Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and today's gonna be hot. In fact, we've got a heat advisory in place from 12:00–7:00 PM warning of heat index values up to 106 °F. That's too hot to mess around with, and, if at all possible, stay inside and stay cool. I mean, always stay cool, like, in a 😎 way, but today you should be really careful out in the heat.
Water cooler
The New York Times has put together some data on breakthrough COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths—aka hospitalizations and deaths of fully vaccinated people. Before looking at this data, you should keep two important pieces of context in mind. First, this data only covers the beginning of the vaccination campaign at the start of the year to mid-June or July, so we are missing key data since the Delta variant started to spread across the country. Second, as vaccination rates go up you should expect more vaccination breakthroughs. An example: If 5% of people vaccinated experience a breakthrough, with 100 people vaccinated you'd expect five breakthroughs but with 200 people vaccinated you'd expect...10 breakthroughs. Math is weird sometimes! Anyway, here's the spoiler for the entire data set: "Fully vaccinated people have made up as few as 0.1 percent of and as many as 5 percent of those hospitalized with the virus in those states, and as few as 0.2 percent and as many as 6 percent of those who have died." You can also poke through VDH's Cases By Vaccination Status dashboard for a more local look at this type of data. I like the way this stat feels to say out loud: Just 0.0047% of fully vaccinated people have ended up in the hospital with COVID-19.
OK, now this is fascinating, Jessica Nocera and Holly Prestidge at the Richmond Times-Dispatch report that last night the Chesterfield School Board adopted a mask mandate while the Hanover School Board "overruled the system's superintendent and voted 4-3 against requiring students or staff to wear masks for the 2021-22 school year." Hanover's decision goes against clear guidance from the CDC, the Virginia Department of Health, and the Virginia Department of Education. I wonder if, as suggested by the Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction, the Hanover School Board has checked with their legal counsel and insurance companies. Compare and contrast this Hanover situation with what's going on Florida, where one local superintendent is moving forward with a mask mandate despite a mask ban from that state's governor, "If something happened and things went sideways for us this week and next week as we started school, and heaven forbid we lost a child to this virus — I can't just simply blame the governor of the state of Florida."
Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams writes about the Richmond Police Department's plan to install automatic license plate readers in some of the city's Black and Brown communities. I think the opening sentence gets right at it: "It’s as if that season of racial reckoning, spurred by egregious acts of police violence, has been wiped from the memory of the Richmond Police Department."
Reminder! Today is your last day to fill out the City's second bike lane survey. The Department of Public Works wants your opinion on some more detailed designs for proposed bike lanes on Brookland Parkway, Colorado Avenue, Grove Avenue, Marshall Street, Walmsley Boulevard, and Warwick Road. I would use at least three of these new piece of bike infrastructure in my day-to-day and am excited to see them move forward. Also, while we're talking about it, take a look at DPW's bike lane page and scroll through the "Projects Designed and Ready for Constructions" section. I know we've still got a long ways to go in Richmond when it comes to safe and convenient bike infrastructure, but, dang, this is a lot of projects! It was not always this way, and I'm very thankful for the advocates that have done the work to shift the culture in town to the point where we can just have three dozen bike projects in the works like its no big deal.
It's Infrastructure Week! Last night the Senate passed the Infrastructure Bill and then today(?) approved a massive $3.5-trillion budget resolution. The House said they required the latter before they'd consider the former. Who knows the final result of any of these things, but it seems like legislative progress—which isn't always a guarantee given that Senate Republicans exist.
This morning's longread
A Failed Star Called 'The Accident' Puzzles Astronomers
Nerdy space science stuff!
Because brown dwarfs bridge the gap between stars and planets, they can help us understand both. At the upper end of the mass scale, the boundary between the largest brown dwarfs and the smallest stars can give us insights into how nuclear fusion begins. An object needs to reach temperatures of around 3 million degrees Celsius in its core to kick-start nuclear fusion, said Nolan Grieves of the University of Geneva in Switzerland; this ignites a chain reaction that turns hydrogen into helium. But no one is exactly sure how much mass is needed for that to happen, and at what point a brown dwarf becomes a star. “There’s a lot of aspects of stellar evolution that our knowledge is still pretty uncertain on,” said Biller. “Where that fusion limit is exactly is one of those questions.”
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