Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and those cooler temperatures have moved in. Today you can expect highs in the mid 50s—but plenty of sunshine to go along with ‘em. Saturday looks pretty incredible and we might see some rain on Sunday. In as much as you’re able, enjoy the weekend!
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 4,042 positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth, and 109 people in Virginia have died as a result of the virus. VDH reports 638 cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 158, Henrico: 319, and Richmond: 126). Like most of you, I’m sure, I’ve been keeping my own spreadsheet of the VDH data; how else do you make graphs if you don’t have your own spreadsheet?? So after poking around the data for a couple of weeks, what concerns me most is the continued lack of coronavirus testing in Virginia. The VDH website reports cumulative tests right at the top of the page—33,026 as of this moment—and that seems like a pretty big number. It’s got five digits! But, I think the more helpful way to look at it is number of new tests per day, which I’ve put together in graph form here. Since the beginning of April, the State has averaged just 2,180 new tests per day. That’s for the entire state! At the current rate, it’d take over five years just to get a majority of folks living in Virginia tested. I’d love to know what the Governor’s plan is to massively increase the number of tests available for Virginians over the next couple of weeks. Also, take those previous sentences with a grain of salt, because I can only know what data VDH publishes each day. If there’s secret, unpublished COVID-19 testing going on, great (I mean, not great, but, you know).
Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch continues his reporting on the tragedy taking place at the Canterbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in western Henrico. 39 folks have died, and the facility’s medical director says, “We will have more deaths.” Absolutely awful. Related, Bridget Balch and Justin Mattingly, also at the RTD, report that the recent jump in statewide deaths due to the coronavirus—doubling in just a couple of days—is due to delays while VDH reviews and verifies data. They say, “The number of deaths jumped Thursday because the state had not entered deaths from the past two weeks at one Henrico County nursing home — where to date 39 residents have reportedly died from COVID-19 — into the state’s count until the past couple of days.”
It’s Friday, which, unfortunately, means I get to write about the new unemployment numbers from the Virginia Employment Commission. For the week ending April 4th, they report 147,369 new claims, which brings the total since March 21st to 306,143. Shockingly, this “equals all of the previous weeks’ claims from 2018, 2019, and 2020 combined.” The final map on this page shows that Chesterfield and Henrico have some of the largest increases in unemployment insurance claims over this past week. If it wasn’t about people’s lives, I’d be stoked to read these releases from VEC—they’re absolutely packed with interesting data, charts, and maps.
Richmond Police posted these new parking restrictions on Twitter yesterday. I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess this is a continued effort to keep folks from springbreaking the river. The City has closed parking lot access at major river spots, and these are streets adjacent to parking lots that are adjacent to major river spots.
Here’s another way for people to help out during the coronacrisis! The excellent folks at Studio Two Three have put together some really great infrastructure to help with making protective masks for “home and public health care workers, behavior health workers, bus drivers, and individual working with homeless populations.” Heck yes! You can donate to the cause, volunteer for a mask making shift, donate supplies, or make masks at home.
I’m a sucker for pics of old cobblestones revealed by street milling. From /r/rva, here’s one of Grace Street near 20th.
This morning's longread
Masterpiece Theater
Dang, y’all. Art forgery just seems like a ton of work.
A successful forger has the ability to produce art of high quality, certainly, and also an inside knowledge of the workings of the art world, from its business dealings to its social mores. A forger is a storyteller, even a performer—someone who can charm customers, appear trustworthy, and spin a convincing tale about where an artwork came from and how they came to possess it. To forge art takes showmanship and a healthy dose of chutzpah. Frauds must be willing to brazenly claim that a work is genuine; some go so far as to approach experts or artists themselves and request authentication.
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