Live: Coronavirus daily news updates, May 16: What to know today about COVID-19 in the Seattle area, Washington state and the world

Any mandates in the U.S. to require people to be vaccinated against COVID-19 will be set at the local level by companies and institutions such as colleges, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

“It may very well be that local businesses, local jurisdictions, will work towards vaccine mandates,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That is going to be locally driven and not federally driven.”

Walensky spoke days after the CDC announced that Americans vaccinated against COVID-19 were clear to shed their face masks in public at most times.

The move has created confusion about who should continue to wear masks and who, if anyone, should police Americans’ vaccination status if they’re unmasked in certain settings.

Read more here.

When 2020 rolled around, nowhere on the Big-Picture To-Do List for the Forth family of Olympia was this item: “Sell dining room table and hutch/replace with two working pinball machines.”

And yet this is exactly what they wound up doing.

“We always talked about wanting to buy one someday,” writes mom Julie Forth, who says she and her husband regularly hit the arcade for a cheap-date option while growing up in L.A. in the 1980s. “The pandemic was just the kick we needed.”

Forth was one of dozens of readers who responded to a recent plea for confessions of nostalgia-themed hobbies they’ve taken up over the past pandemic year — descriptions of not just what they’re feeling nostalgic for, but what sort of action they’re taking to dive headlong back into the nostalgia pool, as it were.

We were happy to see all of them — and are even happier to share them, in the hope they might inspire someone else to fly their old-days freak flag a bit higher, whenever those “old” days might be.

We’re even happier to do so on the advice of psychologists, who agreed that nostalgia — particularly during the recent trying times — is a normal, longstanding human coping mechanism, and a generally healthy exercise.

Read more here.

MISSION, Kan. (AP) — Children are having their noses swabbed or saliva sampled at school to test for the coronavirus in cities such as Baltimore, New York and Chicago. In other parts of the U.S., school districts are reluctant to check even students showing signs of illness for COVID-19.

Education and health officials around the country have taken different approaches to testing students and staff members — and widely varying positions or whether to test them at all as more children give up virtual classrooms for in-person learning. Some states have rejected their share of the billions of dollars the Biden administration made available for conducting virus tests in schools.

Officials in districts that have embraced testing note that the virus might otherwise elude detection since young people with the virus often are asymptomatic and most teachers have been vaccinated.

But many school administrators and families, weary of pandemic-related disruptions, see little benefit in screening children, who tend not to become as sick from COVID-19 as adults. Meanwhile, each positive test that turns up at a school can trigger quarantine orders that force students back into learning from home.

Read more here.

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Florida’s major theme parks are adjusting their face mask policies after the federal government loosened its recommendations as more people get vaccinated for the coronavirus.

Visitors to Walt Disney World and Universal Studios-Orlando were allowed Saturday to remove their masks when they are outdoors except when they are on attractions, in line or riding a tram or other transportation.

SeaWorld Orlando and its sister park, Tampa’s Busch Gardens, are going even further, allowing guests who say they are fully vaccinated to to remove their masks throughout the parks. The two parks will not require proof of vaccination, but are asking guests to “respectfully comply.”

Read more here.