Coronavirus daily news updates, May 7: What to know today about COVID-19 in the Seattle area, Washington state and the world

Willie Nelson is cancelling an upcoming performance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage festival and postponing other shows after a positive case of the coronavirus in his band.

The 89-year-old musician posted on his band’s website on Friday that “due to a positive Covid case in the Willie Nelson Family Band” two upcoming shows scheduled to happen May 6 and May 7 would be postponed and that Nelson’s Sunday performance at Jazz Fest would be cancelled.

Nelson was slated to close the Gentilly Stage — the same stage where his son Lukas Nelson is performing earlier in the day with his band the Promise of the Real. No replacement for the elder Nelson has yet been announced.

The news comes after Melissa Etheridge announced Thursday that she would not be able to perform Saturday at Jazz Fest due to “COVID hitting my crew.” Mavis Staples will perform during that time period instead.

“Oh my heart hurts not to be there. Mavis will be amazing, I know. I am hoping I can be asked back again. Dave and crew are healing. Thank you for all the well wishes. COVID heartbreak,” tweeted Etheridge after news that Staples would appear on Saturday was announced.

The seven-day festival started on Friday, April 29, and ends Sunday, May 8.

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We’re still not done with omicron.

As the variant’s sublineages continue to spread, the risk of testing positive and potentially suffering long-term consequences continues.

Nearly 2 1/2 years into the pandemic, unvaccinated people of all age groups remain at higher risk of testing positive, being hospitalized and dying from COVID-19 than do those who have been vaccinated.

Unvaccinated Washington residents ages 65 and older are 3.4 times more likely to be hospitalized and 4.6 times more likely to die of COVID-19 compared to their peers with two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.

But as the virus mutates, it is becoming more evasive of vaccine protection. That doesn’t mean we should just quit precautions, public health experts say.

“I think the risk is significant in that a lot of us are going to get exposed to it and get it over time, but I don’t look at that as a reason to be complacent about it,” said Mark Springer, an epidemiologist at the Spokane Regional Health District.

Public health officials continue to recommend booster doses to offer the best protection.

About 58% of eligible Washington residents 12 and older have received a booster dose.

In Washington, 16 children and teens have died from COVID-19 since January 2021. When the omicron variant surged in the state, it led to high case counts in schools and more intense impacts on kids, even though it typically sends fewer people to the hospital overall.

Omicron can cause long COVID, and researchers are beginning to see patients with symptoms that linger far after a positive test result.

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The families streaming in to see “The Lion King” were told to have their tickets out and their masks on, but there was no mention of vaccine cards. And the COVID-19 safety officers in neon yellow vests who used to patrol outside “Six” were gone.

Most Broadway theaters stopped checking the vaccination status of their patrons this week for the first time since they began to reopen this past summer.

The industry hopes that doing away with vaccine checks will make theatergoing more attractive, and that the remaining mask mandate will help keep audiences safe as cases have risen.

While some patrons welcomed the change, others said they felt uneasy about going into crowded theaters without the assurance that their seatmates were vaccinated, and several nonprofit Broadway theaters continue to require proof of vaccination.

“I just don’t feel as safe as I have the past several months,” said Lauren Broyles, 44, an executive assistant from Hershey, Pennsylvania, who visited New York to see shows several times during the winter but said she had stopped planning a summer theater trip after reading that Broadway dropped its vaccine mandate.

The changes to safety protocols come as Broadway yearns for a profitable spring. More than a dozen shows opened last month, a major, risky bet for a theater industry trying to bounce back from a rough winter in which the virus forced a number of shows to cancel performances during the crucial holiday period and others to close prematurely.

Broadway theater owners and operators were among the first to require customers to show proof of vaccines and to wear masks, acting together to come up with a common set of protocols even before the city adopted similar vaccine requirements for many indoor activities. Now there is no longer a uniform policy.

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Mary Francis had no qualms about being a poster child for COVID-19 vaccinations on the Navajo Nation, once a virus hot spot. The Navajo woman’s face and words grace a digital flyer asking people on the Native American reservation to get vaccinated “to protect the shidine’e (my people).”

“I was happy to put the information out there and just building that awareness and in having folks feel comfortable enough, or curious enough, to read the material,” said Francis, who lives in Page, near the Utah border, and manages care packages and vaccine drives for a Navajo and Hopi relief fund.

In a pandemic that has seen sharp divides between urban and rural vaccination rates nationwide, Arizona is the only state where rural vaccine rates outpaced more populated counties, according to a recent report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public health experts believe the trend was mainly fueled by a group that lost a disproportionate number of lives to COVID-19: Native Americans.

