San Francisco and the Bay Area have become “a national model for how early and aggressive action can prevent the explosive rise” in Covid-19 cases that have engulfed hospitals in other cities.
And an article just out in The Atlantic credits Mayor London Breed for success in “flattening the curve” of the coronavirus pandemic.
“San Francisco had yet to confirm a single case of the coronavirus when Breed, the city’s 45-year-old first-term mayor, declared a state of emergency in late February,” writes the magazine’s Russell Berman.
Then, effective on March 17, Breed ordered businesses closed and issued a citywide shelter-in-place policy, at a time when the city had fewer than 50 confirmed cases.
At the time, some critics said Breed was moving too quickly.
“She took incredible political heat and criticism,” said Sen. Kamala Harris, one of Breed’s political mentors, “and she had the courage to make a decision that she in her gut, based on science and the research she did, told her this was the right thing to do for her people, even when other people couldn’t see it yet.”
As a result San Francisco had a relatively low case count of 857 as of last Friday, Berman writes, with just 13 recorded deaths.
That, he says, is “much lower than that in metropolises of comparable size such as New Orleans, Detroit, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The city’s curve is low and flattening, and patients are not flooding into its emergency rooms.”
“We’re seeing that our hospital beds are not very full at this point,” Yvonne Maldonado, an epidemiologist at Stanford Medical School, told Berman. “We’re just not seeing a big spike there.”
Even so, Berman concludes, Breed is “ambivalent, even nervous.”
“San Franciscans are complying and people have been incredible with following this order. But on another note, there are a lot of folks who are not,” Breed admitted. “And I am not comfortable letting up.”
