors elsewhere report similar surges, with children — some as young as 8 — deliberately running into traffic, overdosing on pills and otherwise self-harming. In Japan, child and adolescent suicides hit record levels in 2020, according to the Education Ministry.

“The levels of stress among children are truly massive,”Dr. Richard Delorme, who heads the psychiatric unit treating Pablo at the giant Robert Debré pediatric hospital, the busiest in France. “The crisis affects all of us, from age 2 to 99.”

Read the story here.

Brazil’s federal government said Friday it has reached a deal to purchase 10 million doses of the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19, though the shot is yet to be approved by the South American nation’s health agency.

Brazil’s government expects to receive 400,000 shots in April, 2 million in May and another 7.6 million by June.

More than 270,000 people have died of the disease in Brazil, with authorities expecting grim weeks ahead. Only 5.5% of Brazilians have been vaccinated, and the country is experiencing a deadly second wave of COVID-19 with more than 2,000 deaths in each of the last two days.

Read the story here.

Sound Transit will make getting a COVID-19 shot simpler beginning Saturday, by offering free fare to all patients, workers or volunteers traveling to or from vaccination clinics.

The offer is inspired by Saturday's clinic opening at Lumen Field, where light-rail, commuter trains and bus lines converge. The site is designed to serve 22,000 people per day this spring, when more doses reach Washington state. Besides the free transit, free garage parking is available.

The Rainier Beach vaccination hub at Atlantic City Boat Launch, and some pharmacies, are also within walking distance of light-rail stations or an ST Express bus.

Travelers should be ready to flash an appointment notice if asked, but fare-enforcement officers are instructed to accept a passenger's word, said transit spokesman John Gallagher. Fare-evasion citations are temporarily suspended anyway, during this phase of the pandemic.

King County Metro Transit, which reinstated fares countywide Oct. 1 without enforcement, isn't making changes at this time.

Community Transit hasn't offered free bus rides, but "it's possible that could change, as more mass-vaccination sites become available that are transit friendly," said spokesman Martin Munguia. For now, Snohomish County's largest sites are drive-ups including Arlington Airport and the Evergreen State Fairgrounds in Monroe. However, Community Transit provides free-fare vaccination trips to its dial-a-ride paratransit customers, and a free shuttle from a downtown Everett parking lot on Wall Street to the Angel of the Winds Arena vaccination site nearby, he said.

The road to a COVID-19 shot often leads through a maze of scheduling systems: Some vaccine seekers spend days or weeks trying to book online appointments. Those who get a coveted slot can still be stymied by pages of forms or websites that slow to a crawl and crash.

The technological obstacles are familiar to L. Shapley Bassen, a 74-year-old retired English teacher and editor in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. She lost track of the hours she spent making phone calls and navigating websites to get appointments for herself and her 75-year-old husband, Michael.

“A lot of us don’t sleep at night worrying about whether or not we’ll be able to get in,” Bassen said.

Technological shortcomings across the nation’s fragmented public health system have frustrated millions of Americans trying to get shots and left officials without a full picture of who has been vaccinated.

The White House promised improvements, pledging to establish a new website and an 800-number by May 1 to help people find nearby locations with vaccines.

Read the story here.

U.S. deaths from COVID-19 are falling again as the nation continues to recover from the devastating winter surge, a trend that experts are cautiously hopeful will accelerate as more vulnerable people are vaccinated.

While new coronavirus infections and hospitalizations have plummeted, the decline in deaths from a January peak of about 4,500 hasn’t been quite as steep. But, now, after weeks of hovering around 2,000 daily deaths, that figure has dropped to about 1,400 U.S. lives lost each day to coronavirus.

Experts worry that a pandemic-weary public, though, will let down its guard too soon. And they’re monitoring the spread of worrisome new versions of the virus.

Read the story here.

OLYMPIA — In an effort to get students back in classrooms by late April, Gov. Jay Inslee is set to issue an emergency proclamation that essentially requires Washington’s K-12 school districts to offer students at least some opportunity for in-person learning.

Friday’s announcement of a proclamation to be issued next week comes as Inslee has expressed increasing frustration that some of Washington’s schools remain online only. That includes the state’s largest district — Seattle Public Schools— where the local union voted earlier this month to continue teaching most students online only.

