Good morning, RVA: 3,876↘️ • 7↗️; high demand for potato wedges; and signing off for 2020

Good morning, RVA! It’s 41 °F, and there’s a decent chance for rain this morning. Temperatures will head up into the 50s, and there’s a possibility of even warmer days ahead—don’t count on a white Christmas this year. But! That just might mean more time to spend outside without a bunch of layers on before 2021 rolls around.

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 3,876↘️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 7↗️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 360↘️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 55, Henrico: 176, and Richmond: 129). Since this pandemic began, 521 people have died in the Richmond region. Peak or no peak? That’s the question I ask myself every day at 12:30 PM when I update my coronaspreadsheet. The stacked graph of statewide new reported positive cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, to me at least, says we have not yet reached the peak—especially looking at hospitalizations which continued to increase over the weekend. The UVA COVID-19 Model, which I don’t link to a ton because I’m often vexed by it, agrees, projecting a peak of around 100,000 new cases per week come the middle of February. For context, Virginia reported about 25,000 new cases over the last seven days. Let me just quote directly from the dashboard: “If winter weather and the holiday season increases case growth, Virginia may see new cases peak at 137,952 per week during the week ending February 7, 2021. However, if we take additional steps to control the spread new cases may peak at 62,930 per week during the week ending January 31, 2021.” If we take additional steps things will get twice as bad as they are now? That’s grim. However, those numbers should serve as clear motivation for folks to stay home as much as possible over the next couple of months. It sucks, it’s hard, but it’s the right thing to do.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Kenya Hunter covers a new report from the State’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission that says the Virginia Department of Education “is not adequately meeting the needs of students with disabilities.” You can find the report, summary, presentation, and recommendations over on JLARC’s site. You should always, always disaggregate this type of data by race, and, unsurprisingly, Hunter says students with disabilities have a 61% graduation rate, yet “Black students with disabilities are 13% behind their non-Black peers.”

I’m just going to continue to quote these Gregory J. Gilligan headlines in the RTD about the new Ukrop’s food hall: “Ukrop’s Market Hall is using new procedures to help with the high demand for its fried chicken and potato wedges.”

The Richmond and Henrico Health Districts will host their final free COVID-19 testing event before we head into the end-of-year holidays today at the Eastern Henrico Health Department (1400 N. Laburnum Ave) from 10:00 AM–12:00 PM. Additionally, here’s the big list of places across the region you can get COVID test. Be smart! Get tested!

Finally, a logistical note, and some ~personal news~. As we’re entering the “look back at 2020” part of the journalism cycle, this will be the final edition of Good Morning, RVA until 2021. I’m going to take the next two weeks to sleep in a bit later and make some tweaks to the tools that help me put this email together each and every day. It’s small odds and ends that I want to fix but stuff I’ve been putting off for months and months.

Double finally, I wanted to give y’all an update on my professional life, both out of a willingness to be transparent and because I feel like that’s the kind of relationship we’ve grown into over the last couple of years. So! After leaving my wonderful job at RVA Rapid Transit to make space for different voices in that work and to focus on this email, I picked up a part-time job helping the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts handle requests from businesses and organizations looking to reopen after this past spring’s shutdown. This was back when case counts had started to fall and restrictions were lifting by the week—we were truly sweet summer children. Then, a month or so ago, the Health Districts' Director of Communications left to pursue other opportunities, and I was asked to step in and fill that role as Acting Director of Communications for the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts. That’s my title now, and I’m honored to serve our region in this way during this absolutely bananas time. If you’ve noticed a shift in this email from transit to public health, that—and, duh, the ongoing pandemic—is probably why. Of course, it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, this email does not speak on behalf of either health district, just on behalf of me. And, honestly, I had a lot of consternation about what taking on this new role would mean for this email—especially over what the folks financially supporting GMRVA through the patreon would think. Ultimately though, working on public health communications is the highest and best use of my time and talents during this crisis. I would not fault anyone—reader or patron—for unsubscribing for one of many reasons, but for folks that choose to stay on, though, thank you! The next couple of months will certainly not lack in exciting PDFs to read, public meetings to watch, and zoning to complain about—plus budget season is right around the corner!

As the strangest year of my entire adult life closes out, I’m hoping that you and yours will find some time to rest and recharge for whatever comes next.

Stay well, and do good.

This morning’s longread

The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star

Another journalism apology, this one from the Kansas City Star. As you know, I love these sorts of things, and I found this one through the RTD’s Mel Leonor who says, “Institutional introspection takes courage and leadership, and judging by the Kansas City Star’s product, a lot of resources. So many of America’s newspapers—starting with my own, the Richmond Times-Dispatch—are overdue for it, and their Black constituents deserve it.”

Inside The Star, reporters and editors discussed how an honest examination of our own past might help us move forward. What started as a suggestion from reporter Mará Rose Williams quickly turned into a full-blown examination of The Star’s coverage of race and the Black community dating to our founding in 1880. Today The Star presents a six-part package. It is the result of a team of reporters who dug deeply into the archives of The Star and what was once its sister paper, The Kansas City Times. They pored over thousands of pages of digitized and microfilmed stories, comparing the coverage to how those same events were covered in the Black press — most notably by The Kansas City Call and The Kansas City Sun, each of which chronicled critical stories the white dailies ignored or gave short shrift.

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