Good morning, RVA! It's 23 °F, and today looks cold! Dig through your drawer for the warmest, woolest socks because you should expect highs to settle in right around freezing. Temperatures warm up a bit tomorrow and then drop again over the weekend. I think we're in winter!
Water cooler
Here are this week's all-time graphs of hospitalizations and deaths in Virginia due to COVID-19. While cases are skyrocketing, hospitalizations in the Commonwealth have increased at a much slower rate, not yet reaching the numbers we saw this past fall. It's fascinating to toggle between the cases and hospitalization graphs and see how the peaks of Winter '20, Fall '21, and Winter '22 _do_ line up, but they don't match in order of magnitude at all. This current wave we're riding just isn't sending as many Virginians to the hospital—either because so many folks are vaccinated, Omicron is less severe, or both. This doesn't mean everything is lovely and we can return to the blissful life-that'll-never-again-be of 2019; a smaller percentage of a huger number is still going to be a big number, a number that could quickly incapacitate our hospital systems. So! Keep yourself and yours out of the hospital by following the same ol' boring advice: Stay up-to-date on your COVID-19 vaccinations, wear a N95 or KN95 mask, get tested if you can, and stay home if you're sick.
Outgoing-Governor Northam gave his final COVID-19 briefing yesterday, announcing that he'd declared a 30-day State of Emergency to mostly allow hospitals to increase their capacity during the Omicron wave. Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury has the details. I've grown accustom to watching Northam announce darkly important coronanews in his whistley Eastern Shore drawl and am interested to see if Governor-elect Youngkin will hold similar briefings and, if so, how they will change in tone and tenor. NBC12's Henry Graff got the incoming governor's supportive statement on Northam's executive order—a surprise since his transition team typically doesn't have a statement on much of anything.
Well, I did pretty well with my City Council prediction yesterday. As foretold, Council adopted the ordinances accepting the Lee Monument and circle from the state (ORD. 2021-351) and the creating the Office of Sustainability (ORD. 2021-348), plus they continued the increasingly old list of haphazard Richmond 300 amendments (RES. 2021-R026). The one I wasn't sure about—ORD. 2021-308 or, in Friends parlance, "The One That Would Have Funded Design Work For a George Wythe High School Replacement"—they decided to continue that until their January 24th meeting. Out of this set of things, I'm most immediately excited for the Office of Sustainability and to see what they get up to with a little more freedom given their new place in the City's orgchart.
Also on the Council beat, the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Chris Suarez says City Council approved a new, March 28th redistricting timeline after one of the City's lawyers "recommended more time for residents to help draw the map." I don't imagine the districts will change all that much, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get involved! Expect some public meetings, engagement opportunities, and a 30-day comment period later this month.
Speaking of sustainability, make sure you take this month's RVAgreen 2050 flash survey. This one's about community engagement, which is timely given all 600 of the projects—including RVAgreen 2050—that the City has going on at the moment. It'll take you less than two minutes to fill out. I just did it between writing this sentence and the previous one!
Finally, this gray skyline photo from Rocketts Landing, via /r/rva, hit just right on this cold, wintery morning.
This morning's longread
Paige Bueckers, a College Athlete Who’s Cashing In
I don't know what kind of impact college sports' name, image, and likeness stuff will have, but I bet it will be big!
Bueckers is the latest in a long line of UConn women’s basketball superstars, and no matter what she does on the court, she’ll probably never surpass Diana Taurasi—the GOAT—or Breanna Stewart, who led the Huskies to four titles in four years. Off the floor, though, Bueckers is a revolutionary. She’s among the most notable to capitalize on new NCAA measures after the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic June 21 ruling struck down the organization’s antitrust immunity and opened the door for players to profit. Bueckers and all other college athletes are now free to seek financial compensation for use of their name, image, and likeness, or NIL, three little letters that have transformed the business of college sports.
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