A very embarrassing moment: Today So Far newsletter

Happy Friday, friends. An embarrassing email landed in our newsroom inbox this week: "Isolde needs to fix the date on her masthead. It's been 2022 for six weeks now." Signed, Katrina Greeley.

Grateful, but also mortified, I responded: "I would have made it to 2023 with that masthead had you not written." This was like having salad in my teeth, I said, to which Katrina, graciously and hilariously replied: "Nowadays, years are amorphous. I see no salad in your teeth." Thank you, Katrina.

• Washington state's indoor masking mandate lifts March 21 for schools, child care facilities, bars, and gyms. I would love for Xavier, my 4-year-old, to see his friends' faces when they play at preschool, but I'll be fine if the school decides to keep masking. (Xavier often emulates how his best friend talks, which he makes sound muffled, because that's how he hears it from behind the mask. It would be sad if it weren't so maddening.)
• A friend who had Covid recently told me that we need to accept that vaccines don't prevent Covid, just prevent it from being deadly. I found this to be bold thinking, given that vaccines did decrease infections in the beginning, but I couldn't help but agree.

Kate Walters, one of our Covid reporters, shared her thoughts: "The point of the vaccines got lost from the start," Kate said. "Vaccines cut down on infections, yes. But the main point, the bigger point, is to prevent severe illness and death. Cutting infection and transmission is nice, but it's not the main reason to get the shots. The reason they're still being recommended is that they prevent severe illness, hospitalizations, and death."

• Coincidentally, bike helmets are also no longer required by law in King County.

Here's Lisa Herbold, a member of the King County Board of Health, and a Seattle City Council member: “The question isn't whether helmets save lives and prevent serious injuries. We know that they do. The question is: What is the best way to increase helmet use while doing the least harm? We have a lot of data that shows that BIPOC communities suffer from disproportionate policing of helmet use locally, and by repealing the helmet law mandate, while also investing in distributing helmets, in educating people on bike safety, this is really a better way forward.”

• Check our Covid blog for daily updates.

Did you know?

Seattle has long been a cooperative sorta city. REI, the nation's largest consumer co-op, started in 1938. PCC Community Markets, launched in 1953, is the nation's largest food co-op. And then there's BECU, the Boeing credit union that all Washingtonians can access. And P-Patches! Those community gardens are a Seattle-specific thing, too!

I was thinking about this history recently, in the wake of Starbucks and Amazon employees pushing for unionization. Reporter Joshua McNichols notes that the union push at an Amazon Fresh location in Seattle isn't involved in the big high-profile drives we read about.

"It's kind of like, 'What the heck, you can just call yourself a union?'" Joshua said. "Is it really that simple? Yeah, any one group of workers can call themselves a union. The more elaborate union elections we read about in the press are required for a union to be able to represent workers at the bargaining table. But in this case, these folks are just seeking the right to come together to work on problems together. It's a kind of union with less power, but according to a former head of the National Labor Relations Board, even informal groups like this (whether or not they call themselves a union) are protected under the law. And if it comes to it, a Supreme Court decision has clarified that they do have the power to strike."