The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-22)

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ M2 B3

C ounty police said they are investigating the fliers as a bias incident and asked anyone with information to call 703-802-2750. —Tom Jackman

Police identify man killed crossing road

Fairfax County police have named the pedestrian killed in the Lorton area Saturday as Victor Savier Barillas Delao, 28, of Alexandria. He was hit by a southbound car about 7:30 p.m. as he crossed Route 123, in the middle of a block near Workhouse Road, police said. They said the car was approaching the intersection on a green light. I nvestigators preliminarily do not think speeding or alcohol was involved in the crash. —Tom Jackman

and youth s ports camps, UDC said. —Paul Duggan

VIRGINIA

Antisemitic fliers f ound in Vienna

Residents of a neighborhood in the Vienna area of Fairfax County found antisemitic fliers on their properties Sunday, police said, and investigators are trying to find the source. The wording in the fliers was not released. Fairfax County police said a resident in the 1400 block of Laurel Hill Road, just off Leesburg Pike near the McLean Bible Church complex, told them that a sealed plastic bag with an antisemitic flier was on his property. The resident then found more than 70 other fliers in the neighborhood.

Results from Feb. 21

DISTRICT Day/DC-3: 3-7-8 DC-4:1-4-5-6 DC-5:4-0-5-9- 5 Night/DC-3 (Sun.): 8-0-3 DC-3 (Mon.): 7-5-4 DC-4 (Sun.):1-0-1-0 DC-4 (Mon.): 2-0-3- 6 DC-5 (Sun.):9-1-6-7-6 DC-5 (Mon.): 9-7-4-4-2

MARYLAND Day/Pick 3: 8-6- 4 Pick 4: 4-6-1-6 Pick 5: 8-3-4-4-6 Night/Pick 3 (Sun.): 5-1-3 Pick 3 (Mon.): 3-0- 7 Pick 4 (Sun.):6-2-7- 2 Pick 4 (Mon.): 9-5-3- 3 Pick 5 (Sun.):3-5-3-4-6 Pick 5 (Mon.): 1-5-1-3-2 Multi-Match: 2-9-19-22-23-4 2 Bonus Match 5 (Sun.): 4-10-19-35-39 *16 Bonus Match 5 (Mon.):1-6-9-29-33 *7

VIRGINIA Day/Pick-3: 9-0-1 ^8 Pick-4: 9-3-8-4 ^6 Night/Pick-3 (Sun.): 8-2-9 ^6 Pick-3 (Mon.):5-3-5 ^3 Pick-4 (Sun.): 4-7-2-0 ^8 Pick-4 (Mon.):0-8-7-6 ^2 Cash-5 (Sun.):8-17-24-29-3 9 Cash-5 (Mon.): 6-9-15-28-33

MULTI-STATE GAMES Cash 4 Life:4-40-42-54-58 ¶3 Lucky for Life: 10-19-35-43- 45 ‡11 Powerball:2-36-37-45-69 †3 Power Play: 2x Double Play: 22-23- 29 -39- 43 †18 *Bonus Ball‡Lucky Ball ¶Cash Ball †Powerball^Fireball For late drawings and other results, check washingtonpost.com/local/ lottery

LOTTERIES

THE DISTRICT

U niversity receives

$200,000 donation

The University of the District of
Columbia said it received a
$200,000 gift Saturday from
groups linked to sports
entrepreneur Ted Leonsis as the
school kicked off an athletic
fundraising drive.
The “lead gift” was announced
at a ceremony naming UDC’s
athletic facility as the Dr. Edwin
Bancroft Henderson Sports
Complex. A 1 904 graduate of a
UDC predecessor institution, he
was a civil rights activist
prominent in sports and known
as the “Grandfather of Black
Basketball,” the school said.
The UDC Foundation’s
Memorial Fund drive is seeking to
raise $2 million for the sports
complex, upgrades, scholarships

LOCAL DIGEST

John Kelly's Washington

He is away. His column will resume when he returns.

