Archives for April 2021

The Latest on the effects of the coronavirus outbreak on sports around the world:

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The Vancouver Canucks now have 17 players in the NHL COVID-19 protocol with the addition of rookie forward Nils Hoglander.

It marks the fifth straight day the Canucks’ list has grown. The 17 players in the protocol at the same time represents the most by one NHL team since the New Jersey Devils had 18 on Feb. 12.

There are 22 players listed for a third consecutive day, which remains the highest total since 24 players were listed on Feb. 16. The NHL’s one-day high is 59 players who were in the protocol on Feb. 12.

Boston Bruins goalie Jaroslav Halak also entered the protocol.

The additions of Hoglander and Halak increases the total to 190 NHL players who have spent at least one day on the COVID-19 list since the season began Jan. 13.

Dallas goalie Anton Khudobin was cleared after spending one day in the protocol. Los Angeles forward Brendan Lemieux was also cleared after a seven-day stint, which came after the Kings acquired him in a trade with the New York Rangers.

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The Seattle Sounders of Major League Soccer have been given the go-ahead to have fans back at Lumen Field for the first time in over a year.

The Sounders are expecting to host approximately 7,000 fans for the first five home games. The team’s MLS season opener against Minnesota United is a week from Friday (April 16).

The team says season ticket holders will get priority access to tickets.

Face masks that fit within CDC guidelines are required for all fans age two and older but can be removed while eating and drinking. All tickets will be sold in pods between one and six tickets that must be purchased together and must be used by members of the same household or permissible quarantining unit, as permitted by regional health authorities.

All tickets are electronic, No paper tickets will be permitted or printed.

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Some New York Mets players have hesitated to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, causing the team to set up education efforts.

Major League Baseball and the players’ association said in a March 29 memorandum to players that COVID-19 protocols such as mask use and restrictions on movement and gathering would be relaxed once 85% of major league players and primary field staff on a team are vaccinated against the coronavirus.

Players on several teams started to get the vaccine last week during the final week of spring training, when they became eligible.

“There has been some hesitation on the part of some players, and that is why we’ve set up the education,” Mets president Sandy Alderson said Monday.

Alderson said the Mets want to get as many players vaccinated as possible.

“I think that’s in the best interest of the team,” he said. “It’s in the best interest of their families. It’s in the best interests of those who work with the players. So I hope that in addition to their own, personal medical considerations, that they take all of those things into consideration, as well. We’re hopeful they will.”

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South Dakota State’s home football game against South Dakota on Saturday has been canceled because of COVID-19 protocols involving South Dakota’s Tier 1 personnel, which includes players, coaches and staff.

The Jackrabbits (4-1) are ranked No. 4 in the Football Bowl Subdivision and are in a four-way tie for first place in the Missouri Valley Conference.

South Dakota (1-3) has lost three straight games.

The game will not be rescheduled.

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The Milwaukee Brewers announced Monday the team received the COVID-19 vaccine over the weekend but wouldn’t disclose what percentage of players and staffers participated.

Major League Baseball has announced it would relax protocols for teams that had 85% of their players and primary field staff vaccinated. Brewers president of baseball operations David Stearns declined to say whether the Brewers had reached that 85% threshold.

Stearns did say the Brewers who participated received the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The Brewers also put out a public service announcement Monday promoting COVID-19 vaccination. The release of the video coincided with the first day that Wisconsin made vaccination available to everyone 16 and older.

The video features star outfielder and 2018 NL MVP Christian Yelich as well as pitchers Freddy Peralta and Brent Suter. During a Monday Zoom session with reporters, Suter noted that he and his wife had tested positive a couple of months ago.

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The NHL’s deputy commissioner says the COVID-19 outbreak on the Vancouver Canucks is concerning, but Bill Daly remains confident the team will be able to complete its schedule.

Daly said in an email to The Canadian Press the league believes the Canucks will return and conclude their 56-game schedule. He also said the league will not change its COVID protocols in the aftermath of the Canucks’ situation.

The team has had four games postponed because of the virus. As of Sunday, 16 of the 22 players on the Canucks’ active roster were on the NHL’s protocol list.

A player on the list has not necessarily tested positive.

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The president of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest evangelical denomination, posted a photo on Facebook last week of him getting the COVID-19 vaccine. It drew more than 1,100 comments — many of them voicing admiration for the Rev. J.D. Greear, and many others assailing him.

