Good morning, RVA: COVID-19 guidance, homelessness, and women’s basketball

The new guidance still asks that you don’t spit in anyone’s mouth, or
whatever.

Good morning, RVA! It's 53 °F, and today’s a wet one. You should expect a better-than-average chance of rain starting at 10:00 AM, that then continues on through my bed time (which, admittedly, is earlier for me than it is for a lot of folks). Temperatures continue to hang around 60 °F, and I continue to have a hard time choosing between sneakers and boots.

Water cooler

COVID-19 news! It’s been a minute! This past Friday, CDC announced new respiratory virus guidance that applies to COVID-19, flu, and RSV. The first big shift here is moving to a combined and simplified guidance—regardless of which nasty respiratory virus has taken over your body. I think this makes a lot of sense, mostly because regular people cannot and will not keep multiple similar-but-different sets of public health guidance in their brains. Additionally, access to testing is not as good as it has been in the past, and, for a lot of different reasons, folks are just not testing when they get sick and have no idea what they’re sick with.

The second big shift is a change in what you do when you do get sick. Previously, CDC recommended isolating for five days after a positive COVID-19 test, which for a lot of folks—because of Capitalism and America and a lot of men wearing suits sitting in board rooms—is simply impossible to do. It’s an incredible challenge to strike a balance between guidance that’s science-based and keeps the most people safe and guidance that actual humans will actually follow. I appreciate the need to find a new—but still imperfect—way to do both of those things. Here’s what CDC has come up with:

You can go back to your normal activities when, for at least 24 hours, both are true:
Your symptoms are getting better overall, and
You have not had a fever (and are not using fever-reducing medication).

When you go back to your normal activities, take added precaution over the next 5 days, such as taking additional steps for cleaner air, hygiene, masks, physical distancing, and/or testing when you will be around other people indoors.

So, in plain English, without the bullet points: Stay home when you’re sick (with any respiratory crud!), and, after your symptoms improve and you no longer have a fever, you can reemerge into the world. For the next five days, though, make sure you wear a mask and stay out of people’s personal space. Don’t spit in anyone’s mouth, or whatever.

There’s lots of science behind these two big shifts, and Katelyn Jetelina at Your Local Epidemiologist does a really nice job of explaining it all. Or, heck, read it for yourself, straight from CDC here.

Homeward, our regional organization responsible for planing and coordinating homelessness services, released their winter Point in Time count of the number of people experiencing homelessness in our region. From the press release: “The January 2024 PIT count recorded 681 people experiencing homelessness, which is essentially unchanged (only 1.3 percent lower) from the PIT count in January 2023. The number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness – those who were staying outdoors, in cars, and other places not meant for habitation – rose by 9.6 percent to 206 people in January 2024.” Tap through the previous link to see an infographic with a few more data points. You’ll find no surprises in the reasons folks surveyed give for the causes of homelessness: “Economic hardship and housing loss are leading causes of homelessness, according to those surveyed as part of the PIT count. More than 51 percent of respondents cited cost of housing, unemployment, or eviction as the primary reason they are experiencing homelessness.”

Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul William has a new column out. I think all I need to do is quote the first sentence at you, and you’ll know what to do from there: “To understand the Supreme Court’s undermining of the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, it might help to view Donald Trump as the second coming of Jefferson Davis..“

Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports that the last privately-owned piece of Mayo Island—a tiny, quarter-acre square of land adjacent to the bridge—has hit the market with an asking price of $1.65 million. After all the work the City put in to acquiring the rest of the island, I don’t really see them ponying up another million and a half dollars to get this last remaining bit. So maybe it’s destined for private ownership, although I’m not really sure what you could put on a quarter-acre lot in the middle of a river? A bike shop? A bait store? I have no idea, but I bet whatever happens, it’ll cost a lot to build it right smack in the middle of the floodplain.

Today, the A-10’s 2024 Women’s Basketball Championship kicks off at 12:00 PM in the very new and very nice Henrico Sports & Events Center. Both the Spiders and the Rams have both played well this season and earned the tournament’s first and second seeds respectively. UR will take on the winner of Loyola Chicago and Fordham at 11:00 AM on Friday and VCU will face the winner of Duquesne and either La Salle or Massachusetts at 5:00 PM on Friday. Tickets are just $15, and this would make for an excellent way to spend a Friday evening! If I hadn’t just spent the last four weekends of my life at sports and events centers across the East Coast watching youth volleyball, you’d for sure find me cheering on the Rams this coming Friday. The championship game will take place on Sunday at 4:00 PM, and you can watch that over on ESPN2.

This morning's longread
Everybody has to self-promote now. Nobody wants to.

I don’t know how it works in the music or visual arts side of the creative world, but the handful of brave folks I know trying to make a go at a career of writing have all said things similar to this piece in Vox. So much of that work is not, you know, writing, but doing whatever it takes to cultivate a Personal Brand so the industry’s gatekeepers will take you seriously. Sounds absolutely exhausting while simultaneously boring.

The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from 9-to-5 middle managers to astronauts to housecleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. For some, it looks like updating your LinkedIn connections whenever you get promoted; for others, it’s asking customers to give you five stars on Google Reviews; for still more, it’s crafting an engaging-but-authentic persona on Instagram. And for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record, it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist. We like to think of it as the work of singular geniuses whose motivations are purely creative and untainted by the market — this, despite the fact that music, publishing, and film have always been for-profit industries where formulaic, churned-out work is what often sells best. These days, the jig is up.

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Picture of the Day

Taps sign.