Good morning, RVA! It’s 72 °F, and today still looks hot. However! NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says that despite highs in the mid 90s, “a notable drop in humidity midday will make it feel decent.” I will totally accept decent after the last couple of muggy days! After today’s decent weather, though, you can expect the humidity to return and nearly triple-digit highs to move in over the weekend. Stay safe out there, make good heat-related decisions, drink tons of water, and have a great weekend.
Water cooler
It’s another week at a high COVID-19 Community level for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield. That means everyone, regardless of vaccination status, should wear a mask in indoors public spaces. As of last night, the 7-day average of cases per 100,000 people in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield was: 243, 269, and 259, respectively. The 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people was 11.1 across the region. While Richmond and the surrounding localities hit and got stuck at a high level weeks ago, most of the Commonwealth has now joined them, with just a handful of localities (eight maybe?) still in the cool, refreshing green of a low Community Level. It definitely sucks to be on this plateau (autocorrect wanted “sucks to be on this plague” there, which, sure, that too). As everyone and their sister knows at this point, everyone and their sister is now eligible for a COVID-19 vaccination (including sisters as young as 6 months old!). Even at this late point in the pandemic, the best thing you can do to keep yourself and your loved ones safe is make sure everyone is up-to-date on their COVID-19 vaccinations. It’s free, easy, and does a lot of the work of keeping you out of the hospital—which is neither free nor easy. Find a convenient vaccination appointment near you today: vaccines.gov.
As we get used to life in this stage of the pandemic, settled in on this current plateau, how do we evaluate risk? What data can we look at? What data even exists at the moment? Emily Oster had a good post from earlier this week that doesn’t really answer those questions, but at least got me noodling on how to think about these sorts of questions. To quote a bit: “You are now in a world where COVID is some risk more or less all the time, and you probably will not have much more than a vague sense of the size of the risk. Given that, what kind of long-term precautions do you want to take?…I don’t imagine everyone will come down in the same way on these questions. Comfort with COVID risk differs for many reasons. But at this point I think the question you need to ask is: What behaviors am I willing to undertake long-term to avoid infection? This question is sort of a bummer, since it recognizes that there isn’t some moment when COVID will be gone, but it also lets you off the hook from re-making these choices every time.” The anxiety and fatigued caused be newly evaluating each and every situation as it pops up is so real! And while I don’t know that I have my own framework yet for what sort of risks I’m willing to take, I do know that figuring it out at some point will make my day-to-day life a lot more pleasant.
