Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and highs today will hit in the 40s. Temperatures increase tomorrow, and the rest of the week looks pretty nice—and dry. Enjoy accordingly!
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 1,124 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 231 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 127 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 48, Henrico: 59, and Richmond: 20). Since this pandemic began, 1,002 people have died in the Richmond region. As VDH finishes up recording all of the winter COVID-19 deaths, we've surpassed a thousand deaths locally. In fact, these "new" reported deaths in Virginia are so substantial that they're having an impact on national death reporting figures. Compare this national number of deaths reported graph to this one excluding Virginia. Anyway, I think we are almost through seeing these huge new daily death numbers—look at the graph of Deaths by Date of Death for today vs. the same graph from a week ago. You can see that the huge missing gap of data is almost entirely filled in at this point. I do wonder, though, if our collective behavior would have changed if we had known the actual number of people dying every day.
Here's this week's updated graph of the amount of vaccine administered locally. After missing Ross's Stupid Math Goal of 20,000 doses administered two weeks ago, the region crushed it last week and put over 33,000 shots in arms. Good job, region! Now, I think it is time to update the Stupid Math Goal to come in line with the Governor's actual goal of 50,000 jabs across the state per day. That works out to—using back-of-the-envelop population proportion math (aka Stupid Math)—be about 37,000 doses administer each week in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield combined. I'll update the chart accordingly.
Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports that City Council "adopted three ordinances authorizing the sale of the city’s Public Safety Building property and adopt[ed] a development agreement with Capital City Partners, which is planning a 20-story, VCU Health-anchored tower and mixed-use office complex on the bulk of the 3-acre property at 500 N. 10th St." Seems good to build city-type stuff in the center of our city, right? I still am concerned about what will happen to the remains of the GRTC transfer place, which Spiers says would be relocated to "the surface parking lot across Ninth from the building." We can do better than "relocated to a surface parking lot," and I'm looking forward to seeing some details on the plans for humanely sheltering folks that still need to make transfers at the plaza.
VPM's Alan Rodriguez stayed up late to follow along with the Richmond School Board meeting last night and reports that the Board voted 6–2 to "return about 800 students to in-person instruction after spring break in April." Rodriguez also says that the Board will vote on the year-round school calendar on March 15th. I tuned in for a bit of the meeting and caught several boardmembers commenting on the flawed design of the year-round school survey or its lack of reach. What I'd like to see now is how those board members will engage their constituency over the next 13 days to fill in those gaps—and not in a rhetorical way! I think someone should look into and track what, over the next two weeks, each of the nine members do to engage the people that elected them. Honestly, this is the type of open-government / transparency project I think we need more of in Richmond. Caregivers and families can still fill out the year-round school survey here.
The Virginia Mercury's Sarah Vogelsong recaps the long, and ultimately futile, journey of the electric school bus bill. Even if you don't care about schools, school buses, or electric vehicles, this piece is a great look at how politics and lobbying work in Virginia. I mean, this sentence: "Sources with knowledge of the deliberations said some House members had been wary of letting the bill die completely while there was still time for the Senate to retaliate by killing House bills that remained alive..."
Marc Cheatham, of the Cheats Movement blog, says Hamilton Glass, one of Richmond's well-known muralists, is featured in the YouTube Originals "Black Renaissance: The Art and Soul of Our Stories." Add it to your queue!
This morning's longread
A Simple Rule of Thumb for Knowing When the Pandemic Is Over
I don't know if any of the metrics for "when the pandemic is over" make sense, but it's something I hadn't really thought about before. I bet we end up with different states declaring victory at different times using different criteria. Still though, worth thinking about as we continue to see case counts drop.
“The question is not when do we eliminate the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Rather, it’s when do we have the virus sufficiently under control? “We’ll have a much, much lower case count, hospitalization count, death count,” Offit said. “What is that number that people are comfortable with?” In his view, “the doors will open” when the country gets to fewer than 5,000 new cases a day, and fewer than 100 deaths. That latter threshold, of 100 COVID-19 deaths a day, was repeated by other experts, following the logic that it approximates the nation’s average death toll from influenza.
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