Partial loss of power accident

Today is the hottest day of the year so far. So of course the power is starting to flicker. It's been dropping on and off since around 3:30 this afternoon. At the moment, it's on. However, Eversource (the local utility company) just sent me a message that they are "We are aware of an outage in the area of [my address] affecting approximately 2233 customer(s). Based on our experience with these types of events, we expect to restore power by 07/20 06:45 PM."

I'm guessing this isn't a simple instance of someone knocking down a pole, but rather one or more pieces of infrastructure failing under load. Hopefully it's a reasonably quick fix, once they figure it out. On the other hand, looking at their outage map, there's a whole bunch of outages in the area, so maybe not.

Meanwhile, ARRRGH!

Semilocal COVID update

( Wall-o-text )

Again, no changes to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as far as Massachusetts is concerned. The Commonwealth should be reporting numbers tomorrow; it will be interesting to see just when that appears in the CDC's data. The national seven-day case rate is up again, to 265.7 cases per 100k population per week.

In semi-good news, the Food and Drug Administration has been extending the shelf-lives of many of the at-home COVID tests, based on updated data from the test manufacturers:
( Read more... )

Many of the free tests I got from the government have extended expiration dates, which can be looked up from the FDA's At-Home OTC COVID-19 Diagnostic Tests page.

The town of Acton's current Google Data Studio dashboard is showing 11 active and 3,725 cumulative cases as of July 19. In 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.