Some of the critics wondered if worshippers would now need “vaccine passports” to enter The Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina, where Greear is pastor. Others depicted the vaccines as satanic or unsafe, or suggested Greear was complicit in government propaganda.

The divided reaction highlighted a phenomenon that has become increasingly apparent in recent polls and surveys: Vaccine skepticism is more widespread among white evangelicals than almost any other major bloc of Americans.

In a March poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 40% of white evangelical Protestants said they likely won’t get vaccinated, compared with 25% of all Americans, 28% of white mainline Protestants and 27% of nonwhite Protestants.

The findings have aroused concern even within evangelical circles. The National Association of Evangelicals, which represents more than 45,000 local churches, is part of a new coalition that will host events, work with media outlets and distribute various public messages to build trust among wary evangelicals.

“The pathway to ending the pandemic runs through the evangelical church,” said Curtis Chang, a former pastor and missionary who founded ChristiansAndTheVaccine.com, the cornerstone of the new initiative, With white evangelicals comprising an estimated 20% of the U.S. population, resistance to vaccination by half of them would seriously hamper efforts to achieve herd immunity, Chang contends.

Many evangelical leaders have spoken in support of vaccinations, ranging from Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress to the Rev. Russell Moore, head of the Southern Baptists’ public policy arm.

Jeffress believes a majority of his congregation at First Baptist Dallas welcome the vaccines, while some have doubts about their safety or worry they have links to abortion. Jeffress is among numerous religious leaders who say the leading vaccines are acceptable given their remote, indirect links to lines of cells developed from aborted fetuses.

Moore expressed hope that SBC pastors would provide “wise counsel” to their congregations if members raise questions about vaccinations.

“These vaccines are cause for evangelicals to celebrate and give thanks to God,” he said via email. “I am confident that pastors and lay members alike want churches full again and vaccines will help all of us get there sooner rather than later.”

Other evangelical pastors have been hesitant to take a public stance.

Aaron Harris, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas, hasn’t discussed the vaccine from the pulpit or decided whether he’ll be vaccinated.

“We don’t believe that this is a scriptural issue; it is a personal issue,” said Harris, who estimates that 50% of the congregation’s older adults have been vaccinated, while fewer younger members plan to do so.

“We shouldn’t live in fear of the virus because we do have a faith in eternity. However, just because we aren’t in fear of it, where is the line of what we ought to do?” he asked. “I’m not going to lay down in front of a bunch of alligators to show my faith in that way.”

Some Christians say they prefer to leave their fate in God’s hands, rather than be vaccinated.

“We are going to go through times of trials and all kinds of awful things, but we still know where we are going at the end,” said Ron Holloway, 75, of Forsyth, Missouri. “And heaven is so much better than here on earth. Why would we fight leaving here?”

John Elkins, pastor at Sovereign Grace Fellowship in Brazoria, Texas, about 50 miles south of Houston, said only one person in his SBC congregation of about 50 has been vaccinated.

“We’re in a very libertarian area. There’s a lot of hesitancy to anything that feels like it’s coming from the federal government,” said Elkins, who is also forgoing the vaccine, at least for now, along with his wife.

Elkins, whose father was a professor of gynecology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said his congregants’ doubts are not theologically based.

“It’s skepticism about effectiveness,” he said. “People are concerned it was rushed out too quickly.”

Phillip Bethancourt, another Southern Baptist pastor in Texas, has encouraged his congregation at Central Church in College Station to get the vaccine and believes most will. The church hosted a vaccine drive for staff and volunteers at other churches; 217 people got their first doses March 22.

“Even people who might be skeptical from a medical standpoint can understand it from a missional standpoint,” he said. “If it helps more people be able to serve at their church again, so more children can learn about Jesus, that’s a good thing.”

Bethancourt, a former vice president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has spoken with congregants who spurn the vaccine and say they’re unafraid of dying if that’s God’s will.

“The sentiment doesn’t trouble me on the face of it, but there’s inconsistency,” he said. “We don’t adopt that mentality in other aspects of our life, like not wearing a seat belt.”

Chang said that as a former pastor, he understands why some whose congregations are mistrustful of the government and the vaccines muzzle themselves rather than risk backlash if they urge their flock to get vaccinated.

“There’s going to be some courage required,” he said.

His initiative includes a toolkit for pastors offering suggestions for how to address — within a Christian framework — the various concerns of skeptical evangelicals. They range from the extent of the vaccines’ link to abortion to whether they represent “the mark of the beast,” an ominous harbinger of the end times prophesized in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation.

