Good morning, RVA! It's 28 °F, and today looks a lot like yesterday with a few more clouds thrown in for wintery measure. Expect highs in the mid 40s and a strong desire to share a hot beverage with a good friend.
Water cooler
Before we get into it, here are this week's graphs of Virginia's cases, hospitalizations, and deaths caused by COVID-19. While the Virginia Department of Health dashboard says it was updated yesterday with new data, the graphs' latest bars comes from the week of December 4th—which might as well be years ago in Omicron time. I'm not sure what to make of that. Regardless of data freshness, you can still see the spike in new cases and slow rise in hospitalizations. As this new wave unfolds, you can also keep an eye on those hospitalizations over on the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Associations dashboard (if that's how you'd like to spend the last two weeks of the year).
Anyway, it really seems like coronavibes have, once again, shifted overnight. Weirdly (or predictably?), sports seems to be a leading indicator for how things will play out in America, and last night the NHL extended their pre-scheduled holiday break, cancelling 31 games, and paused their season. There's going to be a lot of pressure on other leagues to do the same over the next couple of days—college football, I'm looking at you. It's a little too Idiocracy-adjacent that we use sports as a wayfinder out of disaster, but, better than being completely lost, I guess!
Double anyway, to address rapidly increasing national anxiety, President Biden has some announcements queued up for today. According to the New York Times, "President Biden will announce new steps on Tuesday to confront a staggering surge in coronavirus cases, including readying 1,000 military medical professionals to help at overburdened hospitals, setting up new federal testing sites, deploying hundreds of federal vaccinators and buying 500 million rapid tests to distribute free to the public." Notably, despite the administration mocking the idea earlier this year, a senior official said "the government intends to create a website where people can request that tests be sent to their homes, free of charge." Those tests won't be available until January, which is, clearly, a couple weeks too late to help with the holiday-travel spread of disease, but, again, it's better than nothing.
Finally, I still haven't read anything great about the severity of disease—especially the severity of disease in vaccinated people or children under five—caused by the Omicron variant, which, shockingly somehow already makes up 73% of new COVID-19 infections in the U.S.. While this variant is wildly transmissible, I'm (still) not sure we know a lot about its severity, which is real frustrating. Until then, get vaccinated, get your booster, wear a N95 or KN95 mask, limit your indoor hangs if you can—you're all well-practiced at this stuff by now!
Richmond's City Council and its various committees have posted a lot of interesting documents on the City's website for you to scroll through—think of it as a wonderful gift to send you off into the new year. First, here's the presentation about the Richmond 300 Annual Report that I mentioned yesterday. I do not think this is the actual report itself, but a sort of PDF amuse-bouche to tide you over until the true report drops. Second, City Council will meet for a special meeting today to quickly pass their redistricting criteria and redistricting schedule. I don't see any major changes coming to the former (so much for the effort to include "compactness" as a criteria), and the latter puts us at a March 30th adoption date for the new districts. Finally, the Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee will meet today with a couple of fun documents on their agenda, too: The committee's strategic plan and a white paper on the proposed Department of Mobility & Multimodal Transportation. Definitely flip through the latter so you can see the split in responsibilities between what the new department would handle (transportation planning, engineering, right-of-way management, parking) and what the existing Department of Public Works would handle (urban forestry, street cleaning, waste management, bulk & brush, facility management). The timeline laid out in this paper has the DOMMT created, split out from DPW, and staffed with existing staff by January 2nd. I don't know if that's a realistic timeline, given how the last two weeks of December are fake, but I like the urgency.
GRTC's newest route adjustments went into effect his past Sunday, and that means reduced frequency and operating hours—mostly early in the morning or deep into the night—for a bunch of routes while they look to find more bus operators. To help folks make connections to less-frequent (or non-existent) routes, GRTC has also launched a new on-demand service to ferry folks between bus stops. From the press release: "GRTC customers can request one ride per day from one GRTC bus stop to another GRTC bus stop through on-demand service Monday-Friday, 5AM-6AM and 11PM-2AM. GRTC is working with multiple partners to provide this service under Zero Fare operations." For now, it sounds like you'll need to call someone on the phone to request a ride, but, soon, you'll just be able to use the regular Uber app. I've got all sorts of feelings about our public transit agency providing free Uber rides to make up for missing public transit service. That said, I understand they are in an extremely tight space right now and don't necessarily have the tools or power needed to fix the problems they're facing.
Alert! Artists looking for their next big project! Richard Hayes at RVAHub points to a couple of opportunities for folks to get involved in creating public art installations, one at a fire station and three at community gardens around the city. Tap through to find the deadlines, applications, and budgets.
This morning's longread
Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun
As our Democratic administration flops about, read this terrifying piece in The Atlantic about Republicans and Trump 2.0. I promise I'll find something more uplifting for tomorrow's longread...
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie.
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