Abingdon and Petersburg to talk about ways to increase vaccination rates, and last week his office released a video featuring the governor encouraging people to get vaccinated, while mentioning his philosophical objection to coronavirus vaccine mandates. The video was written and pro- duced, pro bono, by Poolhouse, the Richmond-based advertising firm that made the campaign vid- eos that helped introduce the first-time candidate to Vir- ginians. John Littel, the state health and human services secre- tary, asked the company to create the public service announcement for the Virginia Department of Health, Poolhouse co-founder Will Ritter said in an interview. “With saving lives as his pri- mary goal, the governor is actively encouraging as many people as possible to get the coronavirus vaccine because it is the best way to protect against severe illness and death,” Youngkin spokes- woman Macaulay Porter said in a statement.

collection of impurities, including bacteria and parasites.” Greene responded that eve- ning, telling Bonds that it is “intu- itive” that cloth masks would not work as well if they are unclean. “After being worn all day, it would be hard to argue that a mask would not collect materials from the mouth and nose, which we all know are teeming with bacteria, so by deductive reasoning the mask, which is designed to capture droplets, will capture the bacteria, too. We don’t need a study to show that,” he said. (The exchange was first reported last month in the Virginia Mercury.) Reached by The Washington Post on Tuesday, Bonds declined to comment. Although masking has raised ire, public health leaders — including Nancy Welch, director of the Chesapeake Health District and the state’s longest-serving health director — praised Young- kin’s promotion of vaccines, especially in rural parts of the state where vaccine uptake has lagged behind the urban centers. “We have a tendency to lump people in categories based on af- filiation,” Welch said. “This is a situation where that is not neces- sarily the case. The governor has been a very, very strong proponent of vaccination, as was Gover- nor Northam. And I’m not sure many people expected him to be as strong a proponent.” Youngkin has traveled to

topics including vaccines, physi- cal distancing and when to report cases. Rian Watson, mother of a 6- year-old and a 9-year-old and a resident of Frederick County, in the region that Greene formerly represented as health director, wrote to him on Jan. 17, saying she believes Youngkin’s order “con- tains inaccurate information, is based on an opinion instead of scientific data and does not refer- ence where he got the information. His order and decision reads as an opinion piece rather than based on scientific information.” In a phone interview, she said her children have no problem wearing masks and she worries that dropping the requirement in schools would increase communi- ty spread, especially among the unvaccinated and at-risk, such as her elderly parents, who lived with the family for a time. “This really isn’t a health order; it’s kind of an un-health order,” Watson said.

Effectiveness of dirty masks Denise Bonds, director of the Blue Ridge Health District, which is based in Charlottesville, in a Jan. 18 email to Greene said her constituents were asking for the science that supports statements in the order claiming that masks worn by children “are often inef- fective because they are made from cloth material, and they are often not clean, resulting in the

Finally, Peake forwarded Greene a report from Deloitte that concluded: “Hospitals that pre- dominantly serve patients from areas without masking require- ments continue to see the highest rate of growth in hospitaliza- tions.”

Claims of language delays, impeded social growth The governor’s order states that masks “inhibit the ability of children to communicate, delay language development, and im- pede the growth of emotional and social skills. Masks have also in- creased feelings of isolation, exac- erbating mental health issues, which in many cases pose a great- er health risk to children than covid-19.” The interim guidance issued by the Health Department for schools makes a similar point, saying that “mask-wearing may cause discomfort, skin irritation, anxiety, and otherwise impact a child’s emotional state; children may have difficulty communicat- ing, perceiving emotion, or making social connections when wearing masks.” Greene, through a Health De- partment spokesperson, said that “there are a number of European studies supporting” the claims and that he could provide refer- ences. The spokesperson pointed to three dozen studies listed at the bottom of a 14-page guidance document for schools, which covered

She added, “I did not write this, so I don’t know the source refer- ence.” Greene responded that he used “observational data taken from our dashboard” in late December and early January that showed the omicron variant spread much more rapidly in urban and subur- ban areas than elsewhere. That’s when the state epi- demiologist, Lilian Peake, chimed in: “Colin, You have selected data to create a hypothesis. I think it is premature to include that in a policy document. I recommend referencing studies that are designed to control for confounding factors.” Greene responded: “Lilian, I hear what you’re saying, and if this were a presentation at a sym- posium, I might agree with you, but it’s not.” He went on to say, “The statement makes no claim of causality, nor that other factors might not be involved; it is merely an observation.” Peake said she would ask De - loitte, the firm with a state con- tract to assist with the pandemic response, to search for studies that might back up Greene’s claim. When Forlano wrote back with what she termed a “friendly re- minder” of outstanding requests for the scientific backup, Greene said: “You’re welcome to let them know it came from VDH dashboard data, unless there is a better citation found.”

amount of virus in the air,” said
Neil J. Sehgal, an assistant profes-
sor of health policy and manage-
ment at the University of Mary-
land School of Public Health.
However, he noted that trans-
mission hasn’t been studied ex-
tensively in children in the past
two years.
“Ultimately, what it comes
down to is there is one camp that
says we don’t know for sure and
we want to be as safe as possible.
And there’s another camp that
says we don’t know for sure so we
don’t want them,” he said.
Emails between Virginia state
health officials and Greene illus-
trate the push and pull happening
behind the scenes.

