Good morning, RVA! It's 58 °F, and I think we might see the sun again today! Expect a dry day with highs in the upper 70s. Looks like we've got a pretty good stretch of nice weather ahead of us.
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 854↗️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 3↘️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 79↗️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 32, Henrico: 32, and Richmond: 15). Since this pandemic began, 381 people have died in the Richmond region. As Chesterfield County returns a small portion of their students to in-person instruction this week, I wanted to link to this document from the Virginia Department of Health: VDH Algorithm for Evaluating a Child with COVID-19 Symptoms or Exposuire. I like this document because, in all honesty, it's not too hard to follow, and it makes me feel better for not knowing what to do in any one of the million and two edge cases—turns out, figuring out what to do is complicated! Make sure you check out the bottom left hand corner where some of the possible outcomes are based on the new CDC School Metrics (number of positive cases per 100,000). I think this might be first time I've seen a direct "if the numbers are this, do that."
For whatever reason, I absolutely blanked on yesterday's City Council meeting. As foretold, Council approved the good tweaks to B-3 zoning making it less car-centric (ORD. 2020-209) and resoundingly voted to strike the resolution asking the Richmond Police Department to stop using less lethal weapons against protestors (RES. 2020-R048). The process for the latter is a bit weird, but since the Public Safety Committee recommended the resolution be stricken, a majority of councilmembers would have had to vote during their informal meeting to put RES. 2020-R048 back on the agenda. They did not, so this bill never even made it in front of full Council and folks didn't have a chance to speak for or against it in the time-honored, formal public-comment way. Councilmember Jones, one of the paper's sponsors, had this to say on Twitter: "City Council voted 2-7 to strike the paper on banning certain non lethal weapons. COUNCIL has the power to bring about change. They lacked the compassion to allow the public to speak about their concerns. That is not transparency. That is not leadership. This is undemocratic. What infuriates me was that Councilmembers knew there were people who wanted to speak on this paper. However they still didn’t allow for their voices to be heard. I wouldn’t do that even if I wasn’t in favor of something. I’d hear from the people." I don't know the rules about reintroducing legislation that has already once been stricken, but, perhaps with a more progressive City Council, we could try again in January? I dunno. I'm not surprised by this result, but I'm still upset by it.
Marc Cheatham posted his third "Who's Got Next" column, this one featuring Alexsis Rodgers. Yet again I agree with almost everything Marc says, and I'm thankful he spent the time writing these things so I didn't have to. First and foremost, as Marc puts it, "Rodgers doesn't have a lot of 'BAD' to highlight." She got into the race immediately following Mayor Stoney's response (or lack thereof) to this summer's police violence—a response which was, in Marc's words, "trash." She's young, hip, smart, strategic, and, to a lot of her supporters, a more progressive alternative to Stoney. That said, while her policy platform is good, I don't think it's considerably more progressive than what we get with our current mayor. Will she execute better, faster, and more coherently? Maybe! But, out of the Progressive Candidate, I want more than the mostly pragmatic stuff I find on her policies page. To quote from the piece, "Now, how much more progressive is Rodgers than Stoney? My read is not as much as most progressive activists on Twitter tend to think." I do disagree with Marc on the experience needed to run the mayor's office, though. He says: "Being the Mayor is not a matter of experience as much as it’s a matter of priorities," which, I think I agree with in any other election year (including back in 2016, when the current mayor got elected with basically the same/zero experience). The next two-plus years, however, are going to be absolutely brutal for Richmond as we crawl out of this pandemic-sized hole. At the moment, I'm still unconvinced that we can afford a period of on-the-job training—especially if that's not paired with an exceedingly bold and progressive agenda to pull us all forward.
I want to put a pin in this piece about Richmond's anticipated budget surplus from last year by Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. If it were me, I'd sock it all away to make ends meet over the next couple of year—see above paragraph about the absolutely brutal financial crisis looming on the horizon. We'll know the final, actual surplus when the city's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report drops. Longtime readers will remember when all we ever talked about was CAFRs! Here's what I had to say back on November 14, 2017: "Whoa, y'all! Yesterday evening, the Mayor announced that the city has completed everyone's favorite financial report—the CAFR (Comprehensive Annual Financial Report)—three weeks early. I would not have bet on the City getting this thing in on time, let alone early. Hats off to the Finance Department and the Mayor, who made early promises that his administration would turn the CAFR in on schedule for the first time in four years." Simpler times!
Today is the literal last day to register to vote before the election. You can do this online or in person, but either way you should do it. I feel like most readers of this, Richmond's premier zoning and rezoning email, should already be registered to vote. Don't disappoint me, readers!
Equality Virginia will host their 7th Annual Transgender Information & Empowerment Summit this week, Wednesday through Saturday. Spaces like this are so important: "During one of the most transformative years of our lifetime, highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide uprisings for Black lives, we believe the power of community has never been more clear. TIES offers an opportunity to foster that community by learning from and with each other in a safe and welcoming space." This year's summit is all-digital, free, and the keynote speakers are all Black trans folks. You can register here.
This evening, the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts will host a community COVID-19 testing event at Second Baptist Church (3300 Broad Rock Boulevard) from 4:00–6:00 PM. This is a drive-thru only event, so bring your car or you're out of luck.
Via r/rva, a picture of a Sally Bell's boxed lunch to brighten your morning.
This morning's longread
This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic
I learned a lot from this piece in the Atlantic about the unintuitive way in which COVID-19 spreads. It also made me feel like we made a bunch of wrong decisions in what to open/close in response to the virus.
There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious. Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.
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