🦠 Good morning, RVA: 798↘️ • 30↗️; COVIDWISE; and Sheetz vs. Wawa

Good morning, RVA! It’s 72 °F, and, while humid, today’s highs will stick around in the 80s. Speaking of sticking around, how about that random storm last night? I’d love to see an East End rain total comparison with this week’s tropical storm. As for today, keep an eye out for possibly more storms passing through this evening.

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 798↘️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 30↗️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 111↗️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 29, Henrico: 63, and Richmond: 19). Since this pandemic began, 296 people have died in the Richmond region. I wonder if the tropical storm, which closed offices and testing sites had anything to do with yesterday’s low number of new reported cases—low compared to the seven-day average which stands at 1008. We’ll see if the numbers shift up today or if this is part of a larger downward trend.

The big coronanews, however, is the launch of COVIDWISE, Virginia’s exposure notification app. You should download this app and install it on your phone right now. It’s an easy way to participate in the public part of public health. COVIDWISE runs on your phone and exchanges anonymous tokens with other phones you’ve spent time near. That process is safe, secure, does not track or log your location or identity, and is built on the privacy-preserving contact tracing framework put together by Apple and Google. Virginia is the first state to roll out an app built on this protocol! If you get tested for COVID-19 and the results are positive, the Virginia Department of Health will give you a code to enter into COVIDWISE which will then trigger a notification to any phone you’ve spent time near over the last 14 days using those anonymized tokens. Then those folks can take the proper precautions to quarantine or get tested if they’re experiencing some early, slightly-troubling coronasymptoms. Here’s a more detailed comic involving rabbits that’ll gently, but thoroughly, explain how this all can work while maintaining everyone involved’s privacy. Like I said, you should just put this on your phone immediately. I am not a lawyer, but if I were in charge of app deployment at a large company, I’d put it on my employees’ phones immediately, too. I’d call my parents and tell them to put it on their phones. I’d tweet about it daily. I’d ruthlessly and publicly mock friends that refuse to put it on their phones. This is one of the smallest and easiest ways that you can directly contribute to making the pandemic less bad while also making the lives of our local case investigators and contact tracers a little better. They are working very hard and very much deserve your help! Honestly, I’m astounded by the number of folks who have Big Privacy Concerns™ about an app like this yet have no problems pouring personal data into Facebook each and every day. I know our public trust in technology has been broken (by companies like Facebook!), but this is a small, safe step to rebuilding that trust in the name of public health. Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury has some more details, including a quote from the state’s director of health informatics that says the data suggests “for every 1.5 users of Virginia’s app, they expect to see one less infection,” and here is the Governor’s COVIDWISE press release.

The Virginia Mercury’s Ned Oliver also has an update on the Governor’s request that the Supreme Court of Virginia extend their ban on evictions. There’s some fascinating stuff in this piece about who has the authority to do what when it comes to evictions, and how that confusion (or tension?) means evictions continue to loom.

Ha! Turns out the ABC website was not prepared for the crushing onslaught of an entire state’s worth of people ordering cheap(er) booze online after spending five months stuck inside. At some point yesterday, the site slowed to a crawl, sputtered, and gave up on processing online orders. This is why I didn’t tell y’all until after I placed my order at 6:00 AM! Suckers!

Jack Jacobs at Richmond BizSense reports that the Naked Onion has permanently closed. That’s a real shame because their bahn mi was something special. Do I need a new section of this email where I lament the loss of my favorite Richmond foods to coronavirus? First Greenleaf’s fries, now this! What a bummer.

Style Weekly’s Brent Baldwin talked with the new executive director of the Byrd Theatre, Stacy Shaw, about what running a theatre during a pandemic has been like (stressful, I bet).

Via /r/rva: “Richmond exists at the heart of the war between Sheetz and Wawa. Who does everyone align with?” This is a cool piece of data viz, and, I have to say, I will always be partial to Sheetz. Every drive back to Richmond from Blacksburg, when I was young and my stomach strong, I would stop at Sheetz and order two hot dogs with relish, onions, and nacho cheese. What the heck! Why was I so awesome / disgusting??

Part of aiming to make Good Morning, RVA my full-time, insurance-and-mortgage-paying job, means asking for money outloud. Turns out, folks are much more likely to support your projects with actual money if you, you know, ask for actual money. Consider yourselves asked! Please join the GMRVA patreon, chip in five or 10 bucks a month, and help me keep doing what I’m doing. And help me keep paying my mortgage and insurance, too

This morning’s longread

We Need to Talk About Ventilation

Ventilation! It’s boring yet possibly critical in our ongoing work to help prevent folks from getting COVID-19.

Part of the difficulty with this discussion has been that the relevant experts, including infectious-disease specialists, epidemiologists, environmental and aerosol engineers, don’t even agree on the terminology. The particles we emit from our mouths can be called droplets, microdroplets, droplet nuclei (particles that start out bigger but get smaller because of evaporation) or aerosols. There is no clear line between big and small particles and droplets and aerosols; it’s a continuum with complex aerodynamics depending on the environment, and to make matters worse, the same word—like aerosol—sometimes means something different in each field. The terminological confusion led Milton to write a “Rosetta Stone” paper to try to clarify the terms across fields. For this article, I’ll call the spray-borne particles that travel ballistically “droplets,” and the ones that can float “aerosols” (regardless of what size the particles may be, as the key question is whether they can float and be pushed around by air—and that size cut-off remains disputed).

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This morning’s Instagram