Setting cookies cross-domain? node and react - node.js

Question

I am building a node express rest app with react frontend. At development the backend is running at localhost:5000 and the frontend at localhost:3000. I am using session based authentication system. So I am sending a Set-Cookie header when authentication is successful from the backend. But the problem is that since the frontend and the backend area on different domains the cookie cannot be set.
What can be done?
Plus, I do not want to use the JWT for authentication for the reasons laid out at http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2016/06/13/stop-using-jwt-for-sessions/
Middleware
const cors = require('cors');
app.use(cors({ credentials: true, origin: 'http://localhost:3000' }));
Following is the header sent back from the backend
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 129
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2019 14:24:03 GMT
ETag: W/"81-RZ35EekMxvCHWWNZ8hxPVFlS+R8"
Set-Cookie: connect.sid=s%3Afa5CxZSLQznDHuO7I6y9qAfy5-VuezUj.I%2F3BP6vfXybkyUXej6%2Fjt5ribqmmfoy1NQfSImuNYaU; Path=/; Expires=Sun, 29 Dec 2019 14:24:03 GMT; HttpOnly
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=15552000; includeSubDomains
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-DNS-Prefetch-Control: off
X-Download-Options: noopen
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block