Good morning, RVA: Booster meetings, a new CAO, and one realistic change

If you could make one realistic change to the city, what would it be?

Good morning, RVA! It's 59 °F, and today looks wonderful! Get out there and enjoy the sunshine, the temperatures in the 80s, and the last couple days of this extended summer.

Water cooler

VDH has added a "People Vaccinated with Booster/Third Dose" tracker to their vaccination data dashboard. As of yesterday, about 240,000 Virginians had received their booster or third dose, just 4.6% of the fully vaccinated. Don't feel any sort of way about that number yet, though, as 1) it's early goings in boostertime, 2) only folks who received their second dose on or before April 14th are eligible, and 3) out of that group, just the Pfizer humans can get boosted. But! That could change soon. The FDA's advisory committee (VRBPAC, or Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee) meets today to discuss Moderna Boosters and tomorrow to discuss J&J boosters. I don't know if it's all this recent talk about boosters, an ongoing fear of delta, a lessening of vaccine hesitancy, or a combination of all three and a bunch of other things, but vaccination rates in Virginia have increased since their summertime low. I like the shape of that graph!

I 100% forgot to mention it, but, this past Monday, City Council unanimously confirmed Lincoln Saunders as Richmond's new, official, no-longer-acting CAO.

The Better Housing Coalition is at it again, this time planning to bring affordable housing—technically, 112 apartments and 28 townhomes—to Henrico County, just over the city line. Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports that BHC will target the new apartments towards folks making 40–60% of the area median income and the townhomes to folks earning 80–120% of AMI. All of that sounds good and great!

Via /r/rva, a great question: "If there was one realistic change you could make to the city, what would it be?" There are lots of great answers in the thread, but, for me, I think the single, most realistic change I would make would be to move to rank-choice voting for City Council. The state legislation allowing this already exists, and it would only take a majority vote by City Council to make it so. A whole lot of other changes suddenly look more realistic if we end up with a stronger, more progressive City Council.

Today at 12:00 PM, the Science Museum of Virginia will host a a free vaccine Q&A with Dr. Danny Avula via Zoom. Do you have still-burning questions about how vaccines work (magic/science), if they're safe (yes), and what it takes to coordinate the rollout of a new vaccine to an entire state of eight million people (basically never sleeping for a year)? Now's your chance to ask all of those questions and more to the man who knows!

Quick reminder: Tomorrow is Bike to Work Day, which, for me lately would mean biking from my kitchen back into my bed after making coffee. But, regardless of your work-from-home or in-person office situation, Bike to Work Day is a great excuse to join a bunch of other folks in a casual, morning ride around the city, through some of our new bike infrastructure, and to hear updates on new bike lane progress. If you'd like to join in tomorrow morning, RSVP by filling out this form over on Bike Walk RVA's website to get the meet-up details.

Southside Releaf is looking for volunteers to both plant trees and distribute trees on Richmond's Southside this coming Saturday, October 16th. Registration for the former closes today, so if planting trees sparks joy for you, go fill out that form this morning.

This morning's longread
Flatworms Are Metal

Nature! First bats are living in the latrines and now this!

Planarians complicate other seemingly simple concepts too. Consider a question that Levin and his colleagues posed in 2016: After a bisected planarian regenerates into two new animals, would the planarian that grew from the head consider the one that grew from the tail to be its twin, its sibling, its child, or itself? The answer isn’t obvious, because these words were defined by humans—a species that, last I checked, cannot reproduce by rending ourselves apart. “The things that are weird are exactly the things you need to be paying attention to,” Levin told me. “They tell you that your model of the world is incomplete in important ways. You have to treasure the exceptions.”

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