Good morning, RVA: 5,121 • 80; vaccinating 7,000 people in a weekend; and Black Space Matters

Good morning, RVA! It’s 23 °F, and today’s forecast is cold! Expect highs in the mid 30s and even colder temperatures this evening. This weekend you can expect more of the same with a possible real-deal snow storm on Sunday. Fingers crossed!

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 5,121 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealthand 80 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 521 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 197, Henrico: 175, and Richmond: 149). Since this pandemic began, 668 people have died in the Richmond region. While VDH continues to report a large number of deaths each and every day, the seven-day average of new cases across the Commonwealth is under 5,000 (which, remember, would have been horrifying just a couple of months ago) and the seven-day average of new hospitalizations has almost dropped below 100 (again, shocking at any time before December). Here’s this week’s stacked graph of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, which I do think shows us past a peak and now hanging out on a plateau. You can see similar plateauy trends in the local case count graph, too. Virginia’s not alone in these trends, either: Check out yesterday’s graphs from the COVID Tracking Project that show the entire country coming off a scary peak in cases. So, where we are is not great, where we’re going looks better.

Sabrina Moreno at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details on the region’s plan to vaccinate over 7,000 people aged 75 and older this weekend. If you’ll allow it, let me quote a couple sentence that make me feel feelings: “The odds of getting a shot to protect Talbot against the virus dwindled once Virginia, alongside other states, learned of a federal supply shortage. Renewing her faith was the Richmond and Henrico health districts, along with surrounding counties, announcing on Thursday a push to vaccinate 7,000 adults ages 65 and up in the next three days. The events would prioritize those 75-plus.” It’s definitely a bittersweet situation. Vaccinating thousands and thousands of older people—people who are way more likely to die from this disease—over the course of one weekend is incredible. At the same time, though, tens of thousands of folks will just have to wait until the supply of the vaccine increases. For a lot of seniors, that’s a scary and frustrating prospect. If you or someone you know and love is over 65 and lives in Richmond or Henrico, please fill out this online vaccine interest form.

Duron Chavis, who probably sounds familiar from his work with resiliency gardens, has a new series of videos made in conjunction with the ICA called Black Space Matters. From the YouTube description box: “In our new series Black Space Matters, urban farmer Duron Chavis interviews local community leaders, digging into the themes of food insecurity and urban farming explored in his Resiliency Garden project for the exhibition, Commonwealth. Over the course of five episodes (released weekly every Thursday), Chavis talks with stakeholders in the Richmond area that engage in food justice, environmental racism, Black space, and various modes of creativity, care, and healing.” Check out this first episode to hear Duron talk with Rob Jones, Executive Director of Groundwork RVA.

I mentioned this a couple days/weeks ago, but delays with the Census look like they will impact Virginia’s redistricting process. Mel Leonor at the RTD has some of the confusing details, which includes this suboptimal path forward: “If lawmakers run in the current districts, the state would have two options: ask delegates to run again under new maps in a 2022 special election and then again in 2023, or keep the districts as they are until the next regularly scheduled House elections in 2023.”

Michael Town, Executive Director of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, has a guest column in the Virginia Mercury about the intersection of conservation and transportation. Electrifying our current vehicle fleet is good, but we just need fewer people driving. The only way to make that a reality is to work on building (and rebuilding) our cities (and suburbs!) to make that a legitimate possibility for folks.

A while back Evergreen Enterprises donated a bunch of heat lamps to the City for local restaurants and restaurant-adjacent businesses who want to stay open while providing a safer, out-of-doors, warmer place for patrons to hang. If you own a business in the City of Richmond and have permanent outdoor seating or an outdoor waiting area, you should fill out this form. I’m glad this opportunity exists, but it’s just the smallest of crumbs when it comes to fast-acting policy the City could implement to make Richmond safer during this pandemic. We never saw safer/slower streets policies and we never saw a push to get rid of parking in favor of space for people (parklet program aside). So much low-hanging fruit we never even attempted to grab.

This morning’s longread

Searching for Bernie

AI jokes! It’s been a while since I’ve linked to Janelle Shane’s AI Weirdness blog, but this post made me laugh. She uses an AI that generates images paired with a different AI that judges the accuracy of images to create…malformed horrors?

I wrote earlier about DALL-E, an image generating algorithm recently developed by OpenAI. One part of DALL-E’s success is another algorithm called CLIP, which is essentially an art critic. Show CLIP a picture and a phrase, and it’ll return a score telling you how well it thinks the picture matches the phrase. You can see how that might be useful if you wanted to tell the difference between, say, a pizza and a calzone - you’d show it a picture of something and compare the scores for “this is a pizza” and “this is a calzone”. How you come up with the pictures and captions is up to you - CLIP is merely the judge. But if you have a way to generate images, you can use CLIP to tell whether you’re getting closer to or farther from whatever you’re trying to generate

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