Making Room is a biweekly opinion column. The views expressed are solely the author’s.
This piece was cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.
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Opinion
It’s a beautiful end to a busy but — if we’re going to be honest — pretty nerve-wracking work week, with hospitals filling and economic calamity hanging in the balance.
Fortunately, with regard to the latter, temporary relief is on the way for people and small businesses in the form of a newly-passed $2 trillion stimulus package. With continued social distancing measures, hopefully the worst of the medical side of the coronavirus crisis will be over in weeks and not months.
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The following Letter to the Editor was written by long-time Arlington resident John Seymour.
In a video panel discussion held this week with local Democratic leaders, several Northern Virginia members of the General Assembly were asked to select the piece of legislation passed this session of which they were most proud.
While the human toll of the COVID-19 outbreak becomes shockingly apparent, particularly in New York, the shutdown to slow the disease is also having widespread economic impacts.
Nationwide, the Department of Labor reported 3.28 million new unemployment claims, smashing the previous record. There were a total of 102,240 new claims in Virginia, D.C. and Maryland.
Coronavirus in Arlington has increased ninefold in just ten days. This is all with extremely limited testing resources. We need more tests and we needed them last week.
America just hit the highest number of individuals filing for unemployment in history. Unemployment insurance filings in Virginia jumped from just 2,706 last week to 46,885 this week — a 17-fold increase. People are losing their jobs and they’re losing them quickly.
The University of Virginia (UVA) and the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) have used their status and political power to prevent the Virginia General Assembly from taking action to enable the use of by far the most effective reading readiness screening test (RAN).
Instead, Virginia’s children are being tested using a much less effective test (PALS) from which UVA-associated individuals and organizations derive financial benefits. The Virginia General Assembly will be investigating those financial benefits this year.
As of midday Tuesday, Arlington County had 36 known cases of COVID-19. There are likely many more that have gone unreported.
While totally unscientific, we wanted to get some perspective on the case count from the personal experience of our readers. Are there substantially more people out there experiencing symptoms, for instance, but who haven’t tested positive yet?
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We are 10 days into an initial 15-day nationwide effort to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Lives have tragically been lost. Jobs that seemed secure are now gone. Uncertainty surrounds every decision being made by individuals, families, businesses and our elected leaders. Decisions are being made daily, even hourly that in some cases drastically impact our lives.
By Chris DeRosa
Note: The person-to-person activities described in this article have been suspended to ensure health and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. The volunteers’ research, paperwork and electronic organization continue.
Ed Talk is a biweekly opinion column. The views expressed are solely the author’s.
People assert “social engineering” to oppose ideas to increase the socioeconomic diversity within our schools or neighborhoods. Where has this indignant outcry been as Arlington County policies “socially engineered” us into the segregated neighborhoods and schools we have today?
There’s a growing movement in America comprised of people with wildly diverse views from across the political and cultural spectrum. They’re coming together over dinner to respectfully debate the most contentious issues of our time. And as you might imagine, the Washington, D.C.-area is ground zero for this movement.
While there are more than a dozen organizations engaged in these civil dialogue events, the two most active groups in the D.C.-area are “Make America Dinner Again” and “Better Angels,” both of which host events in the area. I am both the Northern Virginia coordinator for Make America Dinner Again (MADA) and a semi-regular attendee to Better Angels events.
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Today we’re continuing a series of articles to highlight the local businesses that advertise with ARLnow.com.
The coronavirus outbreak will bring significant hardship to many local businesses in Arlington, so we wanted to take an opportunity to recognize the advertisers who support us, in hopes that our readers support them.