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Indybay Feature

6/29/20 Reopening Paused

by Name of the Game Is Money
I woke up this morning wondering how the Reopening of our San Francisco economy was going and learned that San Francisco’s mayor had stopped the reopening plans for June 29, 2020 because of a slight increase in cases. Considering our tourist economy which is the description of San Francisco’s economy depends on reopening, this is a serious problem.
For the mayor’s statement on the pause in reopening, see
https://sf.gov/news/pause-reopenings-were-scheduled-june-29

San Francisco has a population of 892,280 and currently has 49 COVID19 deaths in 3 months. Our 9 hospitals have a total capacity of 2,429 beds, including 24% Intensive Care Unit beds and 75% ventilators available. See
https://covid19.ca.gov/roadmap-counties/#track-data

We have so many beds that San Francisco hospitals are now accepting patients from other counties, as we should when we have a surplus. See https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/wmxr-upyn So we have 8 ICU transfers for a total of 54 in acute care, including San Francisco resident patients. On April 11, we had 31 in ICU and a total of 94 in acute care, all San Francisco residents.

So, now we have tremendous surge capacity. We have 384 ICU beds available and a total of 803 Acute Care beds available. See https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/qtdt-yqr2

We have 89% of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) supply of the 30 day supply needed. This is considered a Level 2, Low Alert. See https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/epem-wyzb

We were told in March 2020 that the reason for the Health Department’s shut down order was the need to increase hospital beds and PPE. Those 2 goals have been met.

The concern of the mayor is the new cases, which are now at 5.1 per 100,000, or about 44 new cases per day, a Level 3 rolling average. See https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/epem-wyzb

New cases means people who are mostly not necessarily hospitalized as most are not sick enough to be hospitalized and are just told to stay home. The higher level of cases are in the workingclass areas on the east side of town. See the map at https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/adm5-wq8i/

So now that we know that we have sufficient beds and PPE and that the new cases are 44 per day in our city of 892,280, we are hopeful that the pause will be very brief, no more than a week, because we face dire consequences for this closed economy with major budget cutbacks as our deficit is currently $1.7 billion. See https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2020/05/13/city-faces-1-7-billion-deficit-from-covid.html

The mayor has proposed not ordering new fire trucks, a serious cutback in our crowded wood-frame building city. She has also proposed cutting the police budget since we do not need armed police handling mental health crises, housing the homeless or treating drug addicts to end their addiction. We will have an interim budget from July to October, at which time we will have a final budget for the coming fiscal year. Our urgently needed bus and train system, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority, is down to 10% service as we have lost 90% of our riders due to the stay home order. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), which has lots of San Francisco riders, has also lost 90% of its riders. The collapse of our economy is not sustainable.

The primary concern of everyone is the paycheck since that is how we survive. It does not matter to our survival as to what the streets are named or what statues exist. Any proposals to change the street names or remove or replace statues cost the taxpayers money, which we do not have. We now have huge areas of empty hotels and surrounding restaurants, gift shops and clothing stores, including the Union Square hotel district and the Fisherman’s Wharf hotel district. We also have a very empty Financial District, whose office workers patronized the hundreds of restaurants and many food stores and pharmacies in that area. Having these 3 areas empty is not sustainable.
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