We begin tonight with a powerful winter storm impacting millions of Americans across the Northeast. The snow fell fast and winds have been fierce, causing blizzard conditions in some areas. Thousands of flights have been canceled, more than a hundred thousand are without power.
The snow and wind have intensified throughout the day significantly impacting everything from visibility to just general conditions. Here in Boston, there has been more snow today, than the city gets on average the entire month of January. A potentially historic storm for Boston by the time it’s all over, with deep snow and high winds. The bomb cyclone whipped up waves Saturday morning battering coastal Massachusetts. Ranging from blustery to bucolic, a day for dogs, skis, and a good old-fashioned group snowball fight. Plows faced whiteout conditions in some areas. And drivers are still urged to stay off the roads tonight to give them space. Well, those roads will have to be clear for the utility crews that are trying to restore power to the roughly one hundred and twenty thousand homes and businesses that are without it, and that is just here in the state of Massachusetts.
Another day, another Covid positive written on body bags in a Kansas City morgue as Omicron drives the daily death toll higher than last fall’s Delta wave. Hospitalizations are down nearly five percent nationwide, but almost all Americans live in a high-risk area. Healthcare workers are still on guard. And now another possible threat, a stealth new subvariant of Omicron, BA.2 has popped up in nearly half the country. Today, thousands of truckers rolled through the capital city of Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates for drivers crossing the US-Canada border. The new subvariant is called stealth, because it may be harder to detect. Scientists expected it to be very contagious. But they’re hard at work trying to figure out whether it could lead to yet another surge.
:::tip bucolic
- : relating to or typical of rural life. 乡村、田园的
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:::tip hyperbole
- : language that describes something as better or worse than it really is. 夸张
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