Good morning, RVA! It's 17 °F, and that's too cold for me. If you've got to leave the house this morning, please be careful as I'm sure everything out there is coated in a thin layer of ice just waiting for you to slip-and-fall. Take it slow! Don't become a hilarious .gif! Temperatures should get back above freezing around lunchtime, which should help melt everything back a bit. P.S. Don't forget to shovel your section of the sidewalk if you've got one!
Water cooler
It's been a while, so here are this week's graphs of hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19. If you must, here's the graph of COVID-19 cases, but I'm not really sure what it even means at the moment. Yes, there are a zillion cases—like more than ever before—but it's still not super clear to me how I should use that information to change my behavior. More interesting to me is that the hospitalizations remain at about half their Fall 2021 Delta Wave peak, which seems promising. But! That does not mean hospitals and healthcare workers are doing just fine. Andrew Cain and John Ramsey at the Richmond Times-Dispatch report that VCU Health has postponed "non-urgent surgeries and procedures requiring a hospital bed or donated blood products, due to a surge in COVID-19 cases." Please do not casually stroll over to the emergency room if you're looking for a COVID-19 test. While tests are scarce at the moment, there are other, better options if you are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms.
Looking forward a bit, Katelyn Jetelina (of the Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter) has a state-of-affairs post from yesterday that dives into the "decoupling" of the number of cases vs. the number of hospitalizations we're seeing. Definitely worth a read! It's old advice at this point, but, like a weathered and worn jeans jacket, it only improves with age: Get vaccinated, get your booster, wear a mask, stay home if you're sick, and test if you can.
Finally, over in vaccine land, yesterday the FDA expanded eligibility for Pfizer boosters in a couple of ways. The biggest change: Kids 12–15 are now authorized to get boosted. Additionally, everyone 12 and up need only wait five months after their primary series to get a booster (instead of six months), and third doses (which are not boosters) are available for immunocompromised children aged 5–11. As per the ancient and time-honored ways that we're now all very familiar with, the CDC must review these changes first and then we'll be able to take even the surliest of teens to get boosted at any number of places locally.
For what it's worth, all of yesterday's City Council meetings were cancelled due to the weather. I think this means that the legislation necessary to accept the Lee monument and its circle from the State did not get introduced. Council will, however, meet for a regularly scheduled meeting on January 10th, but that's only five days before Governor-elect Youngkin takes office. While I'm not convinced that Youngkin would intervene in the current plans to gift the statue and circle to the City, I'm not not convinced either. Stay tuned.
RVA Mag has put together the first part of an absolutely critical resource: "Here is a catalog with every good local band we could think of, spread across two articles. There are over 180 bands listed in here all with a link to their music, or to a video." Spend some time with this list, wait patiently for part two, and start adding some albums to your queue!
Via /r/rva, this dark, car-based snow humor. #bancars aside, there are lots of good wintery Richmond pics over on the subreddit this morning. Check 'em out!
This morning's longread
The Year in 41 Debates
The NYT put together this easy-to-scan look back at 2021 by compiling 41 interesting (and dumb) debates we had. This was about as deep as I cared to go in remembering the year that was.
This December, Times Opinion is looking back at the most important — and absurd — debates of 2021. From the urgent conversations we had as a nation to the minor controversies that fascinated us, these are the things that got people talking, and talking, and talking … on Twitter, in the halls of Congress, on campus and at work. Taken together, the 41 responses in this package create a timeline of the year in opinion; we hope they make you think, laugh and discuss, and maybe, just maybe, one of them will change your mind
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
