😷 Good morning, RVA: 890, 22; Richmond 300 continues!, and streetcars

Good morning, RVA! It’s 62 °F, and today’s weather looks pretty great. Expect highs in the mid 70s and, eventually, some sunshine. Rain moves into town tomorrow evening!

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 890 positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth, and 22 people in Virginia have died as a result of the virus. That’s almost double both numbers from Friday morning (460 and 13 respectively). VDH reports 78 cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 13, Henrico: 40, and Richmond: 25). Over 10,000 people have received the COVID-19 test.

Samuel Northrop at the Richmond Times-Dispatch as a brutal recap of the situation at the Canterbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare facility which has eight of Henrico’s 40 COVID-19 deaths. Health officials have introduced a number of measure to prevent the spread of the virus in and out of the facility, including showers and “bleach foot baths.”

Richmond 300, the City’s master planning process, continues despite the coronavirus’s best attempts to shut down reasons to read nerdy PDFs and take online planning surveys. Speaking of, you can and should still take the survey on Accessory Dwelling Units. Allowing ADUs almost everywhere would instantly double the density of the City and give a bunch more folks (theoretically) affordable places to live. Second, you should keep an eye out for the Coliseum Area Framework Plan, which, much like the Greater Scott’s Addition Framework Plan, will set up some guidelines for future development Downtown. Council requested this plan as part of their vote against the Mayor’s North of Broad redevelopment project, and now, with any luck, we’ll end up with a solid document guiding what folks want to see out of that neighborhood. Third, if you’ve got ideas for how the Richmond 300 folks can do community engagement in The Time of Coronavirus, please send them an email at richmond300@richmondgov.com and let them know.

With school and graduation canceled, students are faced with two options: angrily listening to loud rock n' roll in their rooms or building a virtual graduation ceremony in Minecraft. C. Suarez Rojas at the RTD, says a couple of folks from Midlothian and Cosby High Schools chose the latter, and we’re all better for it. During plague times, you take your stories of resilience where you can get them!

The City is paving a ton of streets at the moment—honestly, it’s a great time to do it since a lot of folks are staying at home and off the roads. Over on /r/rva they’ve got a neat picture of the old streetcar tracks on Main Street that’ve been exposed as workers have stripped off old layers of pavement. If you’re interested, here’s a circa 1900 map of all of Richmond’s old streetcar lines—including that one on Main Street. Hey, also, shoutout to DPW employees and contractors who are out there making our City a better place while most of us—this guy at least—shelters in place.

This article in the NYT about Liberty University’s reaction (or lack of reaction) to the coronavirus is wild and infuriating. Jerry Falwell Jr. refused to close the school after spring break, students returned, and now, as of Friday, “nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggested COVID-19.” Madness.

Trump changed his mind on reopening the country and needlessly killing a bunch of people, and instead extended the federal social distancing guidelines until at least the end of April. Sounds like Dr. Fauci got through to him!

I am not a medical professional, but I think the guidance on folks wearing DIY masks around town—not medical grade N95 masks—has started to shift. We definitely do not have a mask-wearing culture here in America, but that’s something I’d love to see change—and stay changed post-coronavirus. It’s important to note that wearing a crafty mask you made at home is more to keep your germs away from other people than keeping other people’s germs away from you. As they say in the Czech Republic: “My mask protects you; your mask protects me.”

This morning’s longread

We Need A Massive Surveillance Program

Here’s a surprising piece from the dude behind Pinboard.in, who’s a long-time digital privacy advocate. He argues that by deploying our (already existing and terrible) digital surveillance tools, we could slow the spread of coronavirus and save lives.

Of course, the worst people are in power right now, and the chances of them putting such a program through in any acceptable form are low. But it’s 2020. Weirder things have happened. The alternative is to keep this surveillance infrastructure in place to sell soap and political ads, but refuse to bring it to bear in a situation where it can save millions of lives. That would be a shameful, disgraceful legacy indeed. I continue to believe that living in a surveillance society is incompatible in the long term with liberty. But a prerequisite of liberty is physical safety. If temporarily conscripting surveillance capitalism as a public health measure offers us a way out of this crisis, then we should take it, and make full use of it. At the same time, we should reflect on why such a powerful surveillance tool was instantly at hand in this crisis, and what its continuing existence means for our long-term future as a free people.

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This morning’s Instagram