Under Inslee’s pending order, K-6 students around the state must be allowed an opportunity for what’s known as hybrid instruction — a mix of remote and in-person teaching — by April 5.

Then, by April 19, all other students must be given an opportunity to have hybrid instruction.

By that day, school districts are required to hold at least 30% of their weekly average instructional hours as in-person, on-campus instruction for all K-12 students.

Read the story here.

With vaccination against COVID-19 in full swing, social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter say they’ve stepped up their fight against misinformation that aims to undermine trust in the vaccines. But problems abound.

For years, the same platforms have allowed anti-vaccination propaganda to flourish, making it difficult to stamp out such sentiments now. And their efforts to weed out other types of COVID-19 misinformation — often with fact-checks, informational labels and other restrained measures, has been woefully slow.

Twitter, for instance, announced this month that it will remove dangerous falsehoods about vaccines, much the same way it’s done for other COVID-related conspiracy theories and misinformation. But since April 2020, it has removed a grand total of 8,400 tweets spreading COVID-related misinformation — a tiny fraction of the avalanche of pandemic-related falsehoods tweeted out daily by popular users with millions of followers, critics say.

Read the story here.

India registered its worst single-day increase in coronavirus cases since late December as the western state of Maharashtra battles a resurgence.

India’s health ministry on Friday reported 23,285 new cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours. It’s the highest daily rise since Dec. 24, according to government data.

India has so far reported more than 11.3 million cases of coronavirus infection, the world’s second-highest total after the United States. The cases had been falling steadily since a peak in late September, but experts say increased public gatherings and laxity toward public health guidance is leading to the latest surge.

Read the story here.

The World Health Organization granted an emergency use listing Friday for the coronavirus vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson, meaning the one-dose shot can now theoretically be used as part of the international COVAX effort to distribute vaccines globally, including to poor countries without any supplies.

In a statement, the U.N. health agency said “the ample data from large clinical trials” shows the J&J vaccine is effective in adult populations. The emergency use listing comes a day after the European Medicines Agency recommended the shot be given the green light across the 27-country European Union.

A massive study that spanned three continents found the J&J vaccine was 85% effective in protecting against severe illness, hospitalizations and death. That protection remained strong even in countries like South Africa where variants have been identified that appear to be less susceptible to other licensed vaccines.

Read the story here.

At first, many schools announced it would last only a couple weeks. A year later, the unplanned experiment with distance learning continues for thousands of students who have yet to set foot back in classrooms.

Comfortable homes and private tutors have made it easier for those with access. Expectations are higher at some schools than others. And growing numbers of students are being offered in-person instruction at least part time.

But students of all backgrounds have faced struggles with technology, the distractions of home life, and social isolation. The Associated Press followed four students on a typical day to find out how they’re coping a year into the coronavirus pandemic.

Read the story here.

Millions of coronavirus vaccine doses are in cold storage in the U.S. that can’t be injected in the states because they are not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but the Biden administration is not yet allowing them to be sent overseas, where American allies are struggling to get enough doses for vulnerable populations.

The two-dose vaccine from AstraZeneca has received emergency approval from the European Union and World Health Organization, but not in the U.S.

Now U.S. partners are prodding President Joe Biden to release the supply, noting that the administration has lined up enough doses of the three already-approved vaccines to cover every American adult by the end of May and the entire U.S. population by the end of July.

Read the story here.

Japan will not take part in China’s offer — accepted by the International Olympic Committee — to provide vaccines for “participants” in the postponed Tokyo Games and next year’s Beijing Winter Games.

Olympic Minister Tamayo Marukawa said Friday that Japan had not been consulted by the IOC about the Chinese vaccines, and that Japanese athletes would not take them. She said the vaccines have not been approved for use in Japan.

“We have been taking comprehensive anti-infectious disease measures for the Tokyo Games in order to allow participation without vaccinations,” Marukawa said. “There is no change to our principle of not making vaccinations a prerequisite.”

The IOC initially said it would not require athletes to get vaccines, but only encourage it. The deal with China puts more emphasis on getting vaccines to young, healthy athletes and others.

Read the story here.

At 5:37 p.m. on March 11, 2020, a game between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Utah Jazz was postponed after Jazz center Rudy Gobert became the first NBA player to test positive for COVID-19.

