Good morning, RVA! It's 73 °F, and today looks like a repeat of yesterday. You can expect sunshine, highs in the mid 90s, and a powerful desire to pick up a milkshake.
Water cooler
The New York Times has put together a nice map of states that saw the greatest summer increase in first doses, colored by percentage of total population vaccinated. As you may have guessed, in the face of Delta, states with the lowest vaccination rates saw the biggest increase in first doses. This dude running Arkansas's vaccination effort puts it bluntly: "The reason why we’ve seen the marked increase in demand is fear, it’s the Delta variant." I know it doesn't feel great to make fear-based decisions, but, here we are and it seems like it's working. Locally, we're seeing a similar, if not as marked, increase in vaccine uptake in Virginia, too. How will return to school, a move back to more in-person working, employer vaccine mandates, and the coming of the Fall of Uncertainty impact the spread of both disease and vaccine? I don't think anyone can know!
While you're poking around the Virginia Department of Health dashboard from the link in the previous paragraph, make sure you stop by the recently resurrected COVID-19 Outbreaks by Selected Exposure Settings page. This table lists all outbreaks—active or otherwise—in a bunch of different settings, including, maybe most interesting at the moment, K–12 schools. According to VDH, "The dashboard is being reinstated because of the rapid increase in transmission of COVID-19 across the state spurred by the Delta variant. This has resulted in an increase in cases and outbreaks in congregate and communal settings. The publicly posted data will include all outbreaks reported to VDH since August 1, 2021, as these are the most relevant to implementing mitigation strategies and informing the public." This dashboard updates on Fridays, so the data in there this morning are almost an entire week old. At the moment (well, as of a week ago), Richmond Public Schools had one outbreak, at Patrick Henry School of Science and Art; and Henrico County Public Schools had two outbreaks, one at Glen Allen High School and one at Highland Springs High School. I imagine you'll hear more about this dataset in the coming weeks as our region's kids head back to school.
Remember that brief moment last spring when coronatimes had people thinking about transforming our public spaces to make it easier and safer for people to get around without driving everywhere? A smaller version of that moment is back, as kids return to school and families are looking for alternatives to crowded buses or long drop-off queues. Ian M. Stewart at VPM talks to some Chesterfield parents in exactly that situation—remember how families in that county have been asked to all drive their students to school every morning. While groups like Safe Routes to Schools have worked to make biking and walking to school a safer possibility in the city, there's just not a ton going on, infrastructure-wise, out in the counties. Suburban neighborhoods that are intentionally designed as a huge cul-de-sac made up of many smaller cul-de-sacs make it very, very hard to move around an area without having to cross some massive four-lane highway. Carving up those fractaled cul-de-sacs with multi-use trails seems like one of the few paths forward, and, thankfully, it sounds like something that Chesterfield will consider in the immediate future.
In City leadership news, the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Chris Suarez reports that Lenora Reid will officially retire from the City of Richmond effective September 1st. Reid had served as Interim CAO but had been on medical leave since last year. Mayor Stoney's Chief of Staff, Lincoln Saunders, stepped in and has continued to serve as Interim Interim CAO in her absence. Suarez says the Mayor will appoint Saunders to Actual CAO, but City Council has to approve the appointment (which the Mayor expects to go smoothly).
Earlier this week I said we'd learn more about redistricting in Virginia on Friday, after the Virginia Redistricting Commission held their first roll-up-the-sleeves work session. That's probably not going to happen as the RTD's Mel Leonor reports that the Commission's work is on hold after a member tested positive for COVID-19. This group is on a tight timeline to turn out new maps, so I hope they had a strong and flexible work-from-home plan!
Bike Walk RVA needs your help in collecting super useful bike/ped data! Specifically, they're looking for volunteers to count people on bikes and pedestrians at locations across the city on the evenings of September 14th, 15th, and 16th. You can check out the remaining time slots and sign up here. This sort of super-practical work is so very important to the advocacy efforts for new bike and pedestrian infrastructure. When asking for the funding for new bike lanes, how much better is it to stand in front of City Council with a stack of data showing how their current investments in projects like bike lanes and sidewalks have paid off?
This morning's longread
An Alabama Woman’s Neighborly Vaccination Campaign
I like this story because it shows how a single person really can make a difference. Plus, it's a nice illustration of the type of on-the-ground effort that needs to go into vaccination outreach at this stage of the pandemic.
Oliver’s charm with the skeptics is remarkable, but so is her determination to bring the vaccine to her underserved town. Most of the women and men Oliver talked to leaped at the opportunity to sign up for the vaccine. On vaccine day, they rolled down their car windows to thank her. “We appreciate y’all giving it to us, because a lot of people don’t really know where to go to take these vaccines,” one woman tells her. Vaccine hesitancy in Black communities has been harped on in the media, but those conversations can gloss over questions of availability. Levine told me that they were struck by how many people had put off vaccination for logistical rather than ideological reasons. In Panola, he says, they regularly heard people say, “I want the shot. How do I get this? I don’t have a car; how am I going to get forty miles to the closest hospital and back?”
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