Tag: COVID-19
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Richmond’s “Numbnuts” Cripple Busch Gardens
by Kerry Dougherty Five more days until Virginia finally enters Phase 3 of the slo-mo reopening of the commonwealth. But if you were planning to take the kids to Busch Gardens or Kings Dominion to celebrate, forget it. Thanks to ridiculously small crowd limits, both sprawling theme parks said they can’t comply with Virginia’s rules.…
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Up Next: School Bus Crisis
by Kerry Dougherty Last week we marveled at Gov. Ralph Northam’s unworkable guidelines to reopen Virginia schools this fall. Richmond’s bizarre restrictions on social distancing and class size make it impossible for kids to be in their classrooms five days a week. Instead, most school districts seem to cooking up schemes to divide student bodies in half…
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Northam Gets a Couple of Things Right
by James A. Bacon I do have my issues with Wise King Ralph, but I have to give credit where credit is due. He has done two things right in the past few days. He has given the OK to move to Phase 3 of the COVID-19 lockdown on July 1, and he has refused…
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It’s About Time: Phase 3
by Kerry Dougherty Finally. After weeks of plummeting death rates, dwindling hospitalizations and a sharp drop in positive test results for COVID-19, slow-walking Gov. Ralph Northam announced that the commonwealth can enter Phase Three. But not until next week, on July 1. Northam made the announcement at yesterday’s press conference. For months, Northam’s pressers have…
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Where Are the Other 52 Nursing Homes with Outbreaks?
by Carol J. Bova The governor’s Long Term Care Facility Task Force list shows 179 nursing home and assisted living facilities with outbreaks of COVID-19. There are 52 more, according to the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) Outbreaks tab on the daily COVID-19 data, but no explanation why they’re missing from the Task Force list.…
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Open the Schools
By James C. Sherlock I have written here multiple times about the terrible and disproportionate effects that school shutdowns are having on poor children in Virginia. The public school is an enterprise that has no admission standards. We do it that way on purpose, to try to give every American child as much opportunity to…
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Nursing Homes Most at Risk from Virus are Bigger, Urban
Three out of five of the 1,645 Virginians who have died from COVID-19 have been residents of long-term care facilities — one of the highest percentages of any state in the United States. There has been considerable speculation why. Vincent Mor, a research scientist with the Brown School of Public Health, has found that nursing-home…
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The Post-COVID World: More Home Schooling
by James A. Bacon The Home Educators Association of Virginia has seen a dramatic increase in inquiries about home schooling since the advent of the COVID-19 epidemic. In the past three months there have been 3,000 new members to the association’s Facebook page and 2,000 new requests to join through the website. “Since [the pandemic],…
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COVID Regs Unclear, Unneeded, Contradictory
By Steve Haner More than two dozen Virginia business associations have asked that the state’s Safety and Health Codes Board reject proposed workplace regulations to prevent COVID-19, stating they are unclear, contradictory, and not needed in light of other existing worker protections. Some of the largest statewide associations, such as the Virginia Manufacturers Association, National…
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Updates from the Higher-Ed Apocalypse: VSU, RU, and JMU
by James A. Bacon Accelerated by the COVID-19 epidemic, the wrenching restructuring of the higher-ed industry is moving from small, private liberal arts colleges to the weaker public universities. Here’s the latest news from Virginia State University and Radford University. VSU, a 138-year-old historically black institution, faces a 10% drop in enrollment, big losses in…
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Why Hasn’t Northam Acted Yet on the Great COVID News?
by James A. Bacon A flood of COVID-19 test results were reported to the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) over the weekend — more than 45,000 tests — and the news is good. While 1,652 new cases were confirmed over Saturday and Sunday, the seven-day moving average of the percentage of people testing positive declined…
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Virginia Nursing Home Deaths Top 1,000
by Kerry Dougherty Anyone here remember the very beginning of the nursing home crisis in Virginia? Remember when we learned that a home in Henrico County, a facility where some residents reportedly had been stacked for a time like cordwood – three to a room – was in the midst of a deadly outbreak? Last…
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Incompetent, Dangerously Incompetent, and the Virginia Department of Health
By James C. Sherlock It is very hard to recommend a career in politics these days. Elected officials are at the mercy of the competence of bureaucracies they did not create and over which, under civil service protections, they have little control. Yet never have we needed dedicated, smart and effective political leaders more than…
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How Did VDH Miss 1,100 Suspected Cases?
by Carol J. Bova When Governor Northam announced the release of the Virginia Health Department (VDH) COVID-19 details for specific nursing homes and assisted living facilities on June 19, he explained the reversal in policy: “It is also important that this information is released now, given inconsistent information reported at the federal level.” The governor’s…
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Sweeping COVID Workplace Regulation Proposed
By Steve Haner The Northam Administration’s Safety and Health Codes Board will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday –- in a virtual process allowing no public interactions – to impose sweeping new regulatory mandates related to COVID-19 on Virginia workplaces. They could take effect immediately upon Governor Ralph Northam’s signature, and will not disappear if an end…