Good morning, RVA! It's 73 °F, and we've got another day ahead of us with highs in the 80s and a decent opportunity for rain. The weekend ahead of us looks pretty hot and pretty dry. Get after it, and remember to hydrate.
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 818↘️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 25↗️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 148↗️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 46, Henrico: 69, and Richmond: 33). Since this pandemic began, 300 people have died in the Richmond region. Yesterday's trend of sub-1,000 new reported cases in Virginia continues as does a similar national trend of declining new reported cases. However, given some of the recent inconsistencies in states posting accurate data in a timely way, the COVID Tracking Project has some nice graphs looking at weekly numbers instead of daily numbers. Whatever the national, state, and local trends, we've now passed 300 deaths in Chesterfield, Henrico, and Richmond. That's a lot of people.
Have you put the COVIDWISE app on your phone yet? You should. It takes three total minutes! The Virginia Department of Health has a pretty exhaustive FAQ if you have any questions about the details of how this exposure notification app works.
If you got a pre-filled absentee ballot application from The Center for Voter Information, it might have the wrong return address on it. Folks over in the GMRVA slack reported getting applications with a Richmond County address, which, as Virginians, we all know is not the same as Richmond City. Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury confirms that the ol' city-county switcheroo accounted for 587,638 incorrectly addressed applications. Richmond, Roanoke, Fairfax, and Franklin are all names for both a city and a county. I feel intense anxiety transfer for the person who made this mostly honest mistake. However! If you've already sent off a wrongly-addressed application, don't worry too much about it, they "will be forwarded immediately to the correct office for processing." You can check your voter registration status and apply for a true and good absentee ballot through the Virginia Department of Elections website right now, today.
I keep seeing candidate events pop up, and I want to let folks know about them, but, like, who wants a giant list of events taking up space in an already-too-long email every single day? Not this guy. So I went ahead and made this Google Doc to track all of the candidate events that I'm aware of from now until November. This is a stupid task I've given myself, but, especially in these coronatimes, I think it's critical that people know as much about the candidates for School Board, City Council, and Mayor as possible. The next set of elected officials are tasked with building a new and better Richmond after we emerge from the pandemic, and we should have the best folks in those jobs as possible. So! If you know of a candidate event, please holler at me (<ross@gmrva.com data-preserve-html-node="true">). I'm looking for public, informational events, not fundraisers or canvassing events—those are cool, too, but that's not what I'm after.
Venture Richmond (who you may remember from the cool LEGO-style parklet designs that passed the Urban Design Committee earlier this week) together with the City's Public Art Commission won a $25,000 grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies' Asphalt Art Initiative. They'll use the funds to remake the intersection right in front of Gallery5 at W. Marshall Street and Brook Road with a pedestrian plaza, an intersection mural, and a parklet. Lots of folks from that part of town are involved, and community members can weigh in by taking this survey. That's probably you, because community members is defined broadly: The first question the survey asks is "How often do you pass through this intersection?" I'm definitely a community member, because, back in the beforetimes, I'd roll through there a couple times a week on my way to Saison Market (sigh).
RVAH20, an initiative out of the City's Department of Public Utilities, put together a 39-tweet thread about Richmond's combined sewer system. I think this is amazing, and they should be celebrated—it's like a PDF but in Twitter form! Plus, who isn't fascinated by our sewers??
For some reason I don't entirely understand, the weekly unemployment insurance claims reported by the Virginia Employment Commission dropped by over 32,000—that's a massive 9.1% change. These numbers do reflect the week ending on August 1st, and I don't know if "August" is a magical month for unemployment insurance. Unless there's something weird or seasonal going on here, this seems like good news. Total claims still top 350,000, so it's a ton of folks, but still! And, because I just update spreadsheet as my job now, here's my updated (and still pretty lazy) unemployment insurance claims graph.
Via /r/rva, an overlay of the explosion in Beirut on downtown Richmond. Basically all of Downtown—from Chamberlayne, to I-95, to 17th Street, to the River—is in the severe damage zone. Since the City is only 8mi x 8mi blob, the larger six mile "max damage range" circle encompasses almost the entire city. Whoa.
Today, the Henrico and Richmond City Health Districts will host a free COVID-19 testing event at Hotchkiss Field Community Center (701 E. Brookland Park Boulevard) from 9:00–11:00 AM. As always, if you have questions—any questions at all!—call the COVID-19 hotline: 804.205.3501.
This morning's longread
My Midlife Crisis as a Russian Sailor
Introspective travel writing just really hits the spot for me since I'm trapped in my house.
I’ve come to Russia at age 51 to re-create parts of William Barents’s third voyage to the Arctic from 400 years ago. Crossing and recrossing the sea northeast of Scandinavia, Barents, a Dutch navigator, went looking for a passage to China, but he and 16 men were trapped by sea ice during the summer of 1596. For nearly a year, they were stranded hundreds of miles above the mainland on Novaya Zemlya, a pair of large islands extending all the way to 77 degrees north. Five sailors died, including Barents himself, who perished at sea after they abandoned their ship and he and the remaining crew tried to get home on small boats. His quest to find the lucrative route to China was a brave but dismal failure.
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