Good morning, RVA: 937↘️ • 0↘️; it rained a lot; and free masks

Good morning, RVA! It’s 65 °F, and highs today will stay in the mid 80s—a relief from the past month or so. I think we’ll also avoid torrential, continual downpours at least for most of the day. NBC12’s Jim Duncan has a post up about the incredible amount of rain Richmond has seen this summer. This August—which still has 15 days left—is the now the 2nd wettest August ever and the 4th wettest month ever! Also: “It’s notable that since June 1st Richmond has received nearly 23 inches of rain, even with the near drought conditions in early summer. That amount is more than half our typical rain total for an ENTIRE year!” So, yeah, it’s not just you, it has rained a lot.

Also, Chesterfieldians, take note: The County has declared emergency water restrictions for residents as “significant flooding caused the temporary shutdown of Chesterfield’s water treatment plant and emergency repairs are needed at the City of Richmond’s Jahnke Road pump station, which supplies water to Chesterfield and portions of Powhatan County. Customers are asked to conserve water for essential use only and immediately stop all irrigation. While emergency restrictions are in place to help reduce demand on the water system, the water is safe to drink.”

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 937↘️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealthand 0↘️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 123↘️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 25, Henrico: 83, and Richmond: 15). Since this pandemic began, 309 people have died in the Richmond region. Today, VCU students head off to their first day of class, and, normally, the first day of fall classes at VCU is one of my favorite days of the year. The Fan and Downtown feels so empty without all of those students hurrying to class and hanging out in pocket parks. Now, though, I just worry about them all and hope they stay safe and virus-free for as long as our institutions of higher learning are open for in-person instruction. That’s not going great for our neighboring states, by the way. UNC has already announced four “clusters” of COVID-19 on campus, which is defined as “five or more cases in close proximity,” and class hasn’t even started yet. They have, however, put together this very informative and public COVID-19 tracking dashboard. I haven’t seen anything like that yet locally, and I think it’d be useful for folks. If you’re interested in the procedures and protocols VCU has put together for their students, you can read through the full list here.

The City has set up “nearly 50 locations around the city to pick up disposable surgical face masks free of cost.” Here’s the map of spots, and if you’d like to offer up your institution (some restrictions apply) as a mask distribution location, you can do so using this form.

Maybe the aforelinked map could be a useful resource to the assortment of police officers who responded to last night’s Reclamation Teach-In event and apparently weren’t interested in wearing face coverings? I was not there in person, so I don’t know the full details, but these pictures of cops not wearing masks while also disregarding social distance make me feel intensely uncomfortable. I have no idea what the actual guidance is for cops wearing masks while doing their jobs, especially while outside, but dang set an example!

Over the weekend some jerks came by and cut down the hand-painted Welcome to Beautiful Marcus-David Peters sign. This was NOT done by the City, the Richmond Police Department, or even the Virginia State Police. The VSP have intentionally left the sign in place previously, and the RPD put out this statement over the weekend: “No city agency was involved - including the RPD. It is illegal to remove signage without permission. Whoever did this may be trying to spark more violence in the City of Richmond.” All signs point to jerks, and, potentially, white supremacist jerks at that.

Richmond’s School Board meets today and has a couple of interesting things on their agenda. Make sure you take a look at this PDF updating the Board on the MOU between Richmond Public Schools and the Richmond Police Department. The survey data about staff and student perception of cops in schools (aka School Resource Officers aka SROs) may surprise you. The Board will also continue to work through the reopening plan and will discuss “proposals from the City for support of virtual learning.”

The City’s Planning Commission will also meet today to consider Richmond’s own Black Lives Matter mural (PAC 2020–002). The mural would stretch across both lanes of Grace Street between 8th and 9th, right in front of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and the entrance to the Capitol. Each letter would be yellow and 24 feet tall. You can see a rendering in this PDF to get a sense of the scale.

I haven’t yet wrapped my head around the General Assembly’s special session which starts tomorrow, but Mel Leonor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Jeremey Lazarus at the Richmond Free Press have some details on what lawmakers hope to accomplish. They’ve got coronabills and police reform bills to pass, plus probably a bunch of other stuff that seemed like, in the Before Times, it could wait but now maybe shouldn’t. I look forward to all of the brilliant GA watchers to spin up their thoughts and opinions over the next couple of days.

Yesssss a 15-story apartment building could pop up on a Monroe Ward surface-level parking lot, Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports. Going from zero to 15-stories is a heckuva improvement—it’s an infinity percent increase! The developer specializes in student housing, so I’m not sure that the larger units—some with four bedrooms—are appropriate for families (which is something I’d like to see built more often). But, again, 171 places for people to live in a spot that currently just stores cars. Also, 67 parking spaces for 171 units is…just 0.39 spaces per unit. Nice.

This morning’s longread

The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back

I don’t know that we’ve got what it takes—as a country—to execute this plan to use cheap, less accurate tests to test the mess out of basically everyone all of the time. We can’t even get everyone to wear masks. Still though, this is one possible path forward.

Testing is a non-optional problem. Tests permit us to do the most basic task in disease control: Identify the sick, and separate them from the well. When tests are abundant, they can dispel the fear of contagion that has quieted public life. “The only thing that makes a difference in the economy is public health, and the only thing that makes a difference in public health is testing,” Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, told us. Optimistic timelines suggest that vaccines won’t be widely available, in the hundreds of millions of doses, until May or June. There will be a transition period in which doctors and health-care workers are vaccinated, but teachers, letter carriers, and police officers are not. We will need better testing then. But we need it now, too.

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