Good morning, RVA: New COVID-19 guidance, parking minimums, and a gustnado

I am fully ready to take advantage of this weekend's weather. Are you?

Good morning, RVA! It's 68 °F (a number that starts with a six!), and today you can expect less humidity and highs in the low 80s. Even better: This beautiful weather continues right on through the weekend. Keep an eye out for a potential bit of rain, but then I hope you're ready to cram four weekends of pent up outside activity into the next couple of days!

Water cooler

As of last night Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield each remain at a high COVID-19 Community Level. The 7-day average of new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in each locality are, respectively, 258, 260, and 234. The 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospitalizations is 14.2. There's still a ton of COVID-19 in our communities, and, while we do have a bunch more tools and knowledge than we did a year ago, folks are exhausted. I'm exhausted! Yesterday, CDC acknowledged that folks are either slumped-in-a-chair tired or, alternatively, have moved entirely past the pandemic, and, to use CDC's words, "streamlined" COVID-19 guidance. You can read the press release here. They've made a lot of changes, but the biggest ones seem to be: 1) no longer recommending folks quarantine if exposed to COVID-19 (instead wear a mask for 10 days and get tested at day five), and 2) if you do test positive, you can leave isolation after day five if you are fever-free (no test needed) and you wear a mask through day 10. They've also updated a lot of their guidance pages in a nice and friendly way—this explanation of the COVID-19 Community Levels is much, much better. I'm pretty ambivalent about these changes. I recognize that the majority of people are not slumped-in-a-chair tired but out there living their lives, hardly thinking about masks or COVIDs or prandemics. I also recognize that people—people I know!—are still getting very sick from this disease with some are even dealing with pretty devastating effects of longcovid. And if we are "done with the pandemic," we have completely failed (big surprise) to create support systems for folks who end up with a serious illness and can't work, go to school, or pay their rent—or for folks who are at high-risk and are now double nervous about going back to school or work or even out to the grocery store. It's complicated, and I'm still processing, obviously.

WTVR's Tyler Lane talks to a bunch of experts and one resident of the Fan about getting rid of parking minimums. Here's the important thing to remember about doing away with parking minimums: Developers can still build as many parking spaces as they'd like! They're just no longer required—by law—to take up valuable space in our city to store empty cars. If you want to open a restaurant and have four parking spaces for every seat in the place, have it! Sounds expensive! Councilmember Mike Jones has this to say about building more city instead of more parking: "The reality is this: parking minimums are going to go away. They are. They need to. That's the best thing for the environment. It's the best thing for our city...Density is not the death of a city. It begins to challenge our views on mobility, challenges our views on transportation and how we get around." Deleting parking minimums is one of the three fun zoning changes the City's contemplating, and they’ll host a few more telephone town halls next week to collect more public feedback.

"Gustnado" sounds made up, and the iOS spellchecker definitely does not think it's a real word. But! Andrew Freiden assures me that a gustnado is, in fact, real and is "a brief circulation that forms on the leading edge of a thunderstorm." One hit Hull Street the other day, and you can tap through to see a video that would have made me point and yell (incorrectly) "TORNADO!"

Via /r/rva a discussion of the best French fries in Richmond. There are, apparently, many, many places with fries that I still need to try.

On Monday, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, looking for potentially mishandled classified documents, and today the Washington Post reports a worst-case scenario: "Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation." Terrifying but still unfolding. I'm sure we'll learn more over the weekend.

Reminder! NASCAR comes to town this weekend. Expect loud sounds on the Northside and lots of traffic—especially if you're crossing Laburnum—over the next couple of days.

This morning's longread
Black elders saved this couple’s Mississippi farm. Now they’re harvesting ancestral techniques—and tomatoes

Scalawag Magazine has this nice profile of a Black-owned farm in Mississippi that also features a really nice discussion of the difference between isolation and loneliness.

Now, they've got cows, goats, chickens, bees, and three ever-growing produce plots on their regenerative farm, which is both an ecological sustainability process and a lifestyle that honors the land, Teresa said. Completely self-sustaining—chickens feed off leftover veggies, and in turn, their eggshells go back into the soil as a source of calcium carbonate—they don't use any herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, or petroleum-based fertilizer. In addition to their crops and livestock, they've also cultivated a sense of peace; the couple feels a sense of calm wash over them every time they traverse their grounds—something they never knew they needed a decade ago as they navigated, and eventually fled, generational trauma in South Florida.

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