🔫 Good morning, RVA: Omicron updates, a predictable George Wythe delay, and welcome back Style

Good morning, RVA! It’s 30 °F, but, fear not, today’s highs will make their way back into the upper 50s. And then, starting on Thursday, you can expect temperatures in the 60s—maybe even 70s on Saturday.
 

Water cooler

Take a minute and look at this week’s graphs of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19 taken from the Virginia Department of Health’s data dashboard. Last week saw a huge jump in cases, which I’m assuming was due to Thanksgiving gatherings and travel. That’s sixish weeks of increasing case counts, and we’re starting to see that reflected in the hospitalization numbers, which saw a significant bump over the last two weeks (remember, they tend to lag three or four weeks behind cases). Over on the vaccine side of things, 66.4% of all Virginians are fully vaccinated, but just 18.7% have a booster or a third dose. Keep that in mind as you read yesterday’s Omicron Update from Katelyn Jetelina. Here’s a key takeaway for me (and for those of you who have not yet been boosted): “Vaccine effectiveness against Omicron infection was 30–40% after two shots of Pfizer. After a booster, effectiveness increased to 70–80%. This is nothing short of phenomenal. This also probably means that boosters continue to reduce viral transmission.” Sounds mostly good, especially given the wide availability of boosters in our area. Also, please keep in mind that infection does NOT mean the same thing as severe disease or ending up dead! One of the things to keep an eye on in South Africa, the heart of Omicron, will be how many people end up hospitalized due to the new variant. Here’s Jetelina again with a hopeful but realistic take: “The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations in South Africa is remaining low. But we’re coming up on the 3–4 week lag we typically see with hospitalizations, so coming to a conclusion is haphazard.” Hmm less good. Unfortunately, we’re still in the “we need to learn more” phase, which seems like the phase we’ve been in for the entirety of the last two years. We will definitely learn more soon, but, until we do, there is absolutely no reason not to go out and get your booster today if you have not already.
 

As foretold, City Council delayed transferring funds to Richmond Public Schools to pay for designing a replacement for George Wythe High School. Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details. The five-member voting bloc who have pushed the School Board into this mess are certainly a stubborn lot—but so are City Council!—and, in this situation, City Council holds the the power and the purse strings. I have no idea how this will ultimately shake out, but my bet’s on Council wringing a compromise out of the School Board. If it didn’t involve our kids and a crumbling school building, it’d almost be fun to watch.
 

The Supreme Court of Virginia’s newly proposed redistricting maps have included a new 77th House of Delegates district, which, turns out, has no incumbent. Yesterday, 9th District Councilmember Mike Jones announced that he intends to run in the new 77th assuming the new district stays generally the same when the maps are finalized (and assuming that he files his paperwork on time (sorry, I couldn’t help it)). Should Jones win and vacate his Council seat in 2023, we’ll have lost one of our more progressive elected officials. If you know a lovely, progressive person who’d well-represent the 9th in Council Chambers, please talk to them! Now is the time to start recruiting new candidates.
 

Yesterday, the Department of Public Works announced that they completed the foreverlong construction along the Forest Hill Avenue Corridor: “The $13 million federally funded project included improving the road from four lanes to five lanes by installing a raised landscaped median for left turn lanes, construction of a new storm sewer system for improved drainage, new sidewalks, curb and gutters, brick crosswalks, bike lanes, the installation of a new traffic signal, paving and pavement markings, and street light improvements.” The new sidewalks are pretty rad and you know a love a sewer upgrade, but I can’t not point out that in the announcement photos shared by DPW a driver is already driving their car in the bike lane. I get it, this thing was designed a decade ago—before Richmond had come around to the idea of protected bike lanes—but still. The new layout is better, but exactly zero members of my family would feel safe enough to ride their bikes over there.
 

After their purchase by VPM, Style Weekly is back! Brent Baldwin has a welcome-back letter that read a little bit like the farewell letter he never had the chance to write. While you’re there, check out their 2021 Photos of the Year.
 

This morning’s longread

What a Gun Is For

Take this piece in The Atlantic about guns and apply it to almost any policy Republicans publicly support. Theirs is a worldview not to support or compromise or build new things, but to oppose and tear down whatever things put forward by Democrats—to “own the libs.” It’s inherently a bad-faith position, and it’s why arguing the particulars, which Democrats can’t help but do, never gets anywhere.
 

Boebert’s and Massie’s photos suggest that we have moved past the point of a kind of firearm respectability politics. Here, the very meaning of guns is to make liberals hysterical; liberal hysteria is no longer an obstacle to good policy making or even an irritating by-product of the democratic process, but rather the desired outcome of almost all right-wing political rhetoric. It doesn’t matter if the guns make sense for sport shooting, collecting, hunting, or any other plausible pastime beyond killing people or putting pictures on the internet. Their owners don’t intend any confusion on that point. Being photographed for the internet is their raison d’être. If they were just typical-looking guns with potentially reasonable uses kept in a safe, how would they make liberals cry?
 

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Picture of the Day

There’s a fungus among us.