Good morning, RVA: 2,861 • 10; looking for a new registrar, and legalizing weed ASAP

Good morning, RVA! It’s 31 °F, and it’s gently snowing. Probably by the time you read this it’ll have stopped, but right now it’s pretty out there. For the rest of the day you can expect cold temperatures in the 30s with warmer temperatures headed our way for the rest of the week.

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 2,861 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealthand 10 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 410 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 144, Henrico: 161, and Richmond: 105). Since this pandemic began, 680 people have died in the Richmond region. Given yesterday’s notice about VDH data reporting issues, I’m still skeptical of today’s drop in new reported cases—but maybe we’re already quickly sliding down the backside of January’s horrible peak. On the vaccine side of things, our region continues to squeeze every last drop out of the existing vaccine supply as we head into what sounds like a weekslong vaccine shortage. Here’s the total number of vaccine doses administered in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield grouped by week (thanks to Patron Victoria for telling me how to make this happen in Google Sheets!). As you can see, last week the region far exceeded our share of the Governor’s statewide goal of 25,000 shots per day, which works out to around 20,000 shots per week in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield combined. Next up: 40,000 shots per week!—which is what I think Dr. Danny Avula said is our longer-term goal at a recent press conference. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of hope in keeping up this pace in the face of the coming vaccine shortage. But, like I said yesterday, it’s comforting to know that once supply does hit, our region has proved it can put vaccine into arms quickly.

Related, I’ve heard lots of folks ask about how the Health District prioritizes such a limited supply of vaccine in the face of such overwhelming demand—over 60,000 people aged 65 and older have filled out the Richmond and Henrico Health District’s vaccine interest form! Sabrina Moreno at the Richmond Times-Dispatch tuned into a health district press conference yesterday (which you can watch in full on Facebook) featuring Jackie Lawrence, Director of Health Equity at the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts. From Moreno’s piece: “Jackie Lawrence, health equity director for local VDH, said the three main prioritization factors for Richmond and Henrico are age; then race and ethnicity; and finally, who signed up first.” Those folks—the oldest members of our Black and Brown communities—have seen this disease impact their communities the most throughout this pandemic, and, generally, have fewer resources to support them through it.

Last night the Richmond Electoral Board voted to remove Kirk Showalter as the City’s general registrar. Here’s Chris Suarez’s report in the paper, and here’s a real stressful twitter thread with some videos from the meeting. Assuming this decision is final and whatever legal situation Showalter decides to pursue fails, I’m pretty interested to see what kind of practical effects a new registrar could have on elections within the City. Is the goal just to screw up fewer things? Or can the position actually make voting easier and better? I honestly have no idea!

Richmond’s School Board met last night, and, if you want to get into it, here’s the 70-page PDF of public comment—almost all in support of extending Superintendent Jason Kamras’s contract for four years. Val, to whom I’m married, took the time to tally them all up and came up with: Three comments in support of a two-year contract, nine comments in support of renewal with an unspecified time-frame, and 217 comments in support of a four-year contract. Because I can’t help myself, here are two silly graphs of what that looks like: a pie chart and a bar chart.

I’d wondered about what would happen if the General Assembly decides to legalize marijuana, but, like three years down the road. Do we still punish folks for possession despite having broadly acknowledged it shouldn’t be a punishable offense? Mel Leonor at the RTD says gubernatorial candidate and current state senator Jennifer McClellan has a bill for that. Here’s the quote from the Senator: “If we’ve already made the moral decision that possession shouldn’t be a crime, then it’s more equitable to say we’re not going to continue punishing people for it…We should go ahead and end prohibition. There’s consensus in the Senate around that.” I’m dumb about state-level legislative process, but I’m under the impression that the Senate is the more deliberative and slow-to-move of the two bodies. I’m excited to see where this ends up.

Finally, let’s end today with this video of a machine designed to shake off and collect oranges from a street tree. This is amazing, of course, but, also, kind of exactly why we sometimes don’t want to plant fruiting trees in sidewalks.

This morning’s patron longread

The Coup We Are Not Talking About

Submitted by Patron Sam. Facebook and its pals aren’t just doing gross things with your personal data, they’re using it to break our democracy.

First, we go upstream to supply, and we end the data collection operations of commercial surveillance. Upstream, the license to steal works its relentless miracles, employing surveillance strategies to spin the straw of human experience — my fear, their breakfast conversation, your walk in the park — into the gold of proprietary data supplies. We need legal frameworks that interrupt and outlaw the massive-scale extraction of human experience. Laws that stop data collection would end surveillance capitalism’s illegitimate supply chains. The algorithms that recommend, microtarget and manipulate, and the millions of behavioral predictions pushed out by the second cannot exist without the trillions of data points fed to them each day.

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.