🟠/🟡 Good morning, RVA: A change in the COVID-19 level, the State Board of Health, and drone photos (of graves)

Good morning, RVA! It’s 62 °F, and today looks a lot less like yesterday’s constant drizzle and a lot more like a typical sunny summer day. Expect highs in the mid 80s, with temperatures rising a bit over the next couple of days. While last weekend was absolute perfection, this weekend’s no slouch, either! Get some rest, stay hydrated, and enjoy!
 

Water cooler

Today, we’re back to a split CDC COVID-19 Community Level: Henrico County remains at a HIGH level, while both Richmond and Chesterfield County have dropped to a MEDIUM level. The seven-day average case rate per 100,000 people for each county, respectively, is: 211, 195, and 185. So while the case rates are dropping, which is great, they’re still hovering right around the magical 200 per 100,000 number, the border between medium and high. For what it’s worth: I’m going to keep wearing my mask in indoors public places wherever I go in the region because 195 is pretty close to 200 and because the border between Henrico and Richmond is not some magical wall keeping the virus at bay.
 

WTVR’s Tyler Layne reports on yesterday’s State Board of Health meeting. The Board questioned the Virginia Department of Health’s Commissioner about his comments in the recent Washington Post article about structural racism, and, ultimately, “unanimously voted to approve a resolution stating the Commissioner embarrassed the board and issued guidelines saying Greene should not deny ‘basic scientific facts’ moving forward.” The WaPo’s Jenna Portnoy has another follow up piece covering the same meeting with a few additional details, including this one: “Two years earlier, Greene interrupted a Virginia Tech professor mid-speech to dismiss conclusions from data showing that Black and Brown people are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards and environmental pollution.”
 

D. Hunter Reardon at Richmond Magazine reports on some pretty cool science being used to locate unmarked graves at the East End Cemetery: “First, we flew a drone over the cemetery and, using GIS software, identified places where the ground changes in elevation. Then, that information was used to determine where water was likely to pool in these areas. We can be reasonably certain that if water tended to pool in an oblong depression, that location was a gravesite.” Using this technique the team found 8,000 more potential graves! That’s wild!
 

This coming Saturday at the Main Library (101 E. Franklin Street) from 12:00–2:00 PM, you can join RVA Rapid Transit for their quarterly riders and advocates meeting. Come for the round table discussion on how to champion better transit and foster connections between bus riders, activists, and transit representatives, stay for the free food!
 

Today is the last day of school for RPS students (and Henrico County students finished up over a week ago)! Congratulations, you did it! I will now, as is my time-honored right as a parent, play AC/DC’s “Schools Out for Summer” very loudly at random times over the next week—mostly to annoy my own child, but, really, in honor of all children celebrating summer vacation. May you sleep in until lunch, play video games until your eyes bleed, and have too many bike adventures to count!
 

This morning’s longread

The New Luxury Vacation — Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere

I had a good time reading this very The New Yorker piece about, basically, camping (at least once I got over the very The New Yorkerness of it all). I’m still coming down from this past weekend’s bikepacking trip, but reading this fed my already pretty strong desire to get back out into the forest and have another adventure. Remember, you don’t have to travel halfway around the world or pay a fancy company thousands of dollars to go get lost in the woods—we have plenty of adventure-worthy places just a couple hours drive from Richmond!
 

My experience had been both real and extremely theatrical. The mountains and the rocks were solid enough to have broken my bones. But I was able to travel as I did only because a group of experts had prepared a route customized for my level of fitness, and had monitored my every move so that I could feel danger without actually being endangered. There was a touch of “Westworld” to Get Lost. And I hadn’t been truly disconnected; rather, I had been given the luxury of living for a short while under the illusion that I was. The adventure was every bit as confected as my hotel stay. Nevertheless, my hike in the mountains was deeply gratifying.
 

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Picture of the Day

A not-too-long but terribly dark tunnel I rode my bike through (speaking of adventures).