Good morning, RVA: Omicron arriveth, teen boosters, and capping the highway

Make a plan to get boosted today!

Good morning, RVA! It's 39 °F, and today's a bit warmer than the past couple of days. You can expect highs in the mid 50s with a chance of rain this evening. Temperatures go way up tomorrow—like, in the 70s—but so does the possibility for a winter thunderstorm. Looks like Saturday afternoon might be a great time catch up on your ever-growing queue of horror films (or is that just me?).

Water cooler

As foretold, Omicron has reached Virginia. The Virginia Department of Health announced last night that "the first confirmed case of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) has been identified in a sample from an adult resident of the Northwest Region of Virginia who had no history of international travel, but did have a history of domestic travel, during the exposure period." We still don't know a lot about Omicron, although that it is more transmissible than Delta seems pretty clear, but that doesn't change the current best practices to keep our friends and families safe and healthy: Get vaccinated, get boosted, get tested if you feel sick or have been exposed to COVID-19, and wear a mask indoors. Over the next couple of weeks a lot could change, but those four things will still be true and, honestly, pretty easy to do. In fact, if you're not yet boosted, why don't you make an appointment today at your local pharmacy or plan to walk up to one of the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts' vaccination events?

Speaking of boosters, yesterday the FDA and the CDC expanded booster eligibility to everyone aged 16 and older. That means 16- and 17-year-olds who are at least six months out from their second Pfizer dose can now get a Pfizer booster dose. Remember: Because only the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is authorized for children, that's the only booster children can get. No mixing-and-matching for the youth! Also, if you're making teen booster plans this morning, make sure you have some patience with the pharmacy, health district, or nurses you interact with. The booster guidance just changed last night, and I'm sure there's still some operational pieces for folks to put in place.

Things are moving quickly on the proposed plan to cap I-95/64 and reconnect the north and south sides of Jackson Ward—way quicker than I even thought possible! Yesterday, the Governor announced that VDOT and the City of Richmond will conduct a "a feasibility study to assess infrastructure options to reconnect the historic Jackson Ward neighborhood." I imagine that a feasibility study is necessary to apply for—or at least increases our changes of winning—one of those new Secretary Mayor Pete grants specifically set up to reconnect neighborhoods torn apart by Urban Renewal highways. I imagine community engagement during this feasibility study will be a critical part in the later application for federal funding, so keep an eye out for ways folks can get involved. In the meantime, the City's Department of Planning & Development Review has already set up a page on their website where you can follow along with the project's progress.

Also in gov news, Northam continued his "Thank You, Virginia" tour yesterday and announced new funding for the Commonwealth's Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The two public HBCU's, Virginia State University and Norfolk State University, will receive big increases to their operating and construction budgets, while the Governor is also proposing increasing Tuition Assistance Grants for students attending "private colleges, including HBCUs." Also, high-fives to the person who put together the graph at the bottom of the aforelinked news release, it does a great job at illustrating how the Governor has impacted HBCU funding over his term and through his final budget. The standard caveat about Youngkin and the new General Assembly having their way with this final budget still applies, of course.

Let's skip all the talk comparing the real estate tax rates across localities in our region. Each locality is very different and has different challenges to address, and, because of some racist decisions decades ago, some localities have lots of land and an expanding tax base and some localities are landlocked and legally unable to expand. ANYWAY. Jessica Nocera at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on Henrico's plan to issue real estate tax rebates to homeowners, which I think is an interesting idea. Of course, I think the County should instead invest that money back into public services which benefit everyone (even people who don't own homes, gasp!), but issuing a rebate is a heckuva lot easier than raising the tax rate should the financial picture change down the road.

No new news in this update on the new redistricting maps from Patrick Larsen at VPM, but I love this sentence about how Rep. Spanberger was drawn out of her district: "Spanberger did not respond to VPM’s requests for comment on the draft map or her plans for the future, but she is able to submit public comment to the state Supreme Court."

This morning's longread
Largest-Ever Flying Animal Jumped 8 Feet Into the Air Before Liftoff

My gift to you this Friday is this artist rendering of the silliest dinosaur I've ever seen.

Figuring out how Quetzalcoatlus took off, however, has proven difficult, as only a few dozen bones of the larger species, Quetzalcoatlus northropi, have ever been discovered. But because hundreds of bones exist for the smaller version, the team was able to create a partial reconstruction, allowing them to make inferences about the larger one. Previous theories suggested Quetzalcoatlus rocked forward like a bat to achieve flight, or that it built up speed like an albatross, running and frantically flapping its wings to get airborne. The new research suggests Quetzalcoatlus achieved flight through a different means, namely by crouching and then jumping some 8 feet (2.4 meters) into the air. Clear of the surface, Quetzalcoatlus then proceeded to flap its wings.

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