The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending that people residing in 15 Washington counties and 24 Oregon counties resume mask-wearing on public transportation and in public indoor spaces.
Meanwhile, a U.S. policy announced on Wednesday will allow pharmacists to prescribe Paxlovid, a COVID-19 pill treatment, directly to patients.
We’re updating this page with the latest news about the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the Seattle area, the U.S. and the world. Click here to see the rest of our coronavirus coverage and here to see how we track the daily spread across Washington.
This clunky mask may be the answer to airborne disease and N95 waste
In the early 1990s, long before PPE, N95 and asymptomatic transmission became household terms, federal health officials issued guidelines for how medical workers should protect themselves from tuberculosis during a resurgence of the highly infectious respiratory disease.
Their recommendation, elastomeric respirators, an industrial-grade face mask familiar to car painters and construction workers, would in the decades that followed become the gold standard for infection-control specialists focused on the dangers of airborne pathogens.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promoted them during the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak of 2003 (called SARS) and the swine-flu pandemic of 2009. A few studies since then have suggested that reusable elastomeric respirators should be essential gear for frontline medical workers during a respiratory pandemic, which experts predicted would quickly deplete supplies of N95s, the disposable filtration masks largely made in China.
But when the coronavirus swept the globe and China cut off exports of N95s, elastomeric respirators were nowhere to be found in a vast majority of hospitals and health clinics in the United States. Although impossible to know for sure, some experts believe the dire mask shortage early on contributed to the wave of infections that killed more than 3,600 health workers.
Europe is seeing ‘new wave’ of COVID-19, says EU medicines agency
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — A senior official at the European Union medicines agency said Thursday that many nations in the bloc are seeing a new wave of COVID-19, driven by highly transmissible mutations of the omicron variant.
The European Medicines Agency’s Marco Cavaleri told an online briefing that the BA.4 and BA.5 mutations are expected to become dominant across the continent, “likely replacing all other variants by the end of July.”
Got COVID? Doctors caution against powering through it — even from home
More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, when Dr. Anthony Fauci tested positive for the coronavirus, his federal agency announced that he would “continue to work from his home.”
So did U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who announced on Twitter that after testing positive, “I plan to work remotely.” And so did San Francisco Mayor London Breed, whose office announced she would conduct meetings from home after testing positive.
As vaccines and new treatments have eased some of the alarm around a COVID-19 diagnosis, continuing to work — but from home — has become a familiar practice among professionals who can do their jobs remotely. Fauci was vaccinated and boosted and said he was experiencing mild symptoms, like other officials who said they would stay on the job from home.
CDC: Mask-wearing recommended in growing number of counties
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — People in 24 Oregon counties — including the county around Portland — and 15 counties in Washington state should resume mask-wearing indoors in public and on public transportation, according to recommendations from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Washington, the counties at high risk include: Clallam, Grays Harbor, Pacific, Lewis, Thurston, Pierce, Chelan, Douglas, Grant, Walla Walla, Columbia, Asotin, Lincoln, Ferry and Spokane. That’s an increase from six Washington counties at high risk as of June 23.
The most recent community levels were calculated June 30.
