🍴 Good morning, RVA: Six prongs against COVID, an empty void, and a new album

Good morning, RVA! It’s 58 °F, and today’s weather looks wonderful. Expect highs in the 80s, sunshine, and six or seven reasons to knock off of work early to spend some time on the porch.
 

Water cooler

Yesterday evening, President Biden announced a six-pronged strategy to decrease the spread of the Delta variant and get as many people vaccinated as possible. The headlining prong is probably the Department of Labor requiring all employers with 100 or more employees to institute a vaccination mandate (or require employees to “produce a negative test result on at least a weekly basis before coming to work”). As you can imagine, this would impact a ton of employees, and will mostly likely lead to a ton of vaccine-holdouts getting jabbed up. Vaccine hesitancy become a lot less academic and a lot more cold-hard-reality when you have to find time in your schedule to get tested each and every week. The federal government will also require employer to give paid time off “for the time it takes for workers to get vaccinated or to recover if they are under the weather post-vaccination,” which should address another huge reason some folks remain unvaccinated—they just can’t afford to skip work for it. Other interesting presidential prongs: Requiring healthcare workers at facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid to get vaccinated, same for Head Start staff, asking large entertainment venues to require proof of vaccination, calling on states to adopt vaccine requirements for all school employees, and turning on the Defense Production Act to help make more at-home tests available (and more affordable). I love almost all of this stuff and appreciate the clever work that went in to developing a plan to move as many people toward vaccination as possible—even in the face of some obstinate, anti-science state governments.
 

Eric Kolenich at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has an important monument update and one of the better headlines this week: “‘It’s not the void they hoped it would be': 1890 time capsule under Lee statue could not be found.” The chief comms guy for the Governor’s office, Grant Neely, also has one of the better quotes of the week: “After a long hard day, it’s clear the time capsule won’t be found—and Virginia is done with lost causes…The search for this moldy Confederate box is over. We’re moving on.” Also, a less fun update from this article, “The state hasn’t decided when it will remove the black perimeter fence it installed in January.” I’m pretty sure we were all told the fence was going up in preparation for the monument’s removal. Now that it’s removed, it’s entirely unacceptable to leave that horrible fence up permanently or even “temporarily.”
 

Also on the monument tip, WRIC reports that the City “has reached an agreement with the family of former Confederate general A.P. Hill to relocate the monument and remains of Hill to a cemetery in Culpeper.” Sounds like the Mayor will introduce an ordinance next week to get City Council’s sign off, and then we can start having conversations on how to make Hermitage & Laburnum Richmond’s very first protected intersection.
 

FYI! GRTC will implement their fall service updates on Sunday, so make sure you give it a look if you plan on taking the bus next week. Cool/interesting changes: the #3 has been renamed from “Jefferson Davis” to “Route 1”; the #3B and the #111 have merged so you can now take a single bus from Highland Park on the Northside all the way to Brightpoint Community College (previously John Tyler) in Chesterfield County; and the #20 no longer jogs over into Scott’s Addition and instead stays on Arthur Ashe Boulevard. I like that this bus update included two references to renaming things previously named for racists.
 

The 2021 James River Week kicks off tomorrow! Tap through the previous link for an enormous list of things to do, see, learn, and generally celebrate our wonderful, wet Central Park (to borrow a 10-year-old phrase). If I could point to just one event, I think I’d pick the James River Park System Task Force’s monthly habitat restoration project at Chapel Island, helping to remove invasive species (on September 13th). Less “fun” than paddling around the river gawking at eagles, I guess, but, still important so we have other beautiful things to gawk at and not just gross piles of kudzu or whatever.
 

Local musician Matthew E. White’s newest album, K Bay, dropped today, and you should check it out (Apple Music, Spotify). Due to the way album releases work now, I’ve had the singles on repeat for the last couple months and can fully attest to their grooviness. Make it your Friday jams!
 

This morning’s longread

Inside the Tombs of Saqqara

No burnout, no COVID, no social media—today’s longread is strictly about mummies.
 

His approach paid off. In December 2018, Waziri announced the discovery of a 4,400-year-old tomb, intact and ornately carved, that belonged to a high-ranking priest named Wahtye. The next season yielded intriguing caches of animal mummies—not just cats but a cobra, a lion cub, a mongoose and even a scarab beetle. Then, in September 2020, the team unearthed a vertical shaft dug 30 feet down into the bedrock, the first of the “megatombs.” In separate niches at the bottom were two giant coffins, and when the archaeologists cleared the surrounding debris they found dozens more. “I had to call the [antiquities] minister,” says Waziri. “He asked me, ‘How many?’” Eighteen months later, Waziri is still counting.
 

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Picture of the Day