‘Restrictive masking policies’

The questions began days after
Youngkin signed the executive or-
der making masks optional in
schools, which formed the basis of
the Health Department’s “Guid-
ance for COVID-19 Prevention in
Virginia PreK-12 Schools.”
On Jan. 21, Laurie Forlano, dep-
uty director of the office of epi-
demiology, relayed to Greene a
question “from the field” seeking
a source for a statement in the
guidance: “During the Omicron
outbreak, regions with restrictive
masking policies and practices
have shown similar rates of trans-
mission as regions with less re-
strictive mask policies.”

VIRUS FROM B1

Health experts questioned s cience behind mask-optional policy, emails show

BY JUSTIN JOUVENAL

Fairfax County police on Mon-
day identified a department re-
cruit who died by apparent sui-
cide Sunday, an incident that has
prompted an internal investiga-
tion by the department to deter-
mine if responding officers han-
dled it properly.
Matthew Farberov, 28, died of
a gunshot wound shortly after

1:30 a.m. Sunday in his Mount Vernon area home, police said. Officers were initially called to Farberov’s home around 8:10 p.m. for a report of a shoot- ing. Officers found Farberov’s wife with a gunshot wound from an apparent suicide attempt, police said. She was rushed to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Fairfax County police are not naming the woman at the request of her family. Officers found multiple guns inside the couple’s home. Farberov was distraught and police offered him mental health help, but he refused, police said. Officers left Farberov around 1:30 a.m., and he called 911 a short time later and asked for officers to return to his home, police said.

Farberov was found dead from a gunshot wound that appeared to be self-inflicted, police said. Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis has ordered an internal probe of the incident to exam- ine how officers handled it and determine whether they should have attempted to confiscate the guns from Farberov’s home under a Virginia red-flag law that allows weapons to be seized from

people that pose a danger to themselves or others. Police said there was no up- date on the internal probe Mon- day. A state medical examiner will conduct autopsies on Far- berov and his wife to determine the manner and cause of their death. Farberov was scheduled to at- tend the police academy in the coming weeks.

VIRGINIA

Fairfax Co. police identify recruit who died by apparent suicide

BY GREGORY S. SCHNEIDER

richmond — Virginia voters dis-
agree with Gov. Glenn Youngkin
(R) on several major issues and are
slightly more negative than posi-
tive about his performance after a
month in office, according to a poll
from the Wason Center for Civic
Leadership at Christopher New-
port University.
Forty-one percent of voters say
they approve of the job Youngkin is
doing compared with 43 percent
who disapprove, with 16 percent
saying they don’t know how they
feel, the poll found. While the
numbers are heavily partisan —
Republicans are almost universal-
ly positive and Democrats sharply
negative — Youngkin’s overall ap-
proval “is certainly lower than
those of recent governors in Wason
Center polling early in their term,”
center academic director Quentin
Kidd said in a news release.
Macaulay Porter, a spokeswom-
an for Youngkin, said polling has
been consistently off the mark.
“Governor Youngkin’s initiatives
have received bipartisan support,
and he looks forward to delivering
on more promises that he made
during the campaign,” Porter said.
Youngkin has generated strong
feelings since taking office Jan. 15,
issuing a slew of executive orders
on his first day that stoked divisive
issues such as eliminating mask
mandates in schools and banning

the teaching of critical race theory. He recently won quick passage of a law that lets parents opt their children out of mask mandates by March 1, but he is wrestling with a Democratic-controlled state Sen- ate to advance an agenda of tax cuts through the General Assem- bly. The CNU poll finds that Virginia voters seem to be to the left of Youngkin on many of his most high- profile issues, including taxes. With the state running huge budget surpluses, 59 percent of voters want to use the money on “underfunded government services, such as education, public safety and social services,” while 38 percent favor tax cuts or re- bates, according to the poll. At least one tax cut is popular, though, with nearly three-quar- ters of voters favoring some form of relief from the state’s 2.5 percent tax on groceries — 47 percent preferring a total repeal of the tax, as Youngkin is seeking, and 25 percent favoring a grocery tax credit for low-income Virginians. The poll finds that Virginia voters are not on board with Young- kin’s crusade against critical race theory, which is an academic framework for studying systemic racism that is not on the state’s K-12 curriculum. Slightly more than a third of voters (35 percent) support a ban on teaching critical race theory in public schools, while

