Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and blah, blah, blah, hot, and humid. I think today and the next couple of days may be the hottest we've had this entire summer. Get out early, late, or stay inside if you can!
Water cooler
Oakwood Arts worked with Richmond Public Schools to put together this video explaining the mitigation efforts the school district will take as they open to in-person learning for the first time in forever. If you've put off reading through that school safety protocol PDF I linked to last week, put off no further because this video goes down easy and I love a bunch of things about it (you can still read the PDF, if you must). First, it's cool to see the hospital-grade air filtration boxes and hand sanitizer dispensers added to every single classroom. I also really like how Superintendent Kamras mentions that while the risk of catching COVID-19 from surfaces is real low, they're still going to clean surfaces on the regular. Honestly, I'm pretty excited about how the new coronavirus mitigation measures will help cut down on the amount of non-COVID gross germs that typically get passed around in a school. It's like universal design principles, but for disease!
How exactly does contact tracing work? Megan Pauly at VPM talks to Chtaura Jackson, an epidemiologist with the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts, about contact tracing in schools specifically, but I think most of the discussion applies generally. Everyone should get real familiar with the quarantine guidance, because as schools and employers reopen their buildings the risk for exposure and the possibility for quarantine goes way, way up. I hope if employers are dead set on returning to office buildings, they're thinking through how to have extremely flexible work-from-home plans. They're gonna need them!
Homeward has release their 2021 Summer Point In Time count of people experiencing homelessness in our region. As of July, they counted 699 people experiencing homelessness, which is a 16% decrease compared to January, but a 42% increase compared to the previous, pre-COVID January. Tap through to explore a few more chartsandgraphs. Of interest to readers of this email, 19.7% of folks surveyed attributed their loss of housing to COVID-19 and 25.9% attributed a loss of job or income to the disease. However, 60% said they were vaccinated and 19.6% said they planned on getting vaccinated. As per always, affordable housing remains an issue. From the report: Increased funding allowed "agencies to provide more services and transition clients to more stable housing options. Despite this progress, low rental vacancy rates and lack of deeply affordable housing remain critical challenges in our region."
The Richmond Times-Dispatch's Ali Rockett reports on how the City's employees have complied with the vaccine mandate. Overall, pretty good! "Stoney said that 67% of the city’s 3,600 employees who are subject to the mandate are fully vaccinated against COVID-19; 75% have gotten at least one dose, and about 10% have asked for a medical or religious exemption." Failure to comply is pretty serious biz, as, beginning September 1st, employees who refuse will be placed on leave without pay.
Ali Rockett also reports on a new $500,000 grant the city won to create a gun violence prevention program for middle school students. I think this is pretty neat: The program will pay a stipend to students who are older for their grade and who have experienced gun violence to participate in "age appropriate, relative and responsive programming." Parks and Rec will design the programing, which I also think is neat.
This morning's longread
A Field Guide for Nature-Resistant Nerds
This is about climate change, I guess, but sometimes the sentences in a piece are so good that I don't really care what it's about.
You're supposed to love nature, so I kept my mouth shut. But I find the whole idea of it genuinely horrifying. Part of the privilege of being a nerd is that you're able to forget you have a body: You cruise around cyberspace, get a beverage out of the fridge, cruise some more. In the natural world, bodies are inescapable. Everything keeps growing, and the growth feels like rot. There is hair everywhere. I did the math, and in the past 16.38 seconds humankind collectively added a mile of fingernails. That's how I see nature. I don't like dirt. I like devices.
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