In the Media

Nick Barragan is used to wearing a mask because his job in the Hollywood film industry has long required it. So he won’t be fazed if the county that’s home to Tinseltown soon becomes the first major population center this summer to reinstate rules requiring face coverings indoors because of another spike in coronavirus cases.

“I feel fine about it because I’ve worn one pretty much constantly for the last few years. It’s become a habit,” said Barragan, masked up while out running errands Wednesday.

Los Angeles is the most populous county, home to 10 million residents. It faces a return to a broad indoor mask mandate on July 29 if current trends in hospital admissions continue, county health Director Barbara Ferrer said this week.

Nationwide, the latest COVID-19 surge is driven by the highly transmissible BA.5 variant, which now accounts for 65% of cases with its cousin BA.4 contributing another 16%. The variants have shown a remarkable ability to get around the protection offered by vaccination.

nflation’s relentless surge didn’t merely persist in June. It accelerated.

For the 12 months ending in June, the government’s consumer price index rocketed 9.1%, the fastest year-over-year jump since 1981.

And that was nothing next to what energy prices did: Fueled by heavy demand and by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy costs shot up nearly 42% in the past 12 months, the largest such jump since 1980.

Even if you toss out food and energy prices — which are notoriously volatile and have driven much of the price spike — so-called core inflation soared 5.9% over the past year.

Consumers have endured the pain in everyday routines. Unleaded gasoline is up 61% in the past year. Men’s suits, jackets and coats, 25%, Airline tickets, 34%. Eggs 33%. Breakfast sausage, 14%.

Under Chair Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve never anticipated inflation this severe or persistent. Yet after having been merely an afterthought for decades, high inflation reasserted itself with ferocious speed as shortages of labor and supplies ran up against a propulsive rise in demand for goods and services across the economy.

Do you have a significant other who has developed an aversion to live theater and needs to be convinced what will happen onstage is worth leaving the house for?

If so, I have good news. After attending the opening night performance of “Pump Boys and Dinettes” at the Fishermen's Pavilion at Zuanich Point Park with my somewhat grumpy date, I'm convinced even the most reluctant patrons of the arts will be grinning, singing along and stomping their feet on the cement floor by the night's end — just like my boyfriend did.

Although it's important for readers to know the maritime musical is a collaboration between Bellingham TheatreWorks and Western Washington University's Department of Theatre and Dance, that wasn't what I told my fella to convince him to accompany me. Instead, I informed him Boundary Bay Brewery would be on site with ice-cold beverages, a view of the park and Bellingham Bay would be visible from inside the open-air pavilion, the vibe would be nautical and pie would be served during intermission.

“Pump Boys and Dinettes” shows at 7:30 p.m. Fridays through Sundays through July 31 at the Fishermen's Pavilion at Squalicum Harbor. Tickets are $15–$22. Fairhaven Summer Repertory Theatre shows take place nightly (except on Mondays) through July 24 at the FireHouse, 1314 Harris Ave. Tickets are $20. Info and tickets: bellinghamtheatreworks.org. 

It was the evening before the Fourth of July in the last year of his tumultuous presidency, and I sat in front of my television transfixed and horrified as Donald Trump delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore, ostensibly a celebration of American independence but in fact a call for resistance. Against the dramatic backdrop of the four granite presidential faces and American flags, Trump promised that “the American people…will not allow our country, and all of its values, history, and culture, to be taken from them” by protestors and left-leaning scholars. He condemned so-called cancel culture for demanding absolute devotion to leftist dogma. Two months later, he would reprise that theme at the White House Conference on American History. “Whether it is the mob on the street, or the cancel culture in the boardroom,” Trump proclaimed, “the goal is the same…to bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage, and their very way of life.”¹

On both occasions, the defiant words were disturbingly compelling. There was something primal about them: the tribal leader defending his tribe’s ground. That is why I felt so uncomfortable, even threatened. As a brown-skinned immigrant, I wondered whether I fit into Trump’s—or the crowd’s—America. Who was the “our” in “our country”? And besides, I thought, he had to be exaggerating. Who would want to take America’s values, history, and culture from us? Yet only three days after the Mount Rushmore speech, the New York Times published an op-ed calling for the removal of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.² Maybe Trump’s words could not be so easily dismissed. Maybe something deeper was happening.

Essay by WWU Professor of History Johann Neem.

When Nico Vargas spent her time mentoring teenage girls in South Seattle last year, they were just trying to make it through another day in high school – all while disproportionately burdened with air pollution.

Vargas, then a senior at Western Washington University studying environmental policy, walked them through neighborhoods in the Duwamish Valley to collect moss that the United States Forest Service (USFS) would later screen for air toxin concentrations. They asked about how to find viable trees to access the moss, but they also asked why navigating high school felt so impossible. It reminded Vargas of lived experiences outside of datasets often reflected in academic papers.

“The experts don’t have to just be someone in a white lab coat. Science can be used as a tool to help people with their advocacy rather than a tool of gatekeeping,” says Vargas, who now works at a salmon recovery non-profit. “Involving the community directly in research about their own neighborhood is a matter of justice. It’s not just numbers in a study, people are really living this.”