Tribal communities were left more vulnerable to the virus because of underlying health issues like diabetes and heart disease, as well as multiple generations sharing a home. Cases and deaths piled on despite curfews, weekend lockdowns, mask mandates and business shutdowns. By April 2020, the Navajo Nation — which encompasses parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — declared it had been hit harder by the coronavirus than any other tribe.

The devastating loss, particularly of elders, drove a push for vaccinations as an act of selflessness. Holly Van Lew, co-leader of a federal Indian Health Service taskforce rolling out vaccines nationwide, credits Navajo Nation officials with constantly emphasizing that message.

“It really comes from a different perspective. Instead of ‘You should get your COVID-19 vaccines too,’ (it’s) ‘We should all as community members protect each other,’” said Lew, a clinical pharmacist at the Phoenix Indian Medical Center.

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One million dead: The U.S. death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic will hit that unfathomable number this week, and yet there is a far larger number that reflects the true impact this virus has had on Americans over the past two years. That number is 9 million – the number of Americans who have lost spouses, parents, grandparents, siblings and children to COVID.

Sociologists at Penn State and the University of Southern California came up with a “bereavement multiplier,” a way to calculate how many close relatives each COVIDdeath leaves behind and bereft. The answer, on average, is nine – not including extended family or close friends, longtime co-workers or next-door neighbors, many of whom, the study said, are deeply affected, too.

COVID quickly became the third-biggest killer of Americans, behind only heart disease and cancer, according to federal statistics for 2020. One million is how many people live in San Jose, Calif., or Austin, Tex., or in Montgomery County, Md., or Westchester County, N.Y. It’s more people than live in the six smallest states or D.C., about as many as live in Delaware or Rhode Island.

In all likelihood, the death toll is significantly higher than the official 1 million, the National Center for Health Statistics reports, noting that some Americans whose death certificates list heart attacks or hypertensive disease likely had undiagnosed coronavirus infections.

Americans have died of COVID at a higher rate than in any other major industrialized country, and life expectancy for Americans has fallen over the past two years at the sharpest rate since the double whammy of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic.

The 1 million dead may seem like a random group, yet they fall into clear patterns: Those killed by COVID were mostly old; disproportionately low income, Black or Hispanic; and overwhelmingly unvaccinated. People who did not get the shot were 53.2 times more likely to die than fully vaccinated and boosted people.

Yet in those concentric circles of grief around the 1 million are people of every age, every income level and every background, vaccinated and not. In the ripples that bubble outward from each death, the tensions and divisions of American society are at play. COVID honors no walls.

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Just 10 miles from the Rio Grande, Mike Helle’s farm is so short of immigrant workers that he’s replaced 450 acres of labor-intensive leafy greens with crops that can be harvested by machinery.

In Houston, Al Flores increased the price of his BBQ restaurant’s brisket plate because the cost of the cut doubled due to meatpacking plants’ inability to fully staff immigrant-heavy production lines. In the Dallas area, Joshua Correa raised prices on the homes his company builds by $150,000 to cover increased costs stemming partly from a lack of immigrant labor.

After immigration to the United States tapered off during the Trump administration — then ground to a near complete halt for 18 months during the coronavirus pandemic — the country is waking up to a labor shortage partly fueled by that slowdown.

The U.S. has, by some estimates, 2 million fewer immigrants than it would have if the pace had stayed the same, helping power a desperate scramble for workers in many sectors, from meatpacking to homebuilding, that is also contributing to supply shortages and price increases.

“These 2 million missing immigrants are part of the reason we have a labor shortage,” said Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California at Davis, who calculated the shortfall. “In the short run, we are going to adjust to these shortages in the labor market through an increase in wages and in prices.”

The labor issues are among several contributors to the highest inflation in 40 years in the United States — from supply chains mangled by the pandemic to a surge in energy and commodity prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Steve Camarota, a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, believes a spike in illegal immigration under President Joe Biden will make up whatever shortfall lingers from the pandemic. He also contends wage increases in low-paying sectors like agriculture are minor contributors to inflation.

“I don’t think wages going up is bad for the poor, and I think mathematically it is not possible to drive down inflation by limiting wages at the bottom,” Camarota told The Associated Press.

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For diners stopping in at Marjorie, a restaurant on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, the full tables and busy staff might give the impression that the pandemic is truly, finally over.

They can eat and drink like before times and “walk away thinking, ‘well, they made it … everything is back to normal,'” says owner Donna Moodie.

But for Moodie, everything is most assuredly not back to normal.

Her menu is smaller now, in part because two years of supply chain chaos and price inflation mean some items were too costly to serve — among them, Moodie’s signature bestseller, crabcakes.

She also has just eight employees, half the number she had before the pandemic, thanks to a labor shortage that is still wreaking havoc on restaurants across the region. That’s limiting how much business Moodie and other restaurants can do, and thus how fast they can recover.

