Good morning, RVA! It's 76 °F already, and we’re under yet another heat advisory until 7:00 PM. Today you can expect highs near 100 °F, with a heat index near 110 °F. I keep saying this, but stay cool, stay hydrated, and stay inside if you can. Starting Sunday we can expect much cooler temperatures—just a little bit longer!
Water cooler
The FDA has amended the emergency use authorizations for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine to allow a booster shot for immunocompromised individuals. Specifically, that means “solid organ transplant recipients or those who are diagnosed with conditions that are considered to have an equivalent level of immunocompromise.” Most likely this new authorization does not apply to you! So please do not rush out to CVS, or your primary care doctor, or the Health District and demand that they give you a booster shot. This—so far—only applies to folks with really seriously compromised immune systems, although Dr. Fauci said just the other day that booster shots for the rest of us are likely in our futures (just not yet). The CDC and its various committees will tackle this new authorization today and over the weekend.
Yesterday the Governor clarified his extremely unclear K–12 mask mandate by announcing a Public Health Order “requiring all individuals aged two and older to wear masks when indoors at public and private K–12 schools.” The subhead of the press release reads “Order reinforces state law SB 1303”, just in case you’d already forgotten his position that the Republican-introduced and bipartisanly-passed SB 1303 currently implies a mask mandate. So weird, but I’m glad we’re now all on the same page, I guess. The text of the Public Health Order carves out some exceptions for eating, exercising (which I think means sports), playing an instrument, and “sincerely held religious objections.” It seems pretty straightforward, and I’m most interested to see what the school districts, like Hanover County’s, who opted to ignore the Governor last week and implement mask-optional policies will do. Kenya Hunter and Mel Leonor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch report that “in response to the mask order by the state, a note to Hanover parents late Thursday afternoon said it was effective immediately for all students, staff and visitors.” If you can stand it, tap through and read some of the absolutely wild and unsurprising quotes from local Republicans. I don’t suggest it solely to make you mad and to get you to send some angry tweets, but to remind you that local and statewide elections have big and serious consequences. I did not vote for Terry McAuliffe in the primary, but I will happily vote for him in November over the republican candidate who—for stupid political reasons—actively argues against solid public health guidance and puts people’s lives at risk during an actual pandemic.
Ooooo exciting data stuff! The Census Bureau released new 2020 data, which will help support Virginia’s redistricting work, but also gives us changes in population at the county level. Since 2010, Richmond’s population increased by 22,396 to 226,610 (+11%); Henrico’s population increased by 27,454 to 334,389 (+8.9%); and Chesterfield’s population increased by 48,312 to 364,548 (+15.3%). I’m sure as more interesting data gets released we’ll have more interesting analysis by some of our local data humans. Get to work, data humans!
VPM’s Ian M. Stewart reports that the Chesterfield County School Board adopted new policies protecting transgender students. Students should now be able to go by their chosen pronouns and “access restrooms based on their gender identity.” It’s good to adopt policies like this, but it still bums me out that the policies even need to exist in the first place.
Because I must, Sarah Vogelsong at the Virginia Mercury looks into the state of combined sewer overflow systems across the Commonwealth and how the new ARPA money will put a “meaningful dent” into updating that old 19th-century technology. In Richmond we have about a billion dollars worth of problems to solve (not an exaggeration), so we’ll be at this work for a long, long time. Honestly, I feel pretty jealous of Lynchburg, who will use the new federal relief money to finish off updates to their infrastructure in less than five years.
This morning's longread
Shall We Abandon Shall?
Fellow nerds, here’s a lawyer writing about what the word “shall” means. I think you’ll enjoy it!
Reflect on how we, as a profession, landed in this semantic snarl of shalls in our documents. Here’s how I reconstruct it. If you grew up in this country, you grew up without shall as part of your working vocabulary. You encountered shall in some of your reading, but you never used it. You did well in school and ultimately enrolled in law school, where you were bombarded by shalls in statutes and contracts. You intuited that shall is “the drafting verb” that makes legal instruments precise. In fact, it does the opposite. In most legal instruments, shall violates the presumption of consistency: Words are presumed to have a consistent meaning in clause after clause, page after page. Which is why shall is among the most heavily litigated words in the English language (with hopelessly inconsistent court holdings).
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