Winter Storm Warning

Not-quite-snowmageddon imminent! Thus sayeth the National Weather Service, with a Winter Storm Warning now officially up for my neck of the woods:
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I'm actually west of what's expected to be the worst of this storm, with blizzard warnings posted for Boston, southeastern Massachusetts, Capes Ann and Cod, and Martha's Vineyard.

Of course, the seven-day forecast calls for a big warmup towards the end of next week, with high temperatures near or above 50F on Thursday ...

Upgraded to a Blizzard Warning

Whee! Blizzard warnings now up effective tonight!
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It's an upgrade (for some value of "upgrade") from earlier today. The predicted snowfall totals haven't changed, but they've now included "considerable blowing and drifting snow along with near white out conditions at times"; presumably, that's what caused the shift to a blizzard warning.

Still, I'm not overly worried personally; the local power lines are all underground, and we're close enough to the main feeders that an extended outage is awfully unlikely. And I don't have anywhere I need to go for the next couple of days.

Local COVID-19 updates

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Relatively good news today; newly reported deaths, cases and hospitalizations are all down compared to yesterday, as are all four of the seven-day averages (deaths, cases, hospitalizations, and percent-positive). Today's the first time all week that the new cases count went down, which is particularly encouraging. On the other hand, seven thousand plus cases a day is still really bad, and hospitals statewide are still reporting less than ten percent of their non-ICU beds being available. Hopefully tomorrow's blizzard doesn't spawn a bunch of hospitalizations, because there isn't that much room left at the inn.

The town of Acton's current Google Data Studio dashboard is showing 90 active and 2,635 cumulative cases as of January 27. The most recent "newsflash style update" at 7PM on December 21, 2021, the town reported 1538 cumulative cases with 89 individuals in isolation, 1417 recovered and 32 fatalities.