🟡 Good morning, RVA: COVID-19 Medium, great interviews, and history standards

Good morning, RVA! It’s 37 °F and cloudy and that’s probably the weather for the first half of today. Later this afternoon, though, the sun will come out and lead us into a generally bright and chilly weekend. Alert! Temperatures tonight and early Saturday morning look downright cold, so make sure you drip your faucets (or whatever other sub-freezing rituals you may have)!
 

Water cooler

As of last night, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield continue to have medium CDC COVID-19 Community Levels. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 70, 165, and 127, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 13.2. Other than a quick spike to high a couple weeks back, our region has lived on a fairly consistent plateau of medium for nearly nine months at this point. While the situation on the ground hasn’t changed much, there are a couple upcoming COVID-19 policy changes that’ll impact how we (like, our country) responds to the waning pandemic. First, President Biden announced that he’d let the COVID-19 emergency declaration expire on May 11th. This will have some administrative, funding-type impacts, and, notably, will have the costs of COVID-19 vaccinations transfer over to folks’ health insurance plans. I’m not smart enough to know all the nitty-gritty about what else will happen when the emergency declaration ends, but I’m sure we’ll see more reporting on it in the coming months. Second, the FDA voted to “harmonize” the COVID-19 vaccines so they’re all using the newer bivalent recipe. This way, even if you’re just now ready to get your first shot (or maybe you’re new to the world), you’d get a bivalent doses, protecting you against the more recent strains of the virus. I’m into this and how it simplifies both the number of available vaccines and the decisions families have to make when deciding to get vaccinated. I can’t wait for the days when we all just get our updated COVID-19 shot in the fall alongside our flu shots, and I don’t have to write an entire paragraph about it every Friday!
 

Richmond Public Schools is putting together some really great interviews with students during Black History Month that you should check out over on their Instagram. Imani Adewale, a senior from Armstrong High School who’s now a published author, and Jackson and Cassidy, members of RPS’s first Battle of the Brains team (also from Armstrong!), talk about why it’s important for them to celebrate each other during Black History Month. Young people! So inspiring! I love this type of thing and will be checking back in for the rest of the month.
 

Nathaniel Cline at the Virginia Mercury reports that “the Virginia Board of Education voted to accept for first review the newest draft of Virginia’s hotly debated history and social science standards Thursday on a 5–3 vote.” I officially forget which version of the standards we’re on at this point, so I understand why it sounds like folks on the Board are tired and ready to move on. Cline says public hearings will being on March 13th with final approval coming on April 20th.
 

I only link to it because of yesterday’s natural-gas-related longread, but Patrick Larsen at VPM reports on a Republican mostly-troll bill floating around the General Assembly that would prevent localities from banning future natural gas hook ups. First, banning natural gas in new construction is exactly the type of thing we should be doing (along with electrifying everything we can get our hands on). Second, this is yet another great example of how, in a Dillon Rule state where localities are at the mercy of the state-level lawmakers, all the Republican frothing over limited and local government sort of evaporates into thin air.
 

I don’t know why, but I love pictures of the demolition of big structures. Via /r/rva two shots of the ongoing destruction of Virginia Center Commons.
 

This morning’s longread

Jelly Is Ready for Its Redemption Arc

Is it though?
 

This gelatin revival is long in the works, at least in the West. Since 2007, the British duo Sam Bompas and Harry Parr have spearheaded the niche of elaborate and immersive jelly art, despite receiving early feedback that artisanal jelly was “ludicrous.” Also influential is the Facebook group Show Me Your Aspics, started in 2016; today, that group has 46,000 members. (The offshoot Facebook group Aspics with threatening auras offers photos of grotesque gelatins, like hot dogs suspended in jellied hot dog water). Around 2019, with Show Me Your Aspics as inspiration, Albala started making and posting creations like a jelly lobster, jellied pho tartare, jelly with lutefisk and clams in an abalone shell, and a relatively tame spiced wine jelly, eventually becoming an “aspic influencer,” as Salon once put it.
 

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Picture of the Day

Totally regular bathroom stuff.