57 percent oppose such a ban. Similarly, nearly two-thirds of voters (63 percent) support teaching “how racism continues to impact American society” while one- third (33 percent) oppose such teaching, according to the poll. The poll’s findings also under- cut the law that makes masks optional in public schools, finding that 56 percent of voters think a decision about masks in schools should be based on health data and experts, while 41 percent think it should be left up to parents. A majority of voters also support requiring coronavirus vaccination

for people in jail or prison, first responders, members of the mili- tary, teachers and medical provid- ers, the poll found. Respondents were almost evenly split on whether to require vaccination for col- lege students or state government employees, with 50 percent saying yes and 48 percent no for both. There was less support for requiring coronavirus vaccination in public schools. Voters were evenly split (49-49) on whether to require shots for high school students, but slightly opposed to requiring vaccination for middle- schoolers (51 percent no, 47 per-

cent yes) and very opposed to requiring them for children in el- ementary school (55 percent no, 42 percent yes). Virginia voters also favor re- maining in the Regional Green- house Gas Initiative, a multistate compact aimed at reducing car- bon pollution that Youngkin has vowed to exit because he thinks it drives up consumer energy bills. More than two-thirds of voters (67 percent) say they favor re- maining in the initiative, with 26 percent calling for an exit. Despite the polarized positions, the poll finds that 45 percent of voters continue to think the state is headed in the right direction, versus 41 percent who say it’s headed in the wrong direction — which is consistent with CNU’s polling over the past four years, according to the center’s analysis of its findings. Youngkin’s relatively low approval is striking because Virginia governors have consistently scored more favorable than unfa- vorable in Wason/CNU polls going back two terms. The only excep- tion: a few weeks after the 2019 blackface scandal that nearly caused former governor Ralph Northam (D) to resign. Northam sank to 40 percent approval/49 percent disapproval that April but quickly rebounded, a c- cording to Wason/CNU results. Democrats in the General As-

sembly pounced on the results Monday to charge that Youngkin is out of touch with Virginia voters, who elected him last fall by a slim two-point margin. “The honeymoon is over,” Del. Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) said Monday in a blistering speech on the House floor that referred to Youngkin’s negative approval rat- ing in the poll. “It’s hard to be this bad, this fast.... He’s too extreme, too divisive.” But Republicans countered that the same poll also shows Vir- ginia voters are sharply negative on Democratic President Biden, with only 40 percent approving of his job performance and 53 percent disapproving. “I will appear with Glenn Youngkin anywhere if they want to appear with Biden anywhere, okay?” said House Majority Lead- er Terry G. Kilgore (R-Scott), add- ing that he felt the poll was “very left-leaning.” The governor is “very popular in my area,” Kilgore said. “I don’t see any of his stances being out of the mainstream, as [Democrats] are talking. If they want to fight for four years, fine, but it looks like we could all come together and work together to move the common- wealth forward.” The CNU/Wason poll was con- ducted from Jan. 26 to Feb. 15 and is based on interviews with 701 Virginia registered voters.

VIRGINIA

Poll finds governor at odds with voters, who veer to his left on key issues

ROBB HILL FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin recently won passage of a law that lets parents opt their children out of mask mandates by March 1.

BY MARTIN WEIL

Our future holds warmer, brighter, longer days, and as if to remind us of that pleasant prom- ise, our Monday was unusually warm, particularly bright and no- table for the length of its daylight. It was 20 days from Monday to the March 13 start of daylight saving time, the clock shift that we celebrate for creating later sunsets and the pervasive sensation of spring. In its way, Monday marked a milestone. For the first time in four months, the official interval between sunrise and sunset reached 11 hours. This occurred on a day sufficiently warm to make a convincing case that we are at the

outer suburbs of spring and near its meteorological outskirts. Our sparkling high of 66 degrees came to 16 above average and, when experienced under a strengthening sun, made some of us wonder if it was time for loose- fitting, light-colored clothing. Every warm day is not alike. February’s differ from warm days later in the spring. The tempera- tures may be identical. But Febru- ary’s sun glitters not on young leaves but on bare branches. And the climb from morning chill to afternoon warmth may be steep. At Dulles International Airport, for example, the mercury reached 67 after an upward thermal trek of almost 40 degrees out of the chill depths of the morning’s 28.

THE REGION

Warm, sunny day offers

a preview of spring

The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-22)

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