Daybreak Friday 3/27/20

A PLEASURE TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!

Aaaahhh again. "The weather will be dry and uneventful during this timeframe with temperatures pretty close to seasonal normals." Don't you just love it when they say stuff like that? Growing sunnier by the hour, temps reaching toward 50, winds from the northwest. Down to the high 20s tonight. More sun tomorrow, then rain at night. Oliver, whoever you are, what a great idea! Nancy Griffin was out on the rail trail near APD when she snapped this pic of a log decked out with colorfully painted rocks and an equally colorful sign: "Painted rocks by Oliver. Please take one." "I will be leaving one for Oliver this weekend," she writes. "It was delightful to see this—a  sweet message of kindness." Not to mention a badly needed mud-season pick-me-up for the eyes.Okay, let's do the numbers:

Speaking of county-by-county numbers... Unlikely as this seems, the Weather Channel has the most up-to-date stats for the country. That's because it's a subsidiary of IBM, and IBM's using Watson to pull it all together. The link will default to Windsor County, but scroll down to the map, zoom out, and you can find wherever you want. There's a more data-heavy version from IBM here (click on the USA by County tab). Heaviest-hit in the country? Queens, NY. Sununu declares "Stay Home," too. He's ordered all non-essential businesses in NH to stop in-person transactions as of midnight, tonight. And closed the state's beaches, and extended schools' remote-learning until May. "We are not closing borders, transportation; no one will be prevented from leaving their home,” he said at a press conference yesterday. "We are not calling out the National Guard to force people into their homes. You can walk, go to the store, go to work – but beyond essential necessities, stay at home.”Farther down at the same link... The state's congressional delegation, all Democrats, say that federal agencies delayed and mishandled NH's request for emergency medical supplies. A request sat ignored for four days; 16,000 gloves were made of latex, which are "unusable in medical settings" because of allergies; and only a fraction of the masks, swabs, and other supplies needed actually showed up.And in case you were wondering... Here's NH's list of essential services.Phil Scott orders VT schools to remain closed for rest of the academic year. Officially, they'd only been closed until April 6, but in a move that surprised no one last night, the governor said they'll remain shuttered, and ordered districts to come up with distance learning plans by April 13. The order also pulls back on an earlier mandate that school districts provide child care for essential workers; the state now "encourages" them to do so.Meanwhile, nurses are stepping up by the hundreds. Over 500 have responded to the NH's call for retired and current medical staff, WMUR reports. “I am not surprised that hundreds of nurses almost instantly volunteered to step forward,” says Polly Campion, a retired DHMC nurse and state rep. "We don’t know what this is going to look like."All those medical personnel are going to need child care. So Hanover Parks & Rec is helping coordinate for DHMC's employees. "Relieving the stress of finding childcare for medical staff will allow them to focus on meeting the community’s medical needs in this time of crisis," HPR director John Sherman writes. "The hope is that there are willing individuals who are interested in working with the families of the essential medical personnel on a dedicated basis." Here's the link to offer your services — pay rate and schedule gets worked out with the family.Vermont has opened the door to mail-in balloting and other voter-distancing measures. The VN's Tim Camerato surveys the measure passed by the legislature — which Phil Scott has said he'll sign — allowing towns and school districts to abandon floor voting and go to Australian ballots, which will be crucial as school districts prep for annual meetings. It also lets the secretary of state's office require mail-in voting and permit the drive-up collection of ballots. NH towns and districts have fewer options, Camerato notes.So far, no confirmed cases in VT prisons, but they're furloughing prisoners anyway. The idea, reports the VN's Anna Merriman, is to reduce the prison population so that those who remain behind bars can be spread out. So far, the corrections department has released 200 prisoners since late February, half of them in the last week. NH prison officials are still weighing their options for how to proceed.So how — and what — are we doing at home? Or as Seven Days' Eva Sollberger put it for the 608th "Stuck in Vermont": #stuckathome. An 8-minute video filled with people in good humor playing music, cooking together at a distance, ruminating... Definitely check out the ducks around the 4:30 mark. Oh, and yeah -- the guy who shows up early, banging his chest and singing? Jacob Tischler, you've seen him at Northern Stage.The "Granite Geek" rounds up what's known so far about transmission risks. On his blog, David Brooks notes that, as you've probably heard, the virus lasts longest on non-porous surfaces. But a recent New England Journal study found the virus lost half its potency every 66 minutes when exposed to the air — if, that is, it's not protected by a droplet. Those droplets are the biggest risk, especially in the air from a sneeze or cough, hence the six-foot rule. “Right now it’s complicated in grocery.” Grocery store workers are on the front lines, VPR's Peter Hirschfeld reports, and managers are trying to balance keeping them and customers safe while safeguarding public access to food. “I describe this as the leadership challenge of our careers, we hope,” says Kari Bradley, general manager of Montpelier's Hunger Mountain Co-op. They're doing this, Bradley says, without much specific guidance from the state. Food stores, sure. Farmers markets? Not so much. VT's organic farmers' association had been hoping to get the state to agree that markets are "essential services" like groceries. Wednesday night, reports VPR, ag secretary Anson Tebbetts said they're not. “Outdoor markets would likely attract large gatherings that would congregate close together,” he said. “There is risk of person-to-person contact when exchanging goods.” His agency will work with farmers and market managers to help them set up mail, phone, pick-up and delivery services.Vermont Foodbank expects to double its distribution in April. The food bank both distributes food directly to people who need it, through its VeggieVanGo vans, and serves as a supplier to food banks around the state. Typically, it sends out about a million pounds of food in a month; next month, it expects to be closer to 2 million pounds. The most useful contribution you can make? Money, not food, says CEO John Sayles. "We can leverage a dollar a lot better than somebody going to the grocery store."  With economic fallout, Vermont education funding in jeopardy. Non-property tax revenues to the state’s education fund, VTDigger's Lola Duffort writes, are expected to fall between $35 million and $45 million this fiscal year, according to the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office. The picture for the next fiscal year, which begins on July 1, is likely to be worse, but is entirely unpredictable, analyst Mark Perrault told legislators Wednesday. It's also possible that the decision to delay tax filing deadlines will create cash-flow problems for the fund.Payback. You remember how Vermont state Rep. Cynthia Browning on Wednesday forced a quorum call requiring House members to be physically present for a vote? Yesterday, House Speaker Mitzi Johnson stripped her of her seat on the Ways and Means Committee. Browning "unnecessarily required every other member to choose between their duty to Vermont and the health and safety of their communities, peers, and loved ones at home," Johnson wrote in her announcement. "Being a legislator requires that we know the rules. True public service requires the wisdom to know when to use them." 

