mation and distrust.
“I know for most of the country,
people were saying it was mild. I can’t
say that we saw that here,” said Teresa
Tyson, chief executive of the Health
Wagon, a mobile clinic that serves the
most rural and least-vaccinated
counties in Virginia. In January and
February, Tyson said, she was forced
to rent additional space to accommo-
date the flood of covid-19 patients,
dozens of whom ultimately begged
for vaccine doses as they were loaded
onto ambulances.
When omicron arrived, covid- 19
was a largely preventable disease,
health experts said. And yet in the
past three months, more than
150,000 people in the United States
have died of it, the vast majority of
them from underserved pockets of
society.
In January, Black U.S. residents
were hospitalized for covid-19 at a
rate higher than any other race or
SEE OMICRON ON C5BY REBECCA TAN,
JOHN D. HARDEN
AND MICHAEL BRICE-SADDLERTwo brothers in rural Virginia
were hospitalized within days of one
another, their airways inflamed. A
barber in Southeast Washington
went on life support as his lungs and
kidneys failed. And a grandfather in
suburban Maryland, the stoic bread-
winner for his large immigrant fam-
ily, wept when the paramedics took
him away.
Fueled by the highly transmissible
omicron variant, the coronavirus in-
fected more than 29 million people in
the United States over the past three
months. It reached individuals across
race, class and location.
But data showed that it hit unvac-
cinated and under-vaccinated people
hardest, wounding communities
with inadequate access to health care
and where officials have failed after a
year to stamp out vaccine misinfor-The unequal toll of the omicron wave
Over 7,100 people have died of coronavirus infections since Christmas in the highly vaccinated Washington region
SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Maria Rodriguez lays flowers on the grave of her husband, Javier Ramirez Reyes, at a cemetery in Maryland. Reyes, who had received one dose of the Johnson
& Johnson coronavirus vaccine, died of covid-19 in January. He was one of the thousands of people across the region who died as the omicron variant surged.KLMNO
METRO
SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/LOCAL EZ M2 C
JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON
Elizabeth F. Baldy, who
gave Pasadena, Md., its
name, was a savvy
multistate con artist. C3LOCAL OPINIONS
As police critics fight for
access to records, D.C.’s
attorney general is
hindering transparency. C4OBITUARIES
Foo Fighters drummer
Taylor Hawkins, 50, died
while the band was on38 ° 44 ° 46 ° 40 ° tour in South America. C8
8 a.m. Noon 4 p.m. 8 p.m.
High today at
approx. 2 p.m.48
°
Precip: 5%
Wind: WNW
12-25 mphBILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
Leonder “Rico” Jerome, who was hospitalized with pneumonia rising from
covid-19, gives a haircut to his friend, John Pitt, in Washington this month.BY ANTONIO OLIVO,
ERIN COX
AND REBECCA TANWith mask mandates in the
Washington region lifted for most
settings and attitudes about so-
cial distancing more relaxed,
health officials are cautiously
monitoring the behavior of the
latest subvariant of the coronavi-
rus.
BA.2, the more contagious
cousin of the omicron variant that
has spread through Europe and
other parts of the world, now
represents about 30 percent of
new infections in the Mid-Atlan-
tic region that includes the Dis-
trict, Maryland and Virginia, ac-
cording to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention’s tracker
for variants.
Public health experts say BA.2
probably will become the domi-
nant strain in the Washington
region over the next several
weeks, driving another uptick in
new infections after a steady de-
cline since the peak of the omi-
cron surge in early January.
On Friday, the region’s weekly
average for new cases was 1,131,
the lowest rate since July.
The tens of thousands of people
who were infected by omicron
SEE VIRUS ON C6A new
variant
rears
its head
BA.2 EXPECTED TO
DRIVE UP INFECTIONS
Officials monitor it as
mask mandates fadeTheresa
VargasShe is away. Her column will resume
when she returns.BY ELLIE SILVERMAN
The sound reached Daniel
Adler first: a chorus of honks that
seemed to be moving closer.
“This is quite loud,” thought
Adler, an Australia native who has
lived in the Dupont Circle neigh-
borhood for a decade. On a bike
ride for groceries at the time, he
decided to take a detour toward
the circle to see the commotion.
The choices that Adler, 49,
made in the ensuing minutes led
him to the front of a section of the
“People’s Convoy,” the coalition of
drivers that has espoused far-
right beliefs and disrupted Wash-
ingtonians’ lives for two weeks.
Amid this protest of vaccine man-
dates — which also encapsulates a
range of other grievances — resi-
dents have grown tired of drivers
treating the District as their play-
ground.
So, as a group of semi-tractors
on March 19 blared their horns on
17th Street and became separatedby traffic, Adler slipped in front of
a few of them. Then, taking up an
entire lane, he started pedaling as
slowly as he could.
“I heard the stories of the traffic
on the Beltway breaking up the
convoy,” he said, “and I thought I,
too, could break up the convoy.”
Adler, a father of two school-
aged children, brought it to a
crawl — and, for his efforts, be-
came known across the Internet
by a moniker somehow heroic
and commonplace at once: “Bike
Man.”
His convoy holdup, captured
on video and shared widely on
social media, was a powerful vis-
ual, and an absurd one. People
nationwide observed one man on
a 72-pound cargo bike halting
trucks that could weigh up to 10
tons.
Many online said he was a hero.
A brewery in Northeast offered
him free beer. Jimmy Kimmel
described it as “poetry in motion.”
One Twitter user wrote:“Gotham has Batman
Metropolis has Superman
New York has Spider-Man
Washington DC has bike man.”To city residents exhausted and
alarmed by the convoy, Adler be-
came a symbol. To some, the cy-
clist was standing up to fascism,white supremacy, anti-vaccina-
tion sentiments and convoy mem-
bers’ harassment of residents.
Others saw his bike as an example
of sustainable, clean transporta-
tion juxtaposed with massive
trucks burning fuel while driving
in circles.
In the moment, Adler, who is
vaccinated, wasn’t probing what
his choice may mean to friends,
family and strangers. He just
thought that driving commercial
trucks and blaring horns through
neighborhoods was unsafe.
Sure, they had a right to pro-
test, he thought. But so did he.15 minutes, then fame
District residents are used to
demonstrations for a range of
causes like demands for climate
justice, calls for D.C. statehood,
both sides of the abortion debate
and protests against police bru-
tality and racism.
But at the Hagerstown Speed-
SEE BIKE ON C6Meet the Bike Man who brought the trucker convoy to a crawlMATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
When the usual D.C. traffic split up the convoy, Daniel Adler veered
in front on his bike, pedaling at a self-estimated 4 miles per hour.BY LUZ LAZO
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser
has a plan to hit dangerous
drivers where it hurts: their wal-
lets.
Bowser (D) is proposing a
large-scale modernization and
expansion of the city’s automated
enforcement program, promising
to more than triple the number of
traffic cameras that issue fines by
the end of next year.
The proposed budget for fiscal
2023, which begins in October,
includes $9.4 million for the
purchase and deployment of 170
new speed cameras, along with
dozens more that would target
drivers who run red lights and
stop signs, illegally use bike and
bus lanes, or pass school buses.
Bowser’s pitch to expand the
traffic camera program comes as
the city is experiencing a rise in
severe traffic crashes resulting in
deaths and injuries. Forty people
were killed in traffic collisions in
2021, the most since 2007, and
nine people have died this year —
one more than at this time last
year.
SEE CAMERAS ON C3D.C. plans
spike in tra∞c
cameras that
issue fines
Proposal could more
than triple their number
by the end of 2023