Moodie expects things to improve somewhat as the pandemic fades. But after two years of false starts and setbacks, she no longer hopes to get back the life she had before COVID. “The future we’re looking at,” says Moodie, pausing. “It’s a different model.”

On the surface, the Seattle area’s restaurant scene is roaring back to its pre-pandemic self. Consumer spending at restaurants has nearly recovered. Many of the old hot spots are packed again on weekends. Masks, social distancing and other public health measures are in decline — for now, at least.

Yet COVID’s effects are still visible everywhere. Once-exotic labor-saving technologies, such as QR code ordering, have become everyday and routine.

But restaurants are also still grappling with many of COVID’s less positive consequences.

In others words, diners should be prepared for restaurant experiences that may be quite a bit different from what they had before.

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Chicago health officials announced Friday that indoor masking is once again “strongly recommended” — but not required — in the city as the risk of contracting COVID-19 in Cook County has increased.

Chicago’s public health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady made the advisory after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deemed Cook County is now in the “medium” risk level for community transmission. The metrics are based on a combination of new cases and hospitalizations, but the medium category is automatically reached if weekly cases surpass 200 positive tests per 100,000 residents.

Arwady stressed the city is not near adding back mandates on indoor masking or proof-of-vaccination, though Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Transit Authority are “encouraging” indoor masking.

“Chicago moving into the medium level does not mean a citywide mask mandate, restrictions on public gatherings, or reinstatement of vaccination requirements at this time,” Arwady said in a statement. “With the way the current COVID variants are behaving, those are measures we would consider if we reached the high COVID-19 community level — which we aren’t close to reaching in Chicago right now.”

In Chicago Public Schools, meanwhile, employees and parents received a letter Friday from CPS CEO Pedro Martinez who said the district will “continue strongly encouraging the use of masks in our schools,” especially among unvaccinated students, but it will not restore the mask mandate it dropped in March. Martinez said CPS will follow the recommendations of the Chicago Department of Public Health.

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SHENZHEN, China – On a sweltering afternoon in this southern Chinese city, a young woman sat at a stand of giveaways aimed at convincing some of the city’s remaining unvaccinated residents to get their shots.

“You can get a bag of rice, cooking oil, or two bottles of shampoo,” she said, offering the tempting choice to passersby.

There are few takers because almost all of the city’s working-age residents have been vaccinated, but across the country and in Shenzhen, it is the elderly who are the main holdouts. Unlike most of China’s coronavirus prevention measures, vaccination is not mandatory, and low uptake among the country’s most vulnerable groups is a major reason Communist Party leaders feel compelled to persist with a grueling “zero covid” approach.

As the costs of lockdown in China have mounted, the need to vaccinate the entire population has become paramount. Shanghai has suffered staggeringly over the past month, with residents trapped by a strict lockdown unable to reach hospitals and suffering psychological breakdowns after weeks-long home confinement with an unknown end date. Supply chains worldwide have been upended.

Despite the mounting criticism, China’s top leaders declared on Thursday that there would be no let up on the zero-covid policy, and that they would fight any attempts to question the approach. The committee, led by President Xi Jinping, said relaxation of controls now would lead to “massive numbers of infections” and deaths.

They only need to look next door to Hong Kong, where the omicron outbreak this year tore through the high numbers of unvaccinated elderly people and resulted in one of the highest fatality rates in the world.

The head epidemiologist of the national covid response team, Liang Wannian, said last week that vaccination rates among the elderly and children were not high enough, and “if we choose the so-called policy of coexisting with the virus, medical resources would be very likely be overwhelmed.”

But outside the flare-up zones, it’s easy to see why older residents might be reluctant to get vaccinated. In places like Shenzhen, city life bustles as normal, except that pedestrians have to show proof of a negative coronavirus test within the past 72 hours to enter any public spaces.

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Rutgers researchers made a startling discovery when the pandemic curtailed routine medical visits: Going virtual to test cutting-edge therapies reached more diverse patients.

Clinical trials test the effectiveness and safety of new medications or devices. Yet the vast majority of such studies do not enroll participants that represent America. Black patients account for, on average, just 5% of clinical trial participants nationally, according to the American Association of Medical Colleges.

Rutgers’ remote experiment with COVID-19 treatments broke down logistical barriers by allowing people to self-monitor symptoms and check in through online portals. Trials typically require participants to make regular trips to medical offices for blood draws and check-ins. These visits can take hours in the middle of a workday, and be inaccessible to people who can’t take time off work, or lack transportation or child care.