William Daugherty was out with his drone over Windsor yesterday. He got this still shot of of a glassy Connecticut River, the town laid out below, and Ascutney looming behind.Bethel University? "The funny thing is, no one admits to being the one who came up with that idea." That's Kirk White, a prime force behind the Bethel Revitalization Initiative, which runs BU. It started 7 years ago with 11 classes and 400 registrants; last year, it had over 70 classes and 1,100 people registered, from every state in New England. White talks to Junction Mag's Taylor Long about how BU got there and what makes it tick, the town's dreams, and what it takes to be a "do-ocracy."And in case you were wondering: Yep, college life will go on. Dartmouth offered admission to 1,881 applicants yesterday. That's an acceptance rate of 8.8 percent, the third lowest in the college's history."Somewhere along the line, the stats in your article got messed up by somebody, but I am going to blame you:)." Josh Kahan writes a letter to Daybreak digging into the study behind yesterday's item about doctors and speeding tickets. He notes that internal medicine docs and family physicians are tied for most ticketed, and has a thought about why. The former are "so caught up in incredibly complex thoughts...that they likely can't come up with a good excuse," while the family docs "are simply too nice and don't know how to BS their way out of a ticket." More at the link. Britain's in the middle of an egg crisis right now, not because it has too few eggs, but too few egg cartons. I know, it's far away, but intriguing, right? Europe relies on three carton manufacturers, none in Britain; the closest is shut down for two weeks. So while eggs are rotting in warehouses, they're not making it onto store shelves. "There are plenty of chickens laying plenty of eggs, there are plenty of trucks to deliver them and there is more than enough space on the shelves for them.  But the absence of those small cardboard containers is enough to bring the entire system to a halt," writes blogger Tim Watkins. And there's a dire lesson in that, he says, when supply chains are stretched. 

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KJ forwards a post on the Tunbridge/Chelsea Front Porch Forum that reads, in part: "I will be creating a GIANT SUN today to display on the outside of my home as a sign of HOPE and FRIENDSHIP and OPTIMISM and COMMUNITY and PATIENCE and APPRECIATION and TOLERANCE and GRACE.... I invite others to display homemade suns of any size on their homes in the coming weeks. The sun WILL shine bright again..."

And to take us into the weekend, let's do two great pieces of music:

I picked up my bag, I went lookin' for a place to hideWhen I saw Carmen and the Devil walkin' side by sideI said, "Hey, Carmen, come on let's go downtown"She said, "I gotta go, but my friend can stick around."

See you Monday.

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