How COVID-19 could evolve | Morning Newsletter
And, a city landmark gets a new home.
The Morning Newsletter
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Good morning from The Inquirer newsroom.
First: The prediction that COVID-19 will become less deadly but indelible fits with history.
Then: Maja, a bronze artwork, will be freed from storage today and installed in her own small, simple park.
And: Roughly 9,000 Philly teachers and other staffers have been vaccinated and thousands more are eligible as some Philly schools prepare to open Monday.
— Tommy Rowan (@tommyrowan, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)
The consensus is clear: Herd immunity won’t be the end of COVID-19.
Almost 90% of coronavirus experts who were surveyed in January thought the virus is likely to persist but will evolve into a milder “endemic” form, taking hold in pockets of the globe and sticking around indefinitely.
Half of the experts doubted that the virus can be permanently eradicated even from regions with high vaccine coverage and public health measures such as masking.
These predictions fit with the history of infectious diseases that originate in animals and jump to humans.
Read on for Marie McCullough’s story on the evolution of COVID-19.
Today, Maja returns to the sunlight.
The 7-foot-tall statue, whose creator is well-known in Europe as one of the shapers of 20th-century sculpture, graced the terrace of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for decades. In the early 1990s, however, the museum renovated the entire east terrace, and Maja was removed and trundled off to storage.
Until today, when she will reemerge and be installed in her own park — Maja Park — at 22nd Street in front of the Park Towne Place apartment complex.
Read on for Stephan Salisbury’s story on Maja’s climb back into the light.
Where can you get a vaccine in the Philly area if you’re eligible? Use our lookup tool and find out.
Here are the updated coronavirus case numbers, as COVID-19 spreads in the region.
What you need to know today
Every educator who works in Philadelphia and wants the COVID-19 vaccine can be inoculated by the end of the month, the district says.
Officials in the Philadelphia suburbs were frustrated Thursday after the Pennsylvania Department of Health rescheduled a planned call to discuss their vaccine allotments. The department is investigating the extent to which the suburbs may have been shortchanged in the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine.
The Philadelphia school board voted Thursday to deny proposals to open five new charter schools. The board hasn’t approved any new charters since 2018.
Philadelphia City Council on Thursday passed legislation to increase transparency and oversight of vaccine distributors after the city’s controversial ill-fated partnership with Philly Fighting COVID.
The Delaware County District Attorney’s Office is investigating the potential loss of millions of dollars from the Chester Upland School District after district officials reported what may have been a cyberhack of money it typically gets from the state.
For nearly 15 years, writes architecture critic Inga Saffron, the historic Strawberry Mansion house where jazz great John Coltrane composed his most groundbreaking music has been hanging on by a thread. Now the remainder of the handsome, late 19th Century rowhouses on North 33rd Street might not be around much longer, which could seriously compromise the integrity of one of the most significant Black history sites in Philadelphia.
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That’s interesting
❄️ For all the well-publicized adventures in the years since — high-profile romances and breakups, job changes, costly encounters with the Eastern European scam artists who drugged him in Miami Beach — a blown forecast 20 years ago is what people remember most about John Bolaris.
🏀 The Sixers’ Joel Embiid called out our own reporter Keith Pompey for suggesting the NBA center was playing scared. Pompey was flattered.
🥡 Food critic Craig LaBan suggests heading to these Northeast Philadelphia restaurants for takeout dishes from around the world.
Opinions
“A lot can sure change in a half-century. In March 1971, a majority of citizens trusted the U.S. government and many revered the FBI and its powerful but aging long-time leader, J. Edgar Hoover. But the length and carnage of the war in Southeast Asia — which claimed more than 58,000 American lives and killed far more Vietnamese civilians — also inspired a brand of civil disobedience in which some anti-war activists took radical actions that might seem shocking to 21st century Americans,” writes columnist Will Bunch as he reflects on the 50th anniversary of a group of burglars breaking into a small Media FBI office, and stealing thousands of files that exposed the extent of government spying on anti-Vietnam War activists.
Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium’s 24-hour clinic is not a feel-good story, writes Amadee Braxton. The vaccine rollout, Braxton argues, is a story of systemic racism.
The Inquirer asked City Commissioner Omar Sabir and independent poll worker Ryan Godfrey to debate: Should Philly’s election workers be nonpartisan?
What we’re reading
After pressure from families in Cecil, a small town in Southwestern Pennsylvania that has become a hub of the natural-gas industry, the state has launched studies into whether fracking can be linked to local illnesses, writes Eliza Griswold in the New Yorker.
Pennsylvania’s native elk herd was hunted to extinction by the mid-1800s. In the early 1900s, the state game commission began importing breeds of the large deer from the mushrooming herds at Yellowstone National Park. Now, more than 1,400 elk have turned a rural Elk County town into something of a tourist attraction.