Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 38. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 5:49 PM, for 11h 25m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 67.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM, and the Whitewater Fire Department holds a business meeting via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes the 32nd President of the United States. He was the last president to be inaugurated on March 4.
Recommended for reading in full —
Molly Beck reports As Republicans welcome maskless crowd, Democrats say those following COVID-19 precautions are essentially shut out of government process:
We are nearly a year into this pandemic, and this is what we are seeing in the state capitol today: no masks, no social distancing, and no safety precautions for the staff who have no choice but to be in the building. This is reckless and dangerous. pic.twitter.com/Q7ic76xP2y
— Senator Melissa Agard (@senator_melissa) March 3, 2021
MADISON – Assembly leaders packed dozens of maskless adults and children into a small hearing room in the Wisconsin State Capitol on Wednesday in the latest sign that Republicans who control the legislative process do not plan to adopt COVID-19 mitigation rules.
The crowd of people gathering together without face masks is again ringing alarm bells for Democratic lawmakers who say the behavior puts Capitol workers’ health at risk and discourages people from participating in the democratic process.
“This is not allowing the public who wants to be able to engage with government to be able to engage with government in a safe way,” Sen. Melissa Agard, D-Madison, said Wednesday.
The lack of face masks pushed at least one Democratic member of the committee who is not fully vaccinated to avoid the meeting and watch the proceedings by livestream.
Alexis Madrigal writes A Simple Rule of Thumb for Knowing When the Pandemic Is Over:
“The question is not when do we eliminate the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Rather, it’s when do we have the virus sufficiently under control? “We’ll have a much, much lower case count, hospitalization count, death count,” Offit said. “What is that number that people are comfortable with?” In his view, “the doors will open” when the country gets to fewer than 5,000 new cases a day, and fewer than 100 deaths.
That latter threshold, of 100 COVID-19 deaths a day, was repeated by other experts, following the logic that it approximates the nation’s average death toll from influenza. In most recent years, the flu has killed 20,000 to 50,000 Americans annually, which averages out to 55 to 140 deaths a day, said Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “This risk was largely considered acceptable by the public,” Eisenberg said. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Francisco, made a similar calculation. “The end to the emergency portion of the pandemic in the United States should be heralded completely by the curtailing of severe illness, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19,” she said. “Fewer than 100 deaths a day—to mirror the typical mortality of influenza in the U.S. over a typical year—is an appropriate goal.”
See Mars, Betelgeuse, Jupiter and Saturn in March 2021: