😷 Good morning, RVA: 450↘️ • 20↘️; Trump has COVID; and we should build more trails

Good morning, RVA! It’s 57 °F, and today you can expect cooler temperatures in the upper 60s. Honestly, I think you could consider wearing a layer! Look forward to similarly wonderful fall-like weather throughout the weekend.

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 450↘️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 20↘️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 23↘️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 4, Henrico: 10, and Richmond: 9). Since this pandemic began, 374 people have died in the Richmond region. The stacked graph of new positive reported cases, new hospitalizations, and new deaths is pretty interesting. As we head into fall, the daily case count has steadily dropped for almost the past two weeks—which feels like a solid trend. The new hospitalizations graph, while showing some downward trend, doesn’t really mirror the same action we’re seeing in the new cases graph, and I don’t know what that means. The big news is not these graphs I boringly make in a Google spreadsheet but that Trump has tested positive for COVID-19. At 12:54 AM he tweeted “Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!” I’m sure that due to his absolute lack of seriousness about the virus and his total disregard for public health, the contact tracers working this particular case have a heckuva lot of work in front of them. Also, I plan on continually refreshing Joe Biden’s Twitter feed until I see him post something about his COVID-19 test results. I’m pretty sure he’ll want to take one as soon as possible after he spent 90 minutes getting yelled at by someone standing 10 feet away who wasn’t wearing a mask.

If you read the above paragraph and were more interested in the spreadsheet news than the #TrumpHasCovid news (an actual trending hashtag), maybe you’ll also be interested in this announcement from the Governor’s office about a new data portal. The new portal “now includes more than a dozen new COVID-19 datasets from the Virginia Department of Health” and is part of the existing Virginia Open Data Portal. Now you can liberate all of that coronadata from the steely grip of VDH’s Tableau dashboard and do whatever you want with it! I’m glad dashboards and Tableau exist, but sometimes it’s nice to just work with numbers in a spreadsheet, you know?

Cat Anthony, the Executive Director of the Virginia Capital Trail Foundation, has a column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about doubling down on the success of the Capital Trail and getting to work on the proposed Ashland to Petersburg Trail. The Capital Trail is incredible! It’s beautiful, safe, and open to anyone who wants to walk, roll, or ride through some truly striking parts of Virginia. I ride my bike on the Capital Trail all of the time, and, no joke, it is one of the most racially diverse places I spend time. Honestly, it’s such a good piece of infrastructure that sometimes I have a hard time believing it exists. We should be doing everything we can to build as many of these things stretching across the region as quickly as possible!

The CT’s Andrew Ringle, writing for the Capital News Service, says that the state-level Marcus Alert bill (Del. Bourne’s HB 5043) has now passed both the House and Senate. Assuming this bill ends up getting signed by the Gov, it sounds like both the Commonwealth and localities will have some work to do to set up these mental health systems over the next couple of years.

It’s over my head, buy yesterday’s Homeless Plan Update presentation to City Council’s Education and Human Services Committee (PDF) is up on the City’s website. Tap the link for a bunch of tables on how homelessness service providers in our region spent emergency pandemic money and the outcomes of those services. Maybe a little more consumable for people not deeply steeped in this work, starting on page 10 you can flip through some demographic charts which show that the majority of clients served by these providers throughout the pandemic have been older, Black men. Related, the Education and Human Services committee voted to send ORD. 2020–170, the paper dealing with the Annie Giles Community Resource Center that I wrote about yesterday, back to full Council with a recommendation to…continue!

The Virginia Employment Commission updated their weekly unemployment data, which you can see in this graph, and the number of initial claims dropped to four figured for the first time since before the pandemic began. While there are still 183,000 people filing for unemployment insurance, this does seems like progress.

Double whammy public health clinic day! The Henrico and Richmond City Health Districts will host a free flu vaccination clinic for uninsured or underinsured folks today at the Southwood Property Management Office (1400 Southwood Parkway) from 4:00–7:00 PM. The Districts will also host a free COVID-19 community testing event today at the Eastern Henrico Health Department (1400 N. Laburnum Avenue) from 1:00–4:00 PM.

This morning’s patron longread

I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There.

Submitted by Patron Casey. While I don’t agree with the entire piece, some of this is just so incredibly well put.

If you’re waiting for a moment where you’re like “this is it,” I’m telling you, it never comes. Nobody comes on TV and says “things are officially bad.” There’s no launch party for decay. It’s just a pileup of outrages and atrocities in between friendships and weddings and perhaps an unusual amount of alcohol. Perhaps you’re waiting for some moment when the adrenaline kicks in and you’re fighting the virus or fascism all the time, but it’s not like that. Life is not a movie, and if it were, you’re certainly not the star. You’re just an extra. If something good or bad happens to you it’ll be random and no one will care. If you’re unlucky you’re a statistic. If you’re lucky, no one notices you at all. Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.

This morning’s Instagram