Good morning, RVA! It's 30 °F, and the rest of this morning looks rainy—but not super rainy and temperatures should hop above freezing by this afternoon. Surfaces are slick, so don’t overconfidently stride around, slip, and hurt yourself. As for this weekend, I think we should see the sun for a good chunk of the time.
Because, when it comes to winter weather, we are nothing if not an overcautious region, most things are closed or disrupted this morning. Check various website before heading out!
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 2,304 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 15 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 242 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 65, Henrico: 100, and Richmond: 77). Since this pandemic began, 722 people have died in the Richmond region. Here’s this week’s stacked graph of new reported cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. This set of charts really illustrates how the hospitalizations due to COVID-19 numbers are just doing their own thing at the moment. I still haven't read or seen anything about why that might be. Locally, here's the combined casecount graph for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield. You can see that cases in all three localities have now started to trend downward. Jessica Nocera at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the recent spike in cases in Chesterfield is a result of data reporting issues—which helps explain why that locality hasn't followed the slow decline in reported cases seen in Richmond and Henrico. These data reporting issues can have a real impact: Just look at how much of Nocera's article is focused on school reopening. Without good data, it's hard for folks, organizations, and institutions to make good decisions.
The winter weather's not just closing local schools, the freezing-cold temperatures in the Midwest and icy weather on the East Coast have delayed Virginia's vaccine shipments. We've already seen local vaccination events postponed this week due to weather, and now I guess we'll wait to see if this shipping delay pushes even more events. Logistics! A heckuva thing!
Get excited: GRTC has some new information up about their Regional Public Transportation Plan. As required by the legislation that created our new regional transportation authority (the Central Virginia Transportation Authority), GRTC outlines two options for how our region can spend that bucket of new money that's specifically designated for public transportation. Option #1: The Ridership Concept, focuses on adding more frequent, more useful service to our major corridors. Option #2: The Coverage Concept (PDF), focuses on providing less-frequent service to as many places as possible. Whoadang, both of these concepts are a lot to take in!
The Ridership Concept increases the frequency on the #1 Chamberlayne bus to every 10 minutes, ups the frequency on the #7 Nine Mile bus to every 15 minutes, adds a 30-minute bus to Brook & Parham, and (finally!) extends the #1A alll the way out to Chesterfield Towne Center. The Coverage Concept gets us a bus out to the Towne Center, a new hourly route to the Chesterfield Government Center, and an hourly route up to Virginia Center Commons. I encourage you to scroll around the aforelinked maps to really take in all of the changes and expansions.
Both of these concepts come with trade offs. As we've discussed as recently as yesterday(!), a bus to all the new development at VCC is great, but an hourly bus is not that useful for folks who don't want to spend tons of time waiting around on either end of their trip. The Ridership Concept creates more useful transit, that more folks would use, that would then, theoretically, convince our regional leaders to spend even more on public transit. The Coverage Concept, on the other hand, just plain serves more people: 13% more people in poverty and 21% more minority residents would be within a quarter mile of some transit service with the Coverage Concept. Would that "some transit service" be useful enough to actually use to get to work, school, healthcare, or anything else? Probably only as a last resort. You can easily see a world where regional leaders start to complain about how no one rides these not-incredibly-useful buses and then begin to talk about cutting the new service entirely.
After you look through the maps and have a think on it, you can fill out this survey. You can also attend a public meeting on the concepts on March 4th at 5:00 PM. According to GRTC: "Based on the feedback received from Phase 1, GRTC will present a proposed regional transit network for feedback. This is where specific routes will be presented and we encourage the public and current riders to share their reactions to the map!"
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports that Movieland's owners are building a drive-in movie theatre in its parking lot. This part, about the particulars, is fascinating: "For the screen we’d be stacking some shipping containers up and building a screen on the front of it...We’d then build a construction trailer for the projector.” I don't hate it! Movieland will give this new concept a go through "drive-in season" this year, which I didn't know was a specific season, and then they'll see if it makes sense to leave it up permanently.
Episode four of Black Space Matters is out! This week Duron Chavis hosts Silly Genius, a Richmond-based artist and founder of All City Art Club. I've written about Silly Genius before and the work All City Art Club is doing to bring more public art to often overlooked neighborhoods—with a focus on the Southside. You can check out some of that art over on the @allcity.artclub instagram.
This morning's patron longread
What If We Never Reach Herd Immunity?
Submitted by Patron Susan. I think this article was meant to Bum You Out, but, I dunno! Learning about the science of vaccines makes me feel less unmoored.
Think of immunity from vaccines not as an on-off switch but as a dampener on the virus’s ability to replicate inside you. There are four important thresholds, from easiest to hardest to achieve: protection against severe symptoms, protection against any symptoms, protection against transmission, and protection against infection. Most of the topline efficacy numbers for vaccines are against symptoms; to prevent transmission, though, which is key for herd immunity, the vaccine needs to tamp down viral replication even further. That’s why vaccine efficacy against transmission is expected to be lower than efficacy against symptoms—exactly how much lower is still unclear.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
