As COVID Cases Rise, Missoula May Reopen Free Quarantine Shelter

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, the city of Missoula purchased the Sleepy Inn Motel on Broadway to use as a sort of quarantine shelter for those infected with COVID. The idea was that it was a good place for people to isolate if they had nowhere else to go, and hundreds of people used the motel over the course of the next year.

Then, when COVID cases were trending downward, Missoula shut down the Sleepy Inn Motel at the end of June 2021. Less and less people were using it, and it didn't make sense to keep it going due to the monthly cost of running the building.

Well, COVID cases are on the rise again (Montana is back to reporting about one thousand new cases in the state per day), so the city is looking into reopening the Sleepy Inn Motel so that it can continue its purpose as a safe quarantine zone. They just need to figure out how to do it - the hotel was being funded by costs that were being reimbursed thanks to Montana's COVID state of emergency. That state of emergency was recently ended, so Missoula needs to come up with a new way to get the hotel running.

The city will have to fund the operation of the building, plus employees who work there and pay for a "plumbing issue" that they discovered when the building shut down. There's no firm date yet, but they're hoping to have answers to these financial issues in just a couple of weeks.

LOOK: Here are the 50 best beach towns in America

Every beach town has its share of pluses and minuses, which got us thinking about what makes a beach town the best one to live in. To find out, Stacker consulted data from WalletHub, released June 17, 2020, that compares U.S. beach towns. Ratings are based on six categories: affordability, weather, safety, economy, education and health, and quality of life. The cities ranged in population from 10,000 to 150,000, but they had to have at least one local beach listed on TripAdvisor. Read the full methodology here. From those rankings, we selected the top 50. Readers who live in California and Florida will be unsurprised to learn that many of towns featured here are in one of those two states.

Keep reading to see if your favorite beach town made the cut.

Check Out the Best-Selling Album From the Year You Graduated High School

Do you remember the top album from the year you graduated high school? Stacker analyzed Billboard data to determine just that, looking at the best-selling album from every year going all the way back to 1956. Sales data is included only from 1992 onward when Nielsen's SoundScan began gathering computerized figures.

Going in chronological order from 1956 to 2020, we present the best-selling album from the year you graduated high school.