The pandemic has proven why change is necessary — Moderna recast its vaccine trials after the initial participant pool was lacking in Black and Latino participants. Philadelphia research hubs now are cutting a path to more equitable clinical trials to address the deep racial disparities in the U.S. health-care system. Rutgers, the University of Pennsylvania, and Fox Chase Cancer Center are among the institutions tackling other entrenched challenges involved, including racism, distrust of medicine, and inadequate community connections.

“The landscape for clinical trials research and participation in clinical trials is dramatically different than it was pre-COVID,” said Reynold Panettieri, director of the Rutgers Institute for Translational Medicine and Science.

Research has found that social determinants of health, such as racism, stress, food insecurity and neighborhood safety, are the leading reasons why people of color experience more severe illness compared with white people. Genetics also can affect how people respond to certain cancer treatments.

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China’s zero-COVID strategy is starting to derail another major item on the government’s agenda: economic stability.

In the last month, sweeping lockdowns across the country have crimped manufacturing. Stay-at-home orders have stunted consumer spending. The closures are also compounding supply chain issues that have boosted inflation and weighed on global growth.

“No part of China’s economy is untouched by the tightening of zero-COVID policies,” Craig Botham, chief China economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a research report to clients this week.

The costs of prioritizing the pandemic over all else are creating a dilemma for President Xi Jinping as he prepares to assume a third term later this year.

China’s initial success in stopping the spread of COVID-19 while the West floundered became validation for some of the strictest virus control policies in the world. But it’s unclear how long the country’s leaders can maintain those policies without sacrificing the economic growth that has long been the bedrock of their rule.

The 5.5% gross domestic product growth target that China set in March is looking more elusive the longer that lockdowns go on.

Compared with the early days of the pandemic, China is now facing a more contagious variant as well as dwindling public patience for harsh restrictions and growing criticism from the normally muted business community.

“The system’s focus on zero-COVID leads to many decision makers being in a kind of self-destruction mode,” Joerg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, recently told the financial publication the Market NZZ. “They don’t care about the economy in the short term.”

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On Thursday, California lawmakers voted unanimously, 7-0, to move a bill that would allow kids to get COVID-19 and other FDA-approved vaccines without permission from their parents or guardians, despite vocal opposition from people hesitant about safety of the vaccine and kids’ rights to choose.

In January, Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced Senate Bill 866, the Teens Choose Vaccines Act, to allow young people ages 12 to 17 to bypass their parents’ vaccine hesitancy or busy schedules, and give them more autonomy over their bodies.

“Teens should be able to protect their own health with vaccines – whether against COVID, flu, measles or polio – even if their parents refuse or can’t take them to get the shot,” Wiener said on Twitter on Thursday. “Our legislation to allow teens to get vaccinated on their own just passed a key committee.”

Most opponents of the bill are adamant the vaccine causes injuries, and say it’s not safe for kids to make their own decisions about the COVID vaccine in particular.

Hundreds of people — including parents — shared serious concerns and direct attacks against state lawmakers for considering passage of the bill during public comment at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday. Many said Wiener and state leaders want to strip away the rights of parents because the bill allows kids to make decisions over their bodies when they’re not of legal age. They also said the bill promotes a vaccine that causes bodily harm.

Proponents of SB 866 have argued that teens in this state can access HPV vaccine, reproductive health, abortions, birth control and other health services without consent from a parent or guardian, and should have the right to decide whether to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

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For the first time, the U.S. came close to providing health care for all during the coronavirus pandemic — but for just one condition, COVID-19.

Now, things are reverting to the way they were as federal money for COVID care of the uninsured dries up, creating a potential barrier to timely access.

But the virus is not contained, even if it’s better controlled. And safety-net hospitals and clinics are seeing sharply higher costs for salaries and other basic operating expenses. They fear they won’t be prepared if there’s another surge and no backstop.

“We haven’t turned anybody away yet,” said Dr. Mark Loafman, chair of family and community medicine at Cook County Health in Chicago. “But I think it’s just a matter of time … People don’t get cancer treatment or blood pressure treatment every day in America because they can’t afford it.”

A $20 billion government COVID program covered testing, treatment and vaccine costs for uninsured people. But that’s been shut down. Special Medicaid COVID coverage for the uninsured in more than a dozen states also likely faces its last months.

At Parkland Health, the frontline hospital system for Dallas, Dr. Fred Cerise questions the logic of dialing back federal dollars at a time when health officials have rolled out a new “test-to-treat” strategy. People with COVID-19 can now get antiviral pills to take at home, hopefully avoiding hospitalization. Vice President Kamala Harris, who recently tested positive but is back working at the White House, is an example.

“Test-to-treat will be very difficult for uninsured individuals,” predicted Cerise, president and CEO of the system. “If it’s a change in strategy on the large scale, and it’s coming without funding, people are going to be reluctant to adopt that.”

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