Good morning, RVA: HIGH COVID-19 Community Level, evaluating risk, and a patriotic beer belt

I know it's so freaking hot, but you should still be wearing a mask in
indoors public places.

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.

Michael Martz at the RIchmond Times-Dispatch reports on the State's $1.9 billion budget surplus. To that, RPS Superintendent Kamras says, "I never again want to hear that VA doesn't have the money to fully fund our public schools.", and Councilmember Jones says "So you are going to tell me we can't fully fund schools and aid in the ailing infrastructure in many of our cities."

Harry Kollatz Jr. at Richmond Magazine writes about some new improvements coming to Richmond's Slave Trail. I must have missed an agenda item or something becuase this is the first I've heard of it! The Slave Trail's entrance is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it path that branches off of Brander Street on the south side of the river, just under I-95, so these eye-catching improvements sound pretty cool. I'm not sure how the rendering at the top of this piece squares with my mental picture of that part of town, so holler at me if you've got a link to some of the planning documents!

Richard Hayes at RVAHub has some pictures from Paper Tiger, the new comic shop off Forest Hill. Paper Tiger, run by the folks behind Don't Look Back (yeah, the taco place), looks like they'll focus on new issues, collectibles, and toys—don't expect to flip through boxes of old comics. I do love a good comic store, even when most of my comic reading is digital these days.

Axios Richmond's Ned Oliver will bring you up to speed on this year's Flying Squirrels team (which is headed to the playoffs for the first time in almost a decade). Maybe the most important update: Tonight's game-day promotional giveaway is Squirrels-branded "patriotic beer belt." It is exactly what you think it is.

This morning's longread
The Bizarre Bird That’s Breaking the Tree of Life

This piece about the distinct lack of treeness in our common mental model of the tree of evolution reminds me a lot of Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller. I suggest you read both!

In 2016, Alexander Suh, a biologist on the forty-eight-genome team, superimposed all the different gene trees they had generated. The resulting image of the early evolution of modern birds, around the time the dinosaurs went extinct, was not a tidy series of diverging branches but a kind of web or fishnet, whose contours constantly crossed paths. In a paper, Suh urged his colleagues to consider other patterns of evolution—to argue “less about which species tree is ‘correct,’ and more about if there is such a thing” as a traditional tree of life for modern birds.

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