Nearly three hours later, and 1,100 miles away, Washington State defeated Colorado 82-68 in the opening round of the Pac-12 men’s basketball tournament at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

It was the final college basketball game of the 2019-20 season — though WSU coach Kyle Smith didn’t know it at the time.

Read the story here.

Officials in several European countries pushed back Friday against decisions by others to pause use of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine following sporadic reports of blood clots, despite a lack of evidence the shot was responsible.

German Health Minister Jens Spahn said that while the country takes reports of possible harmful effects from vaccines “very, very seriously,” both the European Medicines Agency and Germany’s own vaccine oversight body have said they have no evidence of an increase in dangerous blood clots in connection with the shots.

Denmark was the first of several to temporarily halt use of the AstraZeneca vaccine Thursday after reports of blood clots in some people. The Nordic nation’s health authority said the decision was “based on a precautionary principle” and that one person who developed a blood clot after vaccination had died.

Read the story here.

Hungary has emerged as a European Union leader in COVID-19 vaccinations thanks to a strategy that sought shots from Russia and China as well as from inside the bloc, spurring increasing trust in jabs from eastern nations.

But that strategy is up against a skyrocketing rise in new COVID-19 cases and deaths blamed on a more infectious virus variant first found in Britain that is putting an unprecedented strain on Hungary’s health care system. A new round of lockdown measures took effect Monday to curb the surge, which saw deaths averaging around 150 per day and hospitalizations and new cases breaking records set during the previous peak in December.

As of Friday, 11.9% of Hungary’s adult population had received at least one dose of a vaccine. That is the second-highest rate of vaccination in the 27-member EU after the small island nation of Malta and substantially above the EU average of 7%. With five vaccines approved for use in Hungary, more than in any other EU nation, more than 1.2 million Hungarians have received a jab in the country of fewer than 10 million, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Read the story here.

A year ago, Elvia Banuelos’ life was looking up. The 39-year-old mother of two young children said she felt confident about a new management-level job with the U.S. Census Bureau — she would earn money to supplement the child support she receives to keep her children healthy, happy and in day care.

But when the coronavirus was declared a global pandemic last March, forcing hundreds of millions of people into strict lockdown, Banuelos’ outlook changed. The new job fell through, the child support payments stopped because of a job loss and she became a stay-at-home mom when day cares shuttered.

Millions of Americans have experienced a devastating toll during the yearlong coronavirus pandemic, from lost loved ones to lost jobs. Those losses haven’t hit all Americans equally, with communities of color hit especially hard by both the virus and the economic fallout.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that compared with white Americans, Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to have experienced job and other income losses during the pandemic, and those who have lost income are more likely to have found themselves in deep financial holes.

Read the story here.

All American adults will be eligible for vaccines by May 1, putting us on track to return to a semblance of normal life by July 4, President Joe Biden said yesterday. He laid out concrete steps to make that happen after "a year filled with the loss of life, and the loss of living." Here are three key take-aways from his speech, and the exaggerations that sent fact-checkers scurrying.

Restaurants will be able to serve more customers, fans can go to the Mariners' opener, and beloved spaces at state parks will reopen as COVID-19 restrictions loosen, Gov. Jay Inslee announced yesterday. Here's what else you can and can't do when the third phase of reopening begins soon.

Fans' return to Seattle sports arenas is a cause for joy and great solace, columnist Larry Stone writes exactly a year after the sports world slammed to a halt. Members of five local teams are remembering that jarring time, with seasons lost and a few new perspectives gained. 

Another worrisome coronavirus variant has arrived in King County, the state's secretary of health says. It's more contagious and could evade antibodies generated by vaccines.

As vaccinations rise, we're answering questions about how daily life is transforming for vaccinated people and what they can do under new guidelines.

Side effects are flattening some vaccine recipients, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Here's what to expect, why, and whether you should take anything to ease the effects.

The U.S. is sitting on tens of millions of vaccines made by AstraZeneca while other countries beg for access. Our nation may never need the doses.

What questions do you have about coronavirus vaccines? Join Seattle Times journalists and Dr. Helen Chu, a UW infectious disease expert, for a free online event Monday. They'll discuss the latest on vaccine distribution and take your questions. Register here.