What’s the Plan?
(I was recently elected to represent San Jose’s District 10 and will take office in January 2021. Until then, I’m using this blog to share what I’m learning about a variety of issues relevant to San Jose and my take on those issues. I deeply appreciate your feedback and questions as I prepare to represent our community. Sign up to have these posts automatically sent to your inbox: https://forms.gle/N9af77JuK2nJFDMo6.)
Dear Neighbor,
Two weeks ago, I shared the County Public Health Department’s key indicators for assessing our readiness to slowly and safely reopen society based on new cases, testing and contact tracing capacity, available hospital beds, PPE supplies and other objective measures. This was an important first step toward defining how life will proceed during the pandemic and before a vaccine is available. I argued that the next step is a clear and executable plan that invites everyone to prepare for this gradual and responsible reopening.
Since then, we haven’t heard much about how we will achieve the targets for each indicator. With this gap, our County is missing an opportunity to communicate with the public in a way that builds trust. Public trust is based on total transparency from public institutions about where we are going, how we think we will get there and when important milestones will likely occur. Without radical transparency and proactive communication, public officials can inadvertently create frustration, confusion and polarization.
In March, our County led the nation in sheltering-in-place (SIP) to flatten the curve (i.e. reduce the rate at which the virus was spreading in our community) and buy time for everyone, especially our healthcare system, to prepare for managing a long-term pandemic. This was the right decision. Without the SIP order, the coronavirus would have spread at an accelerating rate, likely reaching hundreds of thousands of local cases by now, overwhelming our hospitals and causing far greater death and suffering. The County’s SIP order and our community’s diligent response have flattened the curve, as evidenced by fewer new cases as testing volumes have increased.
However, we no longer seem to be leading by articulating and communicating what comes next. SIP is not a long-term strategy. It’s a blunt but effective tool for controlling contagion, which should allow us to then better manage the virus from a lower number of cases using testing, contact tracing and other tools. Moreover, it has come at the cost of Great Depression-level unemployment, growing food insecurity, increased domestic violence and extreme stress and fear for many in our community. SIP has worked about as well as we could have hoped for from a public health standpoint, but it will not eliminate the virus. We would need a vaccine to have a shot at that.
Unfortunately, we will need to learn to live with and effectively manage the virus for a couple of years, possibly longer, while scientists work to develop and deploy a vaccine. While we hopefully are on an accelerated timeline, vaccines typically take more than a decade to develop, if they are successfully developed at all:
Given this reality, we are overdue for a detailed, forward-looking plan for how life will look in the months ahead. I’m not referring to the four-phases of reopening the Governor outlined a few weeks ago. Those phases are extremely high-level and don’t have dates or local action commitments attached to them. I’m also not talking about indicators. As much as I love metrics, they do not constitute a plan. Indicators or metrics are a tool for evaluating the effectiveness of a plan as it is being executed.
A substantive plan, on the other hand, should outline our best current answers to the following types of questions:
- How and by when does the County plan to achieve our 4,000 tests per day goal? Are we days, weeks or months away? What are the current barriers and how are we working to overcome them?
- How many contact tracers do we need and how quickly do we plan to hire them? (We should have started hiring and training an army of them two months ago given what we know from places like South Korea and Taiwan that have extensive experience managing through epidemics.)
- How will we implement and enforce quarantine rules for infected or likely infected individuals as everyone else is going back to work? If an infected person is the only infected member of the household, will the County provide a separate place for them to stay?
- How and by when will we acquire the PPE our healthcare workers and other at-risk populations need to stay safe? What are the current barriers and how are we planning to overcome them?
- How will different types of businesses need to operate in order to reopen safely? What will be the social distancing protocols? Capacity limitations, sanitation protocols, face mask policy? When are these protocols likely to go into effect and how can businesses and other organizations begin preparing now?
- How will individuals need to prepare to live in the world again safely? Will face masks be mandated and why or why not? To what extent will social gatherings be limited? What other guidelines should we prepare for and when should we prepare to enter this post-SIP world given our current trajectory?
While these are difficult questions, they are answerable with obvious caveats: A) the details will continue to evolve and B) we will further open or close based on our performance as measured by the public health indicators. In fact, many other counties around the country are already answering these questions for their residents and businesses by providing forward guidance for how they will begin reopening and how their “new normal” will look.
This past weekend, I read detailed reopening plans from Miami-Dade County, Santa Barbara County, San Luis Obispo County and Riverside County. Outside the U.S., countries like Germany and even Italy began carefully reopening a few weeks ago and others, like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, never fully shut down because they already had plans in place for how to organize life during a pandemic to reduce risk without destroying people’s lives economically. We have, hopefully, learned from others’ successes and failures.
From an outside perspective, it seems that we are either behind in planning, behind in communicating plans to the public, or both. Moreover, as the debate over reopening has grown with little commentary from the public officials responsible for these decisions, the loudest and least reasonable voices have tended to dominate: those who want to reopen rapidly with few safeguards and those who want to maintain the status quo indefinitely. Both are wrong.
