Good morning, RVA! It's 74 °F, and today looks a lot like the last couple of days: hot, humid, and a chance for storms later this evening. This weekend, though! Get excited for a little bit cooler temperatures and a little bit more time to spend outside without taking your life into your own hands.
Water cooler
As of last night, the CDC’s COVID-19 Community Level for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield is HIGH—like, way high. The case rate per 100,000 people in each locality, respectively, is 323, 260, and 327; and the new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 13.4. I'm not sure I've seen case rates in the 300s before (at least in this recent wavy plateau we seem to be stuck on). Unfortunately, CDC has no extra guidance for when the amount of COVID floating around in your community is real high, but they do continue to recommend that everyone, regardless of vaccination status, wear a mask in indoor public settings. It's stressful and annoying, but maybe take some time this weekend to think through your own acceptable level of risk and if the increased amount of COVID-19 in the region impacts what you're comfortable doing in your day-to-day.
Related, some good news from the New York Times: "The Biden administration now expects to begin a Covid-19 booster campaign with retooled vaccines in September because Pfizer and Moderna have promised that they can deliver doses by then." It sounds like all adults (and maybe some children) will be eligible for a new omicron-specific booster in as few as six weeks! We all know how soft these sorts of timeline announcements can be, so I'm not clearing my calendar just yet. That said...sign me upppppp!
Megan Pauly at VPM sat down for an interview with Eva Colen, head of Richmond’s Office of Children and Families, to talk about universal pre-k. There are all kinds of really excellent benefits from getting allllll of our kids into preschool programs—for the kids, of course, but also for families and communities, too. The City and the Children’s Funding Project are, as we speak, putting together a study, due next summer, about what it would take and what it would cost to launch a universal pre-k initiative in Richmond. I imagine it's complex and expensive, but I'm definitely excited to eventually read this PDF!
Do you know about...The Lake? Jack Jacobs at Richmond BizSense reports that, in just a couple of weeks, the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors will vote on the funding for this "105-acre mixed-use development...that would feature a surf pool and recreational lake." Fascinating. Tap through to read how this development will use a TIF-like financing tool to provide upwards of $27 million to the developers. Like I said: Fascinating! Can you imagine if you lived in an apartment building in Chesterfield that had a "surf pool" as one of its amenities?
Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond has some pictures from inside the new General Assembly building—well, kind of. The Department of General Services wouldn't let him in to take pictures, so they sent a few along instead. Tap through to see some photos of what's been disrupting our city's bus system for the past forever!
It's not up yet, but don’t forget to vote in the Elite Eight of the City’s contest to name the adorable bike-lane street sweeper (as of right now, you've got fourish hours to vote in the first round if you haven't already)! Unfortunately, both Kate Brush and Dirt Reynolds look unlikely to make it through to the next round, but Bike Dyson, though! This is a good and fun distraction.
This morning's longread
How Polio Crept Back Into the U.S.
Here's the story of how a new polio case showed up in New York and how wastewater surveillance will help track down the spread of this disease. This is terrifying, of course, but wasterwater stuff is so neat.
Ultimately, New York health officials will use wastewater monitoring to tell them quickly whether they have a bigger problem, essentially allowing them to test thousands of people at once for polio infection rather than individually, David Larsen, an epidemiologist and Syracuse University professor who directs the state’s wastewater surveillance network, said in an email. Wastewater testing for polio has been a staple in developing nations for decades, but at least a few countries where cases are rare and vaccination rates are high do it, too.
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