🚪 Good morning, RVA: Ride the coronawaves, free COVID-19 tests, and free fares live (for now)

Good morning, RVA! It’s 54 °F, and today looks lovely. Expect highs in the mid 80s, sunshine, and, if it weren’t for the gusty winds, I’d say it’s a perfect day to take off from work early and ride your bike into the sunset. The beautiful weather continues for the next day or two and then big heat moves in this weekend—looks like we can expect highs in the 90s! In May!
 

Water cooler

It’s Tuesday, and your COVID-19 Community Level for Richmond remains at low (kind of), while Henrico and Chesterfield have both increased to medium. The 7-day case rates per 100,000 people in each locality, respectively, are: 221, 299, and 219. Remember: The CDC only updates this metric once a week on Thursday nights, but to flip a locality from low to medium, those case rates need to cross the 200 threshold. To flip from medium to high, however, you’ve got to look at two different, hospital-related numbers: 7-day new COVID-19 admission per 100,000 and 7-day percent of staffed inpatient beds occupied by COVID-19 patients. If either of those two numbers are greater than 10 while case rates are greater than 200, your localities is experiencing a high COVID-19 Community Level. At the moment, the admissions per 100,000 people for all three localities is: 8.7. That’s creepingly close to high, and you should keep an eye on it as we approach that Thursday night update. The big change in CDC guidance when we do switch from medium to high is that folks should: “Wear a well-fitting mask indoors in public, regardless of vaccination status (including in K-12 schools and other indoor community settings).” CDC calls this an “individual- and household-level prevention behavior,” which gets at the reality that we’ll probably never again see mask or other mitigation mandates from our local, state, or federal governments. Anyway, the current coronacontext means we need to prepare to ride whatever coronawave gets put in front of us, and right now that sure looks like another approaching peak.
 

One way you can prepare to ride those coronawaves, and keep other people around you safe, is to make sure you’re stocked up on COVID-19 tests. Luckily, and as of yesterday, you can order another round of free Joe Biden tests from USPS—this time you get eight instead of four. The form, which I just filled out while writing the previous sentence, takes less than a minute to complete, and you should do it before reading the next paragraph!
 

The last bit of coronanews I wanted to share was this update on vaccines for kids that Emily Oster sent out late last week. She goes through the timeline—still seems like we’re headed for an early June launch date—but also talks about efficacy of the babyvax compared to the adult versions of the vaccines and what that means given the current variants floating around.
 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Michael Martz reports that “with a deadline looming at the end of the week for state employees to ask permission to work from home, Virginia has lost the leader of the state personnel agency handling the requests.” Martz goes on to report that the Director of the Department of Medical Assistance Services is also stepping down ahead of a “crucial juncture in the COVID-19 pandemic” as “the state agency is poised to undertake a massive determination of Medicaid health care eligibility for 2 million Virginians once the federal government ends the public health emergency.” Yikes. Not a good look to have your senior-level leadership resign right before huge and complex deadlines.
 

Also in the RTD, Lyndon German reports that GRTC’s zero-fare program lives to ride another day, or, at least, for another fiscal year. German says that GRTC will provide the million bucks required to match the state’s zero-fare grant for this coming year, but, the years after that? When the required match triples? Who knows! I get that this year may be different, so what I’m really interested in is what pops up in next year’s budget. Because while the Mayor has made some strong statements in support of free fares in the past (“My administration is committed to financial support of GRTC with the Zero Fare Study…The City commits to funding for a term of three consecutive years, while reserving the right to review the outcome for commitment to an additional year.”), those statements have softened recently (“We just approved another budget for the upcoming fiscal year … obviously we’ll be getting into budget talks, but I would hate to overcommit my administration to [it] without seeing the dollars for the future”). Fascinating, right? I think the best case scenario for the coming years, as the state grant dwindles, is for the three localities to get together and figure out an equitable way to split the growing cost (without taking money away from current bus service or planned bus service expansion!). Richmond doesn’t need to shoulder this entire burden alone, but it can and should lead the region to funding zero fares in a sustainable way that doesn’t chip away at the progress being made to build a better regional public transportation system.
 

City Council’s Land Use, House and Transportation committee meets today (full agenda here). I’m pretty excited that LUHT will consider the paper to adopt Path to Equity, a guiding framework for how to put together a truly equitable multimodal transportation plan for Richmond (RES. 2022-R027). The Path to Equity document is so very rad, and continues to blow my mind with how straightforward it presents the extremely true and fact-based history of Richmond’s racist transportation systems and infrastructure. Once Path to Equity makes its way through Council, I imagine we’ll start seeing work begin on the full transportation plan, aka Richmond Connects
 

This morning’s longread

Fury road.

This will make you mad. If you don’t want to be mad, maybe save it for later.
 

“Vision Zero” in New York is a grim misnomer. I can’t stop thinking, though, about what life would be like if the city did take the “Zero” part seriously—if the response to every single death in traffic was to immediately close the roadway or intersection where it happened, and not to reopen it until they had physically made it impossible for the same thing to happen again. When a chunk of a building facade comes crashing down, the sidewalk gets closed and protected with a sidewalk shed pending repairs; if you’re careless enough with your building to harm someone, you can even be charged with a crime. What if when someone in a crosswalk got hit by a turning car, the Department of Transportation showed up and converted it overnight into an elevated crosswalk? (What if every crosswalk in the city could be an elevated crosswalk, so that the grid of roadways was constantly interrupted by sidewalks, rather than the other way around?)
 

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Picture of the Day

Sorry, but you can take pictures of blanket flowers from my cold, dead hands.