A year after COVID superspreader event, family finally finds closure
From front left, Wendy Jensen, Joe Woodmansee, Linda Holeman and Bonnie Dawson, the four children of Carole Rae Woodmansee, are joined by family friend Debbie Blazina, at right, as they clean the headstone Carole shares with their father, Jim, who died in 2003, at Union Cemetery in Sedro-woolley, Wash., north of Seattle, prior to a memorial service.
SEDRO-WOOLLEY, Wash. —
With dish soap, brushes and plastic water jugs in hand, Carole Rae Woodmansee’s four children cleaned the gravestone their mother shares with their father, Jim. Each scrub shined engraved letters spelling out their mother’s name and the days of her birth and death: March 27, 1939, and March 27, 2020.
Carole passed away on her 81st birthday.
That morning marked a year since she died of complications of COVID-19 after contracting it during a choir practice that sickened 53 people and killed two — a superspreader event that would become one of the most pivotal transmission episodes in understanding the virus.
For the siblings, the somber anniversary offered a chance at closure after the pandemic stunted their mourning. They were finally holding a memorial befitting of their mother’s footprint in the community.
“The hardest thing is that there was no goodbye. It was like she just disappeared,” said Carole’s youngest child, Wendy Jensen.
After cleaning, the siblings reminisce. They say their father must be happy to be back with his wife of 46 years. They thank them for being good parents and recall how their mother used to say “my” before calling their names and those of other loved ones.
“I was always ‘My Bonnie,’” Bonnie Dawson tells her siblings. “I miss being ‘My Bonnie.’”
“She had been missing Dad for a long time,” eldest sibling Linda Holeman adds. Their father, Jim, passed away in 2003.
Of the more than 550,000 people who have died of the virus in the United States, Carole was among the first. Her death came just weeks after the first reported outbreak at a nursing home in Kirkland, about an hour south of Mount Vernon. Carole, who survived heart surgery and cancer, had fallen ill at her home. Bonnie took care of her until they called the paramedics.
“You’re trying to say goodbye to your mom, and they’re telling you to get back. It was a very hard, emotional … to have to yell, ‘I love you, Mom,’ as she’s being wheeled out the door with men standing in our yard 10 feet out because they didn’t want to be near our house,” Bonnie said.
The rehearsal of the Skagit Valley Chorale, a community choir made up mostly of retirees and not associated with the church where they practiced, happened two weeks before Gov. Jay Inslee shut down the state. The choir had taken the precautions known at the time, such as distancing themselves and sanitizing. But someone had the virus.
“The choir themselves called us directly, and they left a voicemail. The voicemail said a positive person in the choir, 24 people now sick,” said Lea Hamner, communicable disease and epidemiology lead for Skagit County Public Health. “It was immediately evident that we had a big problem.”
Hamner and her team went to work interviewing choir members, often repeatedly, and those with whom they came in contact after the practice, a total of 122 people. They meticulously pieced together the evening, tracking things like where people sat and who ate cookies or stacked chairs.
That level of access and detail is rare among outbreak investigations, Hamner said, so when cases waned in the county a few weeks later, she sat down to write a report.
“There was a lot of resistance to calling it an airborne disease,” Hamner said. “But we found this middle ground of this disease that can both be droplet and airborne. So that was a big shift. After the paper, the CDC started to acknowledge airborne transmission.”
The outbreak had gained notoriety after a Los Angeles Times article, prompting other researchers to study the event, further cementing the conclusion that the virus traveled through the air at the rehearsal.
“I think this outbreak in the choir is viewed … as the one event that really woke people up to the idea that the virus could be spreading through the air,” said Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech professor and expert in airborne transmission.
President Joe Biden on Friday named a panel to study reforms to the U.S. Supreme Court, such as adding justices or instituting term limits, fulfilling a campaign vow as progressives push to add more liberals to the conservative-leaning court.
Liberal activists have been urging an expansion of the Supreme Court to offset the 6-3 conservative majority created by three appointments by former President Donald Trump. The right-wing tilt has opened the possibility the court could overturn the constitutional right to abortion and roll back gay rights, though so far the justices have moved slowly on those issues.
The White House announced Friday that Biden will sign an executive order to form the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court.
Biden named a bipartisan group of law professors, former judges and others familiar with the legal system and asked them to issue a report within 180 days of first meeting.
Chairing the panel are Bob Bauer, a New York University law school professor and former White House counsel and Yale Law School Professor Cristina Rodriguez, former deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department.
Among the issues the commission will look at are “the court’s role in the Constitutional system,” turnover and length of service, and how the court selects cases.
The Constitution doesn’t say how many justices the court must have, but Congress has left the number at nine since 1869.
—Bloomberg News
Piney Point wastewater releases to Tampa Bay slow substantially,
state says
TAMPA, Fla. – then lead to fish kills.
The reservoir has been leaking for more than a week.
—Tampa Bay Times
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have called police to their Calif. home 9 times in
as many months
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have experienced a challenging start to their new lives in California, having to call authorities to their Montecito home nine times over the course of just as many months.
During their first month in their new neighborhood, officers were called four times to the property, including three times for “alarm activations” and once by phone request, according to information obtained under the Freedom of Information laws by the Telegraph.
Police in August responded to the home for a “miscellaneous priority incident,” and then again in November 2020 and February 2021 for alarm activations.
Sheriff’s deputies also responded to calls from the couple on both Christmas Eve and Boxing Day for reports of a man trespassing on the property, who was later identified as Nickolas Brooks, Vanity Fair reported. Police said the Ohio man drove more than 2,300 miles to the home.
—New York Daily News
Slavery reparations study set for House Judiciary markup WASHINGTON —
A bill to study paying reparations to descendants of slaves will be considered in the House Judiciary Committee next week, paving the way for a possible vote on an issue that has become increasingly mainstream in recent years of racial reckoning.
The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday will mark up and vote on a bill from Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee that would establish a commission to examine the role of federal and state governments in slavery and racial discrimination from 1619 to present day. The commission would recommend remedies, including possible payments to make up for centuries of lost wealth.
“Today, we still live with racial disparities in access to education, health care, housing, insurance, employment and other social goods that are directly attributable to the damaging legacy of slavery and government-sponsored racial discrimination,” Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said in a statement Friday. “The creation of a commission under H.R. 40 to study these issues is not intended to divide, but to continue the efforts commenced by states, localities and private institutions to reckon with our past and bring us closer to racial understanding and advancement.”
The late Rep. John Conyers of Michigan initiated the argument for reparations in Congress with a 1989 bill to study the issue. In the 32 years since the measure was first introduced, it has never been brought to the floor for a vote, although the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on Jackson Lee’s bill in 2019 and in February.
—Bloomberg News