The U.S. government extended a ban on nonessential travel along the Canadian and Mexican border on Friday. The announcement comes as politicians have mounted increasing pressure on the Biden administration to ease the ban.
While Canada has recently begun letting fully vaccinated U.S. citizens enter the country, the debate in the U.S. over mask and vaccine mandates has continued. Florida officials threatened to withhold funds to school districts that continue mask mandates and in Texas, the disagreements have escalated into the courts.
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 previous days’ live updates and all our other coronavirus coverage, and here to see how we track the daily spread across Washington and the world.
Silenced by COVID, mariachi Mass returns to Tucson cathedral
After more than a year of silence due to the pandemic, mariachis are back playing Sunday services at Tucson’s St. Augustine Cathedral, where the colorful and sonorous tradition dates back a half-century and fuses Roman Catholicism with Mexican American pride.
For the hundreds of worshippers gathered in this Spanish colonial church, and other congregations across the Southwest, the unique sound of mariachi liturgy is more than just another version of choir. It evokes a borderlands identity where spirituality and folk music have blended for centuries.
“Syncretism is the reality of this land, the ‘ambos’ reality,” said the Rev. Alan Valencia, the cathedral’s rector, who grew up attending mariachi Mass in “ambos Nogales,” or “both Nogales,” as locals refer to the two cities of the same name straddling the U.S.-Mexican border about 60 miles (100 kilometers) to the south.
“And that’s what we see in these mariachi Masses,” he added. “Faith and culture come together and grow.”
Biden sees dip in support amid new COVID cases
President Joe Biden is facing a summer slump, with Americans taking a notably less positive view of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Just 54% of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance, down slightly from 59% last month, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that.
That’s still a relatively solid rating for a president during his first year in office, particularly given the nation’s deep political polarization. But it’s a worrying sign for Biden as he faces the greatest domestic and foreign policy challenges of his presidency so far.
The biggest warning sign for the president in the survey centers on his handling of the pandemic. Last month, 66% of Americans approved of his stewardship of the public health crisis; now, that number has fallen to 54%, driven by a drop in support from Republicans and independents.
That decline in support coincides with other storm clouds gathering over Biden’s presidency, most notably the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan as U.S. troops withdraw and the Taliban cement their control of the country.
The poll, conducted August 12-16, as news of the Taliban’s movement into Kabul was widely reported in the United States, shows Americans about evenly divided over Biden’s handling of foreign policy (47% approve, 51% disapprove) and national security (52% approve, 46% disapprove).
COVID cases surge at Tacoma detention center as ICE brings in more detained migrants
As the number of COVID-19 cases at the immigrant detention center in Tacoma climbed to nearly 240 since June, a federal magistrate judge wrestled Friday with how to stop an outbreak that has been largely driven by transfers from the southern border, where hundreds of thousands of migrants have arrived in recent months.
Lawyers representing vulnerable detainees have asked the U.S. District Court for Western Washington to issue a temporary restraining order that would forbid Immigration and Customs Enforcement to place people at the Northwest ICE Processing Center unless they had been tested before boarding planes and separated according to whether their results were positive.
“There is no good reason why testing cannot be happening before a cross-country flight,” Cho said. “At this point in the pandemic, it’s quick, it’s widely available. You can pick up a rapid COVID self-test at the corner drugstore that takes 15 minutes for $10.”
In the last 10 weeks, ICE has flown more than 1,000 detained migrants to Washington, according to Eunice Cho, an attorney with the ACLU of Washington, at a telephone hearing. (Hundreds have ultimately been released from the facility, whose current population is about 530). Cho and other lawyers say some appear to have contracted COVID-19 in the process of being transferred.
Magistrate Judge Michelle Peterson said she was struggling with what to do.
“We, obviously, are seeing a severe uptick in COVID cases,” she said. “So why are we adding fuel to the fire by admitting individuals [who] I believe have a test positive rate of 12%,” she said, referring to those coming from the southern border. “It seems like there are no measures being taken to protect those individuals.”
Vaccine hesitancy falling in King County, but only slowly
Rates of vaccine hesitancy in King County have come down, but not by much, new data show.
According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine and COVID Collaborative, 7.1% of county adults were either unsure or said they would flatly refuse the shot, down from 7.3% at the end of June. The county has one of the highest vaccination rates of any big U.S. county.
In 28 out of King County’s 84 ZIP codes, vaccine hesitancy had declined by at least one percentage point since one month earlier. The biggest declines were in some areas with high rates of hesitancy — Auburn’s 98002 and Federal Way’s 98003.
But there were 12 ZIP codes where hesitancy had actually increased by at least one percentage point. The biggest jump was in the 98092 ZIP code, which runs east of Auburn out toward Black Diamond. Here, nearly 24% of residents expressed hesitancy toward, or were against, being vaccinated — the highest rate of hesitancy of any ZIP code in King County in the current data.
The 98092 ZIP code is a more rural area of the county, and the data shows that there is a sharp divide between urban and rural places, with urban areas more likely to be vaccinated and rural ones more likely to be hesitant.
The lowest rates of vaccine hesitancy are all in North Seattle. The 98107 ZIP code, which covers the southern half of the Ballard neighborhood, was the lowest, with just about 2% of the adult population expressing hesitancy toward vaccination. Two more North Seattle ZIP codes — 98117 and 98103 — were just a fraction higher.
from WordPress https://ift.tt/3gm14Mu
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment