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Lauren Kirschman: Coronavirus updates: Bowling centers offer buildings for vaccine inoculations
News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash. 12/18/2020 Lauren Kirschman, The News Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.)
Dec. 17 Updated at 9:30 a.m.
The Washington state Department of Health reported 1,681 new cases of COVID-19 and 89 deaths Wednesday.
As of Wednesday, DOH began adding people who have tested positive for COVID-19 using an antigen test to its daily case total. About 5% of case totals come from the antigen test, said state health officer Kathy Lofy.
Pierce County reported 165 cases Wednesday and two new deaths. Pierce County has a total of 263 deaths likely caused by COVID-19 as of Wednesday, according to the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department.
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December 16, 2020 SEATTLE – Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is loosening school reopening guidelines amid a resurging coronavirus pandemic and pleading with reluctant teachers to return to the classroom, particularly those tasked with educating the youngest and neediest students.
Inslee, a Democrat, on Wednesday unveiled the state’s latest reopening standards, which urge schools to begin phasing in in-person learning no matter what the community COVID-19 infection rates are, and to resist reverting back to remote learning should transmissions further increase.
That’s a stark departure for the Democratic administration, which has until now taken a more cautious approach.
The ultimate decision on how and when to reopen schools is up to individual districts. Washington state saw the nation’s first confirmed virus case in late January.
Inslee puts pause on termination of city-county health departments
He calls politics in public health ‘reckless, dangerous’ By Laurel Demkovich, The Spokesman-Review
Published: December 16, 2020, 7:51pm
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Gov. Jay Inslee issued a proclamation Monday halting the termination of a city-county health department or the withdrawal from a health district until the COVID-19 state of emergency is over, as local public health districts face continued politicization.
The proclamation came a day before a Pierce County Council vote to break its county-city health department agreement. The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department has received attention the past few weeks after councilmembers proposed breaking a decadeslong agreement between Tacoma and Pierce County to share a health department.
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December 17, 2020
JAKARTA, Indonesia The World Health Organization says countries in the Asia-Pacific region are not guaranteed to have early access to COVID-19 shots and urged them to adopt a long-term approach to the pandemic.
WHO Regional Director Dr. Takeshi Kasai told reporters in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, that the development of safe and effective vaccines is one thing. Producing them in adequate quantities and reaching everyone who needs them is another.
Dr. Socorro Escalante, WHO’s coordinator for essential medicines and health technologies, said that while some countries that have independent vaccine purchase agreements might start vaccination campaigns in the coming months, others could see vaccination begin in the middle or late 2021.