With the B.117 COVID-19 variant causing cases to rise in 30 states, Vermont’s virus totals are looking similar to those of January, when the pandemic reached its peak. But the risks are very different now, state officials said on Tuesday at one of their twice-weekly COVID-19 press conferences.

More than 200,000 Vermonters have received at least one shot of COVID-19 vaccine, leading to fewer deaths and hospitalizations than during January, said Mike Pieciak, commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation. Pieciak, who is in charge of modeling COVID-19 numbers for the state, said only about 9 percent of recent cases in Vermont are among people 60 and over — the group most at risk of serious complications from the virus.

Despite that good news, the state on Friday reported 255 new cases, the highest daily count since the pandemic began. The numbers have eased up only slightly since: 122 new cases on Saturday, 238 on Sunday, 173 on Monday and 73 new cases on Tuesday.

Case numbers have risen 53 percent among people in their twenties in the last month, Pieciak said, the group that will be eligible last for vaccinations. Vermont's positivity rate has risen to 2 precent, and the death count now stands at 225, with 25 people hospitalized.

For about 40 years, Burlington artist Tony Shull has painted murals  — colorful and humorous pieces that light up his city's streetscape. One adorns the north side of the Nunyuns Bakery & Café building in the Old North End, at the corner of North Champlain and North streets.

Affixed to the clapboard exterior, Shull’s lively and intriguing 2017 mural — rendered in purple, blues and greens — depicts people, a spaceship, an eye in the sky, a rock n’ roll band, a dog in a wagon and a man in a fish.

Friday evening, Shull’s mural was vandalized by a person who used the same medium Shull uses to make art: paint.

In gold, a tagger wrote SP DISARM across the painting. A corner of the mural was tagged AC/DC LIVE WIRE.

Shull, who is in his mid-70s, won’t see the damage. He’s in hospice care at home, according to several friends. On Monday night, his friend Megan Humphrey spoke to Shull on the telephone. In an email to Seven Days, she wrote: “He just said he was too sick to go see it and to see how it could be fixed.”

Burlington photographer Carolyn Bates said that “tagging” isn’t the correct term to describe the graffiti on Shull’s work; she called it “malicious destruction.” It coincides with a COVID-19-era graffiti epidemic in Burlington, according to police and other city officials.

Neighbors registered disapproval on a Facebook page. “Not cool,” one woman wrote. … “Yeah we wanna disarm, but destroying someone else’s art ain’t the way to go about it.” She added: “This original base art is genius. Hope the crap comes off!”

The good news: Much of it already has. By Tuesday afternoon, Bates and Nunyuns co-owner Paul Bonelli had used a graffiti-removal spray to take off much of the gold paint — which will delight Shull's fans.

“Tony’s a guerrilla artist,” Humphrey said. “His idea of doing artwork all over Burlington was just to share his drawings. He was very laissez-faire about sharing his art, everywhere.”

“Tony, over the years, saw a blank wall and he couldn’t stand it,” Bates said. “He found the owners, got permission, and painted the wall.”

Bates is working on a book about the 150 murals in Burlington. The project led her to work on another volume dedicated to Shull’s art. She estimates that Shull painted about 15 of the city’s murals. He also painted on canvas; some 50 Shull works are at Four Corners of the Earth sandwich shop on Pine Street, according to Bates.

“He’s got such an incredible, unique sense of humor,” she said. “He creates his own world. He loves having heads tipped over and people coming out of them.”

Humphrey recalled befriending Shull almost 40 years ago when they were neighbors. One day she walked into her yard to see a sculpture of a spacecraft that Shull had made from recycled material. The piece included a Martian holding a sign that read, “Hello, Earth girl, I think you’re beautiful.” She thought it was funny, and they became friends.

If you're interested in Shull's work, an exhibit opens on April 18 at Sequoia Salon in Burlington. Phone ahead at 540-8333 to reserve a time for viewing.

Darren Drevik, who co-owns the Phineas Swann Inn and Spa, says he pays $500 in state fees each year to offer 10 rooms and serve meals. He’d like short-term rentals to do the same, and he’s hoping a bill that's headed to the House will make that happen.

The Senate on Tuesday approved S.79, a wide-ranging bill that aims to improve enforcement of health and safety standards for apartments around the state. The measure would include short-term rentals such as Vrbo and Airbnb in that registry. Owners of conventional lodging have said for years they’re competing on an uneven playing field.

Drevik noted that when the state shut down all inns, hotels and B&Bs last year because of the pandemic, it had no way of knowing who was operating an Airbnb.

“We had state troopers literally coming to our door and checking to make sure that there were no cars in our parking lot from out of state and no guests in our inn,” said Drevik. “And then we had short-term rentals in my town with cars from New York and Massachusetts.”

University of Vermont faculty and students condemned its administration’s austerity measures and president Suresh Garimella’s lack of transparency in a press conference on Monday, the second event of its kind since December.

Four months after the University of Vermont announced faculty layoffs and sweeping cuts to its humanities and geology programs, nearly 3,000 people have signed a Change.org petition declaring no confidence in Garimella. The petition, started by a coalition of faculty and students called UVM United Against the Cuts, charges that his administration has effectively manufactured a budget crisis by siphoning money away from the College of Arts and Sciences.

 According to faculty, the administration’s chief tactic thus far has been to ignore the dissent, with one exception. In early March, Nancy Welch, a tenured English professor who has been involved in protesting the cuts, shared a link to the petition with members of the faculty union and the English department. A week later, College of Arts and Sciences dean Bill Falls summoned Welch to a meeting to discuss what he deemed her “unprofessional” use of her university email account.

Gov. Phil Scott has named his three picks for the Cannabis Control Board, the entity responsible for licensing and regulating all stages of Vermont's budding adult-use marijuana marketplace.

Scott's office announced the nominations in a press release Monday afternoon. They include James Pepper, a deputy state’s attorney for the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs; Julie Hulburd, the human resources director at the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation; and Kyle Harris, an agriculture development specialist at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets.

The three were among nearly 100 applicants for the new board. The state Senate must confirm the nominees before they can begin their full-time gigs.

“The Board will play a critical role in ensuring public safety, equity and fairness while implementing this new market,” Scott said in the press release, noting that his three nominees bring  "diverse and relevant experience."

Vermont senators advanced a bill Friday to encourage the construction of more affordable housing over the objections of water quality advocates who say it will increase the amount of untreated wastewater flushed into waterways during rainstorms.

Lawmakers have been deluged in recent weeks with concerns from environmental groups and residents who worry that streamlining wastewater permits for new housing projects would only further pollute the state’s streams, rivers and lakes.

One of the most controversial provisions of the bill would delegate the state's authority to issue new water and wastewater permits to municipalities, replacing the current “redundant and costly” system, Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint (D-Windham) said.

Updated on March 29, 2021.

The City of Burlington’s director of police transformation plagiarized significant portions of a final report he turned in last week, according to an analysis by Seven Days.

Kyle Dodson was appointed by Mayor Miro Weinberger last October to oversee the city’s police reform efforts. He took a six-month leave of absence from his job as CEO and president of the Greater Burlington YMCA for the special assignment, which was to end April 1.

Dodson turned in his final report on March 19. The document — sent to city councilors and police commissioners on Thursday and obtained by Seven Days — borrowed liberally from several websites, including those of the City of Cambridge, Mass., and Georgetown Law school.

Dodson included links, but didn’t actually attribute some of these passages. Other sections that appeared to be Dodson’s own analysis were actually lifted from elsewhere, with no acknowledgment of the original source. A Seven Days review found that more than half of the document’s 1,542 words were not Dodson’s own.