And for that we have to go back to February 26th and an action I didn't understand in light of San Francisco's other public health threat, people pooping in the streets:
San Francisco Mayor London Breed Declares State of Emergency Over Coronavirus
I'm not sure I know what is going on here....
*****
.....This is a city that has people crapping in the streets.A city that has a "Poop Patrol" to clean said human fecal matter and pays a pretty penny for folks to do the job:San Francisco 'Poop Patrol' employees make $184,000 a year ... (Business Insider)Granted that is both salary and benefits but it's still adding up.This is a city that the U.N.'s special rapporteur on Adequate Housing compared to the worst she had seen in Mexico City and Mumbai.What are the Mayor and top Alderman talking about?
I've been told there were two main reasons for Mayor Breed's declaration:(because S.F. is both a city and a county Yee is both the top county legislator and heads the city council)
1) In the U.S. a State of Emergency sets up a template for reimbursement of costs expended by the municipality.
2) Because there are quite a few people in San Francisco with compromised immune systems the public health authorities were very sensitive to the new threat. More on that after the first jump.
From the San Francisco Chronicle, March 27:
New York’s coronavirus outbreak has violently erupted over the past few days, and the state is now driving the national epidemic — while on the West Coast, public health experts are wondering if an early and aggressive response saved California from a similar fate.
California reported some of the earliest coronavirus cases in the United States in late January. And in the first week of March, California and New York were neck and neck on cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. But over the past week, New York case counts have doubled every few days, and the state now has nearly 10 times the cases California does: 38,000 to 4,200.
[on the left, state-level; on the right metro area]
Infectious-disease experts say early maneuvers in California, especially in the Bay Area — first discouraging people from gathering in crowds and then ordering them to shelter in place — may have had a dramatic impact, even if they came only a few days ahead of those in New York.
But other factors may also be in play. New York is testing far more people — three times as many as California — and therefore identifying more cases, for example. And it’s possible that what’s happening 3,000 miles away could be California’s future.
“New York may just be three or four days in front of us. We’re going to see an increase in the number of cases here as well,” said Dr. Warner Greene, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco who specializes in HIV but is studying the new coronavirus. “Days matter — they really matter. You think you’re fine, you’re absolutely fine, but this thing is just waiting to explode.
“But we went into shelter in place quicker; we got people apart quicker,” Greene said. “That could be a contributing factor to what we’re seeing in California now. And that’s why I think the whole country should be sheltering in place.”
The World Health Organization on Tuesday identified the United States as the next potential epicenter of the pandemic, with China and South Korea both on a path to recovery and Italy starting to see signs of its outbreak slowing down, though gradually.
New York state now makes up roughly half of the United States’ 86,000 cases of COVID-19. On Tuesday, experts on the White House Coronavirus Task Force advised that residents who have fled New York City, where the bulk of cases are located, should place themselves in a two-week quarantine to avoid infecting people in other parts of the country.
New York state is also testing more people than anywhere else in the country — 120,000 as of Thursday, compared with about 77,000 in California, 57,000 of which haven’t been processed yet.
How and why New York’s testing is so far beyond California’s isn’t entirely clear. New York started testing more people sooner than California because the state requested and received emergency-use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to start using its own test on Feb. 29. At that time, California was using tests supplied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was trying to play catch-up after early production errors slowed down distribution to the states.
But testing alone doesn’t explain why New York’s case counts are so much higher than California’s, or why the rate is spiraling up so fast on the East Coast. The death toll in New York was five times higher than California’s — 500 deaths to 85, as of Friday. Deaths tend to be a much more reliable marker of the spread of the disease than cases because determining how someone died is not dependent on the availability of testing kits.....MUCH MORE
Also, hospitals across New York state, and in New York City in particular, are filling up, but California hasn’t yet seen a similar surge.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued “stay at home” orders last Sunday, two days after Newsom did the same for California and five days after Bay Area health officers told 6.7 million people to shelter in place.
New York City and the Bay Area had about 450 and 300 cases, respectively, when the Bay Area stay-home orders were issued on March 17. When Cuomo shut down the state on March 22, New York City had 5,500 cases. The Bay Area: 539.
Shelter-in-place orders hadn’t been in effect long enough to entirely account for the dramatic differences, but the Bay Area issued other directives earlier, such as shutting down mass gatherings, advising people to work at home when possible, and asking older adults and people with compromised immune systems to stay home.
“We were more aggressive; we got out there a little earlier,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley. “We were maybe a week up on New York, and that doesn’t sound like much time, but in terms of the spread of this pandemic, it’s enormous.”...
And from the San Jose Mercury-News:
Meet the doctor who ordered the Bay Area’s coronavirus lockdown, the first in the U.S.
Under intense pressure, Sara Cody’s cohorts made the move ‘none of us really believed we would do’
She is the Bay Area’s Anthony Fauci, Santa Clara County’s most “essential” employee, the one who banished us from Sharks hockey games, canceled her own daughter’s high school prom — and eventually shut in 6 million Bay Area residents in six neighboring counties to slow the stampede of a deadly pandemic.....MUCH MORE
You could be forgiven if you’d never heard of Sara Cody before Jan. 31 — what seems like a century ago, when Kobe Bryant’s death was still what shocked us. That’s the day Dr. Cody was already feeling late, sitting at her dining room table in Old Palo Alto, gulping down a cup of coffee when her cellphone rang. It was 6:49 a.m.
“You’ve got your first positive,” the voice said.
A virus’ lethal journey
Right then, Cody — Santa Clara County’s Public Health Officer since 2013 — was positive that even by Silicon Valley standards, life as we know it here was about to change. Santa Clara County had recorded the Bay Area’s first case of coronavirus — the seventh in the U.S. Later that same day, President Donald Trump would ban most travel from China, where the stealth virus had begun its lethal journey across the planet.But early that morning, Cody was preparing to tell the public it had already landed right here. Ever since, she has been in a furious race against the virus, making critical decisions that would shut down festivals and family gatherings, ban people from school, work and church — all in a grave attempt to save untold lives.
It was Cody who would eventually lead her Bay Area cohorts to pull the trigger March 16 on the historic seven-county legal order — the first of its kind in the country — that required residents to “shelter-in-place,” days ahead of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s similar mandate for the entire state.
And it is Cody who is carrying the burden of those decisions and the uncertainty of whether they will actually work.
“We just want to do everything we can to slow the train down,” Cody, 56, told the Bay Area News Group in a series of interviews this week, “so that when it hits the curve in the track it will not derail.”
‘When do you need me?’
In these unparalleled eight weeks, colleagues from Cody’s inner circle say, she has seldom hesitated. The morning she learned of the county’s first coronavirus case she was already calling two of her most-trusted advisers, now retired, from the health department. She had worked with them during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent anthrax scare: her predecessor Marty Fenstersheib and Karen Smith, who had recently retired as the state’s public health officer and was on a girls’ ski weekend at Donner Summit when she got Cody’s call....
I won't go into the public pronouncements of the NYC and NY State health commissioners here except to note they did not age well.