That’s one of the reasons why Duwamish River Community Coalition (DRCC) Executive Director Paulina Lopez worked with the USFS to train community scientists to investigate heavy metals around them. More than 73% of people who live in Duwamish Valley’s neighborhoods, Georgetown and South Park, are Black, indigenous and people of color. In the local government’s science-based agencies, they’ve historically been excluded from evidence collecting and evaluation in their own community.

Lopez is sharing what a team of 55 community scientists learned from measuring pollutants in moss tissues from these industry-adjacent neighborhoods. Through a complex air quality investigation, including a newly published study of heavy metal concentrations in the air, they hope to bring environmental justice to an underinvested area with a long history of environmental contamination. After reviewing their data, the government has already agreed to fund several temporary air monitors in the Duwamish Valley this summer.  

When Ohio transplant Rebecca Quirke, 38, moved into a $1,400-per-month Billy Frank Jr. Street rental home in November 2021, she wasn’t prepared for the multitude of unpleasant — and unlawful — surprises.

Familiar to many veteran Bellingham renters, but not a newcomer, were a range of local rental quirks: a smattering of mold on her bathroom ceiling, a mural of a gigantic squid painted on the living room wall, cockroaches in the fridge, rodents in the walls, windows that had been painted shut and $500 electrical bills during the frigid winter months due to the aging structure. 

Her complaints mirrored those of hundreds of other renters and foreshadowed an innovative and growing local movement led by tenants, against landlords.

In a few short months, the weather will turn crisp, the holiday season will draw near, and the coronavirus may embark on its third consecutive winter of death and devastation.

That prospect has federal regulators and their scientific advisers engaged in a high-stakes guessing game.

The question: How should the COVID-19 vaccine change?

Certainly, the circumstances have changed. The coronavirus strains responsible for 97% of infections today — BA. 4, BA. 5 and BA. 2.12.1 — didn’t exist in 2021, let alone in 2020. Yet all of the vaccines currently available in the U.S. are designed to recognize the version that left China in January 2020.

The shots have done an admirable job. Researchers credit them with saving 1.9 million U.S. lives in their first year of availability, and they continue to provide solid protection against severe illness and death from COVID-19. The ubiquitous omicron subvariants, however, have several mutations on their crucial spike proteins that make them less recognizable to an immune system primed to fight the 2 1/2-year-old virus.

The result: A real-world study found that the protection from three doses of mRNA vaccine is half as strong against omicron compared to the Delta variant that preceded it.

At the end of June, the FDA asked vaccine manufacturers to produce “bivalent” doses that combine the original vaccine with one designed to recognize BA. 4 and BA.5. Who will be advised to get it has yet to be determined.

The U.S. is getting another COVID-19 vaccine choice as the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday cleared Novavax shots for adults.

Novavax makes a more traditional type of shot than the three other COVID-19 vaccines available for use in the U.S. -- and one that’s already available in Europe and multiple other countries.

Nearly a quarter of American adults still haven’t gotten their primary vaccinations even this late in the pandemic, and experts expect at least some of them to roll up their sleeves for a more conventional option — a protein-based vaccine.

The Maryland company also hopes its shots can become a top booster choice in the U.S. and beyond. Tens of millions of Americans still need boosters that experts call critical for the best possible protection as the coronavirus continues to mutate.

The number of new COVID-19 cases reported in Whatcom County ticked up slightly for a second straight week, and the county had two more deaths linked to COVID.

Whatcom County now has had a total of 43,552 COVID cases reported during the pandemic, according to the Friday, July 8, report on the Washington State Department of Health COVID-19 Data Dashboard, including 38,154 confirmed cases and 5,398 probable cases, resulting from a positive antigen test not confirmed by a molecular test. The county’s 483 new reported cases last week were up from the 466 reported by the state a week earlier, which was up from 435 cases reported the week of June 19-25.

Whatcom’s weekly COVID-19 reported case rate increased to 204 new cases per 100,000 residents for the most recently completed epidemiological data from June 23 to June 29, up from a rate of 191 from one week earlier (June 16-22). St. Joseph’s hospital in Bellingham reported it was treating seven COVID-related patients on Monday, July 11. Over the past week, the hospital’s daily snapshot has averaged 12.7 COVID-related patients per day, which is down from 14.6 one week earlier (June 28 to July 3) and represents 5.0% of the hospital’s 252 inpatient beds.

Biden administration officials are developing a plan to allow all adults to receive a second coronavirus booster shot, pending federal agency sign-offs, as the White House and health experts seek to blunt a virus surge that has sent hospitalizations to their highest levels since March 3.

Virus levels have risen across the country, fueled by ever-more-contagious omicron subvariants such as BA. 5 that evade some immune protections and have increased the risk of reinfections. About 112,000 new cases have been reported per day, according to The Washington Post’s rolling seven-day average – with the true number many times higher, say experts, as most Americans test at home. Hospitalization and death levels are mounting, although they remain significantly below January peaks, with about 38,000 people hospitalized with covid as of Sunday, and an average daily death toll of 327 as of Monday.

Currently, a second booster shot is available only to those 50 and older, as well as to those 12 and older who are immunocompromised. But administration officials are concerned by data that suggests immunity wanes within several months of the first booster shot. Swiftly expanding access to booster shots also would enable people who are boosted now to receive reformulated shots that target newer virus variants, when those become available, likely later this year. In addition, officials want to use vaccine doses that are reaching their expiration dates and would otherwise be discarded.