Aside from the dreary, rainy weather, it almost felt like a normal Memorial Day weekend in New England – with the return of congested highways and traffic backups.
Traffic on the Maine Turnpike was up over 66% from last year s holiday weekend – when COVID travel restrictions remained in place – but still fell short of pre-pandemic numbers.
Nationally, AAA Travel had predicted more than 37 million people would travel 50 miles or more from their homes between May 27 and May 31. In New England alone, AAA Northeast estimated 1.6 million people would travel by car in the six-state region. People who booked trips weren t about to give them up just because of a little rain, Mark Schieldrop, public affairs specialist for AAA Northeast, said this week. There s a lot of pent-up travel demand.
The Great Eastern Brood, widely referred to as Brood X, is surfacing after 17 years underground. This particular brood of cicadas was last seen in 2004, and is most likely to be spotted this spring and early summer across 15 states – Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia – according to the University of Connecticut s cicada mapping project called Cicadas @ UCONN.
Are there cicadas in New England?
New England will miss the takeover of Brood X this year, but it s slated to see two other 17-year broods in the next nine years.
As of May 29, there will be no statewide mask mandates remaining in New England, following the new Centers for Disease Control guidance around fully vaccinated people relaxing the use of masks indoors.
Per the agency s new direction, those who are fully vaccinated can shed their masks in most indoor settings, and many states have followed suit in amending their statewide mask mandates. Fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance, the CDC now says in new federal guidance issued last week.
This story is being provided for free as part of a series on childcare during the COVID pandemic, powered by the Solutions Journalism Network and dedicated to delivering solution-oriented stories about problems our community is facing.
Parents and guardians were forced to become ad-hoc teachers when schools shut down last March, and for many, their algebra and geometry chops were rusty.
They weren t able to aid their kids math pursuits at home – fractions, decimals, linear equations – in the same way they could reading. It wasn t only due to a lack of remembrance from their own schooling days, but an overall discomfort with math in general that existed pre-pandemic.
New England states saw both rises and falls in new unemployment claims for the week ending May 8, as many industries remain desperate for workers.
New Hampshire and Connecticut saw new unemployment claims increase, while Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont and Maine saw dips, pointing to an ongoing unequal recovery across the region.
Nationally, unemployment claims across the U.S. dropped to 473,000 last week, down 34,000 claims from 507,000 the week prior on a seasonally adjusted basis.
What does the labor shortage look like nationwide?
Many industries are continuing to find themselves desperately in need of workers, especially service industries, as some frame the narrative around people choosing to stay on unemployment to receive $300 bonus benefits lasting through September.