When weighing next steps, public leaders should consider the most vulnerable members of our community from both a health and economic standpoint. In recent weeks, I’ve spoken with older residents who have health complications that make them fear leaving home even to take a walk and I’ve spoken with residents who have lost jobs and fear that they are on the brink of poverty and homelessness. We need a balanced, long-term plan that protects both the medically vulnerable (and to be clear, we all have some vulnerability until there is a vaccine) and the economically vulnerable (nearly 20% of Californians are now unemployed).
Moreover, I think we generally know what life will need to look like as we reopen, ranging from social distancing protocols and face masks to widespread testing and contact tracing. Workplaces will have to physically spread workers out and even rotate workdays and times. Retail establishments and restaurants will operate with reduced capacities, distancing and disinfection routines. Telecommuting will be strongly encouraged. And much more, which you can read about in the reopening plans cited above.
It’s time for Santa Clara County to expand from dashboards and indicators, which are important first steps, to a detailed reopening plan with milestones, target dates and clear calls to action for individuals, businesses and other organizations. Until then, frustration, confusion and fear-mongering will only grow.
COVID Mortality Reflects Broader Inequalities
Last week, the Mercury News reported zip code-level COVID-19 deaths for the first time. Tragically, but also not unexpectedly, East Side San Jose — where I was once a public school teacher — has experienced a significantly disproportionate share of deaths attributable to COVID-19. More than one-third of the first 100 COVID-19 deaths in Santa Clara County occurred in just four zip codes in East Side San Jose, where the death rate has been four times higher than our wealthiest zip codes.
While no one has yet done a scientific analysis of the causes of the disparity, I think it is safe to assume that inequality — in resources, access to healthcare, information, perhaps access to testing and PPE — underlies this tragic reality. If asked, I think we would all agree that one’s likelihood of dying from a virus should not be determined by zip code, income or ethnicity (I believe the same should also be true of one’s educational opportunity, for what it’s worth).
The harder question is how local government should now respond. For one, the County ought to ramp up testing and contact tracing specifically in zip codes that are most impacted by the virus to reduce further spread and disproportionate impact. I also assume we can and should be doing more to intervene in viral hotspots, from providing free PPE to directly communicating public health best practices in various languages. Longer-term, I think there are myriad implications for our social safety net, lack of housing supply and many other areas of public policy that intersect with the health crisis.
City Hall Lays Off Staff to Close Budget Gap
Last week, City Council participated in a detailed two-day budget study session during which staff presented a proposed budget for the 2020–2021 fiscal year (starting July 1st). The first session offers a particularly informative overview of the budget, revenue impacts due to the pandemic, and proposed budget cuts:
As expected, San Jose faces a large revenue shortfall estimated at $71.6 million, primarily due to lower sales tax revenue. The proposed budget closes this gap by spending down rainy day fund reserves and reducing staffing levels by 103 positions:
While 103 positions represent only 1.5% of total current staff, we will no doubt feel an impact in our libraries, community centers, parks and other city services. Worse, I fear that further staffing cuts are more likely than not. Like most service-oriented organizations, staffing accounts for the vast majority of the City’s costs (i.e. “personal services” category at 67%):
Currently, the City forecasts a 9% decline in overall revenue, which is significantly larger than the decline seen during the Dotcom Bust and the Great Recession:
The proposed budget document does not clarify if this 9% estimate is only for the first year of the recession or beyond, but it stands to reason that if revenue remains down 9% (or even lower) into a second year, staffing levels would need to be reduced significantly more than 1.5%. Let’s hope we’re not in that position next year.
Relatedly, it’s worth noting that San Jose is chronically under-staffed as a city due to our relatively low tax revenue per capita, having less to do with tax rates and more to do with our low ratio of jobs and retail to residents. In other words, while we have a lot of people, land mass and infrastructure to maintain, our status as a bedroom community results in relatively thin city services. As you might guess, this was the primary concern I heard while campaigning, whether related to police presence or road and park maintenance. (For a comprehensive look at San Jose’s long-term structural budget challenges, I highly recommend reading SPUR’s 2016 Back in the Black report.)
And the Band Played On
Finally, at the suggestion of two Almaden parents, I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Scott Krijnen, orchestra teacher at Castillero Middle School, who explained to me how he and his fellow teachers are working to ensure ongoing access to arts education despite school closures. Mr. Krijnen described how he is overcoming some of the challenges of moving his instruction online.
Typically, as an orchestra teacher, he would teach in an environment of group instruction, rehearsal and immediate aural feedback. Since this is not possible remotely (audio latency of even a second or two would throw off a group performance), Mr. Krijnen is instead creating individual assignments, recording himself performing each assignment, and posting them to Google Classroom. Students upload the videos and practice them from home. Using Google Meet, Mr. Krijnen works with students individually throughout the week. Students record videos of their performance at the beginning and end of each week, upload both videos for review and write a self-assessment. Mr. Krijