Good morning, RVA! It's 44 °F, and highs today will hit 65 °F at some point this afternoon. Expect the warm and sunny weather to continue through the weekend. Enjoy in the most safe and responsible way you can!
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 1,706 positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth, and 41 people in Virginia have died as a result of the virus. VDH reports 212 cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 73, Henrico: 87, and Richmond: 52). Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says that 16 people have now died from COVID-19 at the Canterbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in western Henrico. Just awful—a significant portion of the state’s deaths in one building.
If you, like me, have a morbid fascination with virusdata, Alejandro Alvarez, the digital editor at WTOP, has put together this absolutely beautiful coronavirus spreadsheet tracker for Virginia, D.C., and Maryland. If you’re looking for a dark data dashboard to start your day, you probably won’t find anything better than this.
The Virginia Employment Commission released this week’s unemployment insurance claims numbers, and they continue to shock me: 111,497 people filed claims, up from 46,277 last week. For sobering context, around this time last year about 2,700 people filed unemployment claims. I mean, look at this absolutely horrifying graph. We’re in truly unprecedented times, and hundreds of thousands of people will need serious assistance from the state and federal governments as soon as possible. Given the number of orange alert boxes on the VEC’s website, it seems like getting that assistance to the people who need it has maybe hit some technical and logistical roadblocks.
It only took a pandemic, but the Washington NFL team has agreed to allow the City to eliminate their 2019 and 2020 cash contributions for the Washington Training Camp. That’s great news; the 2019 contribution alone totaled $161,000. The Mayor also announced the Economic Development Authority has created a small business loan program that will offer “interest-free emergency loans of up to $20,000 to small businesses within the city limits.” If you’re a small business owner you should get your stuff in order, because applications for that loan program open on April 6th and will be considered in the ordered they are submitted. That sounds stressful! Take the weekend to prepare, OK?? Mark Robinson at the RTD has more detail about how to qualify. As for the source of the loan money, Mayor Stoney said that cash saved from the Washington Training Camp deal will directly fund this new small business loan program.
Alright, y’all. City Council met yesterday for less than four minutes to introduce legislation that will allow them to meet virtually until September (ORD. 2020-093). This ordinance applies not only to City Council, but to a whole slew of public bodies and should get a bunch of the various boards and commissions meeting again, too. Of note: Public bodies wishing to have public comment must allow folks to submit those comments electronically before the meeting. They can, additionally, decide to allow “telephonic or other electronic communication means during the course of the meeting”—which, honestly, sounds terrible. This is definitely step zero in setting up a process for remote, asynchronously civic engagement! However, if you take four minutes and listen the audio from yesterday’s meeting, you’ll see (well, hear, rather) that Council still has a ways to go in figuring out the technical bits. While you could hear Councilmembers Newbille, Grey, and Trammell—who were all sitting in actual Council Chambers—everyone else who dialed in was but a whisper. Council will hold a public hearing on this paper next week on April 9th.
For whatever reason, American society has decided to try to carry on life as best it can by moving every possible in-person encounter to a video conference call hosted by Zoom. I don’t know how everyone simultaneously decided on using Zoom as a platform, but it happened. Now, Zoom is both a noun and a verb I say regularly in my professional life when just two weeks ago it only applied to dogs running around in cute circles. So—whether you wanted to or not—you probably know about Zoom, but do you know about ZoomBombing? Nefarious folks have scraped up public Zoom invites and popped into meetings uninvited spraying hate, grief, and offensive material. Bummer yet predictable, I guess. UR has put together this very helpful page of tips for how anyone hosting Zooms can make those meeting a bit more secure. Take note! Especially those of you meeting with kids!
This morning's patron longread
‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide
Submitted by Patron Blake. It’s a trope at this point, but coronavirus has certainly revealed who the essential workers are and it’s not Richard Florida’s creative class. Kate Masters at the Virginia Mercury has a piece on what this looks like locally.
In some respects, the pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in access to health care, child care, education, living space, even internet bandwidth. In New York, well-off city dwellers have abandoned cramped apartments for spacious second homes. In Texas, the rich are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to build safe rooms and bunkers. And across the country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.
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