Partnering in the initiative is the Ad Council, known for iconic public service ad campaigns such as Smokey Bear and “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.”

“We know the important role faith plays in the lives of millions of people throughout the country,” Ad Council president Lisa Sherman said, expressing hope that the campaign could boost their confidence in the vaccines.

As the vaccines first became available, there was widespread concern that many Black Americans would be hesitant to take them due to historic, racism-related mistrust of government health initiatives. But recent surveys show Black Protestants are more open to vaccinations than white evangelicals.

“This pandemic has hit our community like a plague — and that’s made our job easier,” said Bishop Timothy Clarke of First Church of God, a Black evangelical church in Columbus, Ohio. “We’ve done a tremendous job of educating.”

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Associated Press writer Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Missouri, contributed to this report.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through The Conversation U.S. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts are accelerating the reconstruction of Geffen Hall because of the lull granted by the novel coronavirus pandemic and now plan to reopen the auditorium in fall of 2022, about 1 1/2 years ahead of the original schedule.

Rather than rebuild in phased segments around seasons, the Philharmonic said Monday it will relocate for the 2021-22 season and split concerts that year between Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, a 1,086-seat venue more typically used for chamber concerts and recitals, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 1,233-seat Rose Theater, located at Columbus Circle, less than half a mile from Geffen Hall.

Philharmonic President Deborah Borda said a full season will be announced in late May or early June to start in late September, and that in light of COVID-19 the first 1 1/2 months of concerts will be performed without intermission. The Philharmonic traditionally performed programs on Thursdays, Friday, Saturday and Tuesday nights, but Borda said its union contracts had changed to allow it to shift to Sunday matinees from Tuesdays.

The Philharmonic and Lincoln Center said Monday they had raised $500 million of the $550 million needed for the project, up from $360 million committed when the earlier timetable was announced in December 2019.

“Once the closure of the Hall was mandated because of COVID, we realized the Phil would be out of work for an extensive period of time and it made sense to accelerate the construction,” Lincoln Center chair Katherine Farley said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It also gave us an opportunity to be part of New York’s economic recovery, because this project and is going to create 6,000 jobs.”

Construction jobs are expected to be held 30% by minority- and women-owned business, and 40% of the construction work is to be performed by minorities and veterans.

Borda said COVID-19 has caused the Philharmonic to add state-of-art ionization and air exchanges.

“During the time we were planning the acceleration, we did a tremendous amount of logistical planning,” she said. “We also did some maintenance of things that needed to be done, prosaic things like fixing the roof and so forth. And we were also able to do some targeted demolition. As of now, we are ready to go full steam ahead.”

The rebuilt Geffen Hall is to have a capacity of under 2,200, down from 2,738, with the rows in the orchestra cut from 43 to 33, and the stage moved forward 25 feet, allowing seven rows of wraparound seating behind the orchestra. About two-thirds of the third tier will be eliminated.

The original timetable was to have the hall closed from May to October in 2022 and again from May 2023 until February 2024, with part of the 2023-24 season relocated to Carnegie Hall, the Philharmonic’s home from 1891 to 1962, and to New York City Center.

Size of the lobby space will be doubled, and there will be large garage doors leading to Lincoln Center’s Josie Robertson Plaza. The sidewalk studio for education activities and areas for art installations are intended to be open 18 hours daily. There also will be new dining options and east and west patron lounges, which will be available for performances — and rentals.

A digital organ will be installed at the hall, which has been without an organ since the original 45,000-pound Aeolian-Skinner organ with 5,498 pipes was removed in a 1976 renovation.

Diamond Schmitt Architects is the lead firm of the renovation design with Akustiks and Fisher Dachs Associates. Public spaces are by Tod Williams Billie Tsien.

Opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall at a cost of about $21 million and designed by Max Abramovitz with acoustics by Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the orchestra’s auditorium has been criticized for a sound that emphasizes brass and muddles lower strings.

Changes made during many summers included adding reflecting panels on side walls, removing the original sound “clouds” and installing a stepped ceiling. The building was named Avery Fisher Hall after a $10.5 million gift in 1973, and three years later, there was a major renovation with the input of Cyril Harris, the acoustician for the praised Metropolitan Opera House next door. Another renovation in 1992, this time with Artec Consultants as the acoustician, included suspended panels.

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