Good morning, RVA! It's 43 °F, and today looks like the warmest-but-still-dry day of the week. If you can, get out and enjoy it because tomorrow comes thunder. NBC12's Andrew Freiden says we should expect severe weather tomorrow afternoon—especially just south of Richmond.
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 1,276 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 44 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 144 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 63, Henrico: 48, and Richmond: 33). Since this pandemic began, 1,179 people have died in the Richmond region. I'm still trying to put my hands on Virginia's flu data from previous years as a way of benchmarking "the end" of this pandemic. I haven't yet found exactly what I'm looking for, but this 2017–18 Season Influenza Surveillance End-of-Season Report from VDH is interesting. If I'm reading this right, Virginia confirmed just 4,304 positive cases of the flu that year, but also, at its seasonal peak, 120 people died in one week. For context, 314 people have died in Virginia from COVID-19 over the last seven days. I'm guessing that many, many positive flu cases go unreported, so I'm not really sure what to do with that. I'll keep noodling.
While the Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield health districts remain in Phase 1b of the vaccine rollout, yesterday a handful of health districts moved into Phase 1c (Pittsylvania, Danville, Southside, and Eastern Shore). This is exciting! Compared to 1b, population-wise, 1c is tiny. And then, after Phase 1c, comes Phase 2: Everybody Else. I didn't really believe him when the president said we'd have enough vaccine for the entire country to move into Phase 2 by May 1st, but here we are! I'll be honest, the prospect of in-person cookouts on July 4th still gives me the shivers a bit, but it does look like a lot of folks will have the opportunity to do so while fully vaccinated.
Also of note, Patrick Larsen at VPM reports that VDH will open some mass vaccination clinics today—Community Vaccination Centers in their parlance—including one at Virginia State University. They hope to vaccinate a few thousand folks each day, eventually ramping up to 6,000 vaccinations daily. Love it!
Today, Richmond City launched a new and improved RVA 311 where you can report all of the broken stuff in our city—things like potholes, busted street lights, even cars parked in the bike lane (in the system currently as a right-of-way violation). Read a bit more on this Twitter thread or on this page of the RVA Strong website. The new site lets you filter requests in some ways that could be interesting moving forward. Do I really need to know that 14 "Odor from Sewer" requests were made over the last year? Maybe! Anyway, I have reluctantly put this app (back) on my phone and will do my best to submit and document issues as I see them. You should, too!
Want to live in the old DEQ building downtown? 14 months from now, you can! Gregory Gilligan at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the plans to convert the beautiful building at 629 E. Main Street into a hotel have been switcheroo'd to building 188 apartments instead. I'm not holding my breath on affordable units in this project, but it is nice to see more homes downtown instead of more hotels.
Dale Brumfield, field director for Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, has a long piece in Style Weekly about the path the Commonwealth took to abolishing the death penalty. I think the Governor still needs to sign this bill, but, when he does so, on July 1st the death penalty will be no more in Virginia. Good riddance.
I 100% did not know a single thing about yesterday's gubernatorial debate put on by a group of progressive orgs under the banner of the Virginia People's Debates. Luckily you and I both can stream the entire thing over on YouTube and catch up on what we missed. Absent from the Zoom, Terry McAuliffe, which, shrug.
This morning's longread
Stacey Abrams Talks Flipping Georgia, Defending Change, and Setting Limits
This feels like a good read ahead of Virginia's gubernatorial race.
Most people, she believes, don’t realize how much they can do because they don’t already know how to do everything they want. In addition to that, sometimes they’re actively being misled about their options. “One of the most successful gaslighting operations in American history has been the disinformation [campaign] about our power, and because so many pieces of our society have been weaponized against us, we’ve also been conditioned to believe that weaponization is innate, that what they are doing is the right thing, and everything we’re asking for is a departure.” Extinguishing the gaslight is what organizations like Fair Fight, Fair Count, and the Southern Economic Advancement Project are working to do. There’s a long line of leaders from coast to coast who believe they can do the same in their own reliably red states. Groh-Wargo shakes her head a bit and smiles. “Everybody’s like, ‘We want Stacey to fix our state. Lauren, can you come fix our state?’ And I’m like, ‘Guys, it’s just been 10 years of really hard work.’ There’s not a magic bullet. You’ve got to see the full playing field. You got to fix the party. And it’s just hard. It’s just hard.”
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