[2006alum]

While we're spending Easter Sunday speculating on elected officials worthy of future electoral canonization, let's not forget London Breed, who I think has done an excellent job in SF:

[tweet]https://twitter.com/mclemoremr/status/1249366183192588288?s=20[/tweet]
This bit is particularly galling for those of us who keep hearing folks say that the slow federal response was because no one could have anticipated how bad it would be. It's also galling given that some governors and mayors (including de Blasio) have attributed their slow responses to the fact that they were not being given specific guidance from the feds:

Public-health officials in san francisco began monitoring the coronavirus outbreak around the holidays in December, Mary Ellen Carroll, who runs the city’s Department of Emergency Management, told me. By late January, Breed had activated San Francisco’s emergency-operations center in preparation for an outbreak—the first such move in any major city in the country. The mayor has since relocated the command post to the Moscone Center, a sprawling complex where top city officials can work in-person while social distancing. Everyone, including Breed, wears a mask when they meet, Carroll said.

Breed told me that what got her attention early on was the ghastly photographs and footage coming out of Wuhan, China, showing the region’s hospitals overrun by coronavirus patients. “A picture’s worth a thousand words—seeing the images of what could potentially happen and then hearing your doctors tell you that we may not have the capacity to handle this situation,” the mayor said, recalling a briefing during which her advisers laid out the possibilities for a similar scenario in stark detail. “We have tons of hospitals in San Francisco. What do you mean we don’t have the capacity to handle an outbreak of this capacity?” Breed recalled thinking. “That’s when I was just like, Oh my goodness, this is serious. And we need to basically sound the alarm in a way that helps us to get ready.”

She said that as early as January, she recognized that the federal government was not prepared to offer the needed help to boost the city’s supply of protective equipment. On February 25, a top CDC official, Nancy Messonnier, told reporters on a conference call that the coronavirus outbreak in the United States “may be severe” and that people should prepare for disruptions in daily life, including school closures. In D.C., Trump was reportedly incensed that Messonnier was raising such alarm. In San Francisco, Breed declared a state of emergency that very day.

A week later, the mayor was urging her constituents on Twitter to “prepare for possible disruption from an outbreak.” That same day, de Blasio was encouraging New Yorkers “to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus.”

[2006alum]

While we're spending Easter Sunday speculating on elected officials worthy of future electoral canonization, let's not forget London Breed, who I think has done an excellent job in SF:

[tweet]https://twitter.com/mclemoremr/status/1249366183192588288?s=20[/tweet]
This bit is particularly galling for those of us who keep hearing folks say that the slow federal response was because no one could have anticipated how bad it would be. It's also galling given that some governors and mayors (including de Blasio) have attributed their slow responses to the fact that they were not being given specific guidance from the feds:

Public-health officials in san francisco began monitoring the coronavirus outbreak around the holidays in December, Mary Ellen Carroll, who runs the city’s Department of Emergency Management, told me. By late January, Breed had activated San Francisco’s emergency-operations center in preparation for an outbreak—the first such move in any major city in the country. The mayor has since relocated the command post to the Moscone Center, a sprawling complex where top city officials can work in-person while social distancing. Everyone, including Breed, wears a mask when they meet, Carroll said.

Breed told me that what got her attention early on was the ghastly photographs and footage coming out of Wuhan, China, showing the region’s hospitals overrun by coronavirus patients. “A picture’s worth a thousand words—seeing the images of what could potentially happen and then hearing your doctors tell you that we may not have the capacity to handle this situation,” the mayor said, recalling a briefing during which her advisers laid out the possibilities for a similar scenario in stark detail. “We have tons of hospitals in San Francisco. What do you mean we don’t have the capacity to handle an outbreak of this capacity?” Breed recalled thinking. “That’s when I was just like, Oh my goodness, this is serious. And we need to basically sound the alarm in a way that helps us to get ready.”

She said that as early as January, she recognized that the federal government was not prepared to offer the needed help to boost the city’s supply of protective equipment. On February 25, a top CDC official, Nancy Messonnier, told reporters on a conference call that the coronavirus outbreak in the United States “may be severe” and that people should prepare for disruptions in daily life, including school closures. In D.C., Trump was reportedly incensed that Messonnier was raising such alarm. In San Francisco, Breed declared a state of emergency that very day.

A week later, the mayor was urging her constituents on Twitter to “prepare for possible disruption from an outbreak.” That same day, de Blasio was encouraging New Yorkers “to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus.”