Good morning, RVA! It's 40 °F, and today looks like a great day to get outside and move your body around. Expect highs right around 70 °F and lots of sunshine. Take advantage of the opportunity!
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 730 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 41 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 90 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 48, Henrico: 23, and Richmond: 19). Locally, this is the third most new reported positive cases in a single day, and that finally got me to put together this chart of the seven-day average of new reported positive cases in Richmond, Chesterfield, and Henrico. As you can see, Chesterfield continues to report more new cases each day, Richmond's either mostly flat or has a slightly increasing number of new cases, and Henrico is still coming down off its early peak. Statewide, reported deaths shot way up. Doctors and statisticians will hate how I use these numbers—so, grain of salt—but the CDC reports leading causes of deaths for each state, and in Virginia cancer killed 15,064 people in 2017 (the most recent data they've got). That's an average of 41 people per day. Looking at it that way, yesterday, COVID-19 was the leading cause of death in the Commonwealth. Also, not that it matters anymore, VDH reported under 5,000 tests yesterday, and the average number of tests reported over the last six days (for dumb data reasons) is either 6,886 or 7,216—depending on how you define "test." Both of those numbers are significantly less than 10,000. I'm interested in what the Governor will say at his regularly-scheduled 2:00 PM briefing today, the final one before the May 15th plunge into Phase One.
In potentially huge news locally, Justing Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says Mayor Stoney "is expressing reservations about whether Friday is the right time for officials to start easing restrictions in the city" and that "Richmond is considering asking Northam for an exemption similar to what Northern Virginia received." Heck yes, Mayor! I'm having...an unplanned emotional reaction...to finally reading about an elected official who I feel like has their focus on the health and safety of me, my family, and my neighbors. Yes, that's for sure how normal people talk about feelings—as "unplanned emotional reactions." Anyway, as I hinted at yesterday, I don't think there's much weight in the Governor's continued "my restrictions are a floor not a ceiling" rhetoric. At the moment he appears way more focused on, in his words, "Uniformity across the region is critical to a successful strategy, rather than having restrictions piecemeal across towns and counties." Here again is Mayor Stoney with the A+ response: "I understand that the governor wants everybody to be on the same page in the region to do so, but I think this is once again where being an independent city in this state kind of penalizes you...We’re different than the counties. That’s just the bottom line.” Super different than the counties in priorities: Both county managers from Henrico and Chesterfield say they plan on going ahead with the May 15th move into Phase One.
I don't really know what to make of this piece of reporting by Kate Masters in the Virginia Mercury about the State sharing names and addresses of individuals with COVID-19 with 911 dispatch centers. Masters gets into some of the localities' super legit privacy concerns and how VDH seems to be using the same section of the State Code to authorize this use of data while preventing other uses. I'm definitely not against using our personal data to allow for robust contact tracing—in fact, I think it's critical to me ever getting out of this dang house again. But what we need is a plan, put together by health and data experts, to get this thing done. Not just "release the data to call centers and let localities decide how to handle it properly."
/r/rva has posts from a ton of folks who were out taking pictures of yesterday's flyover plus this video. Yes, there was a flyover yesterday! Honestly, I don't really know what a flyover does during coronatimes. Are we, like, full of morale now? How about hazard pay for the people working in grocery stores? That'd pump up my morale jams for sure. But, because I am still a small child, I can't be but so cynical when looking at pictures of huge, fast machines.
This morning's patron longread
The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying
Submitted by Patron Kimberly. Here's a depressing piece about how, like almost all things in America, race is such an enormous factor in the impact of COVID-19.
The racial contract is not partisan—it guides staunch conservatives and sensitive liberals alike—but it works most effectively when it remains imperceptible to its beneficiaries. As long as it is invisible, members of society can proceed as though the provisions of the social contract apply equally to everyone. But when an injustice pushes the racial contract into the open, it forces people to choose whether to embrace, contest, or deny its existence. Video evidence of unjustified shootings of black people is so jarring in part because it exposes the terms of the racial contract so vividly. But as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them.
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