Good morning, RVA: Coronavirus update, transit in Chesterfield, and increasing the minimum wage

Good morning, RVA! It’s 46 °F, and today looks a lot like yesterday. Expect highs in the mid 60s and a sneaky chance of rain throughout the day.

Water cooler

According to the Virginia Department of Health, there are nine presumptive positive cases of COVID-19 in the Commonwealth.

Today’s coronavirus update is vastly different than yesterday’s, which just goes to show how quickly things can change. VCU and UR have both suspended class next week, through March 20th. When instruction resumes on the 23rd, VCU says “classes will be taught remotely for the foreseeable future” while UR says “faculty will prepare for the transition to remote instruction beginning March 23. Our community should be prepared for an extended period of distance learning.” Staff for both universities are expected to just come in and work like normal though, and that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

At the local public school level, Superintendent Kamras cancelled “all school-sponsored and division-sponsored travel outside of the Richmond area for both students and staff.” He’ll also ask the School Board to reallocate $500,000 towards “supplies and services dedicated to preparing for and responding to COVID-19.” While school will carry on as normal, for now, he does say that “out of an abundance of caution we are already developing virtual learning guidance and examining different ways of supporting families who rely on the school meals program due to food insecurity.“ Henrico County Public Schools has a similar update. Meanwhile, beginning today, Seattle Public Schools have closed for a minimum of 14 calendar days.

The Atlantic 10 men’s basketball tournament, in which VCU plays at 12:00 PM today and UR tomorrow at 6:00 PM, will continue but without fans. In fact, the entirety of March Madness will “be played with only essential staff and limited family attendance,” and the NBA just suspended the rest of their season.

Sean Gorman and John Reid Blackwell at the Richmond Times-Dispatch talked to some of the region’s major employers about their Work From Home plans. And I imagine we’ll hear from the City—which has been pretty quite on the coronavirus front—today or tomorrow. I’ll tell you what, I’ve got immediate questions about Shamrock the Block and whatever other St. Patrick’s Day celebrations folks have planned.

Trump flubbed the announcement of a travel ban from Europe, and freaking Tom Hanks tested positive for the virus.

A lot has changed in the last 24 hours! As for me, I am still not a doctor, epidemiologist, or public health expert, but I am going to continue to socially distance the heck out of myself from as many meetings as possible. In my opinion, this is civic duty stuff! I will do my part to avoid being a disease vector and avoid putting high-risk folks in danger.

Read this Correspondent of the Day piece in the RTD! The editor of Hanover’s Lee-Davis High School paper—from 40 years ago!—writes in to say “Unfortunately I wasn’t courageous enough to outright call for a new school name in 1980…Now I do have the courage to speak out for what is right. We understand the importance of inclusion. The time has come to change the names of these schools and remove the vestiges of racism in our communities.” Love this!

Rich Griset at the Chesterfield Observer has an absolutely wonderful piece about the County’s history and future of public transportation. Check this out: Not only will the new #111 bus down Route 1 open on Monday, but the County has “approved a grant funding request to study public transit options along Midlothian Turnpike from west of Chesterfield Towne Center to Chippenham Parkway near the Richmond city line.” What the heck! Who even is this County?? This piece also features a quote from yours truly, which reveals 1) where I grew up, and 2) that, yes, this is really how I talk.

A while back, I wrote about the General Assembly’s dalliance with regional minimum wage and how that seemed both dumb and inequitable. Luckily, the GA decided to send a clean minimum wage bill to the Governor that gets most folks in Virginia a $12/hour wage by 2023 and then, possibly, a $15/hr wage by 2026. Phil Hernandez at The Commonwealth Institute has some good analysis on what this means for working folks from across the state.

This morning’s longread

When a danger is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t

This piece is from two days ago, so, basically, it’s one thousand years out of date at this point. That said, this illustration about exponential growth is super helpful in grokking something that our brains are just bad at handling. The reason closing schools, canceling basketball tournaments, and practicing social distance are so important is that things look fine….until suddenly—very suddenly—they don’t.

There’s an old brain teaser that goes like this: You have a pond of a certain size, and upon that pond, a single lilypad. This particular species of lily pad reproduces once a day, so that on day two, you have two lily pads. On day three, you have four, and so on. Now the teaser. “If it takes the lily pads 48 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take for the pond to be covered halfway?” The answer is 47 days. Moreover, at day 40, you’ll barely know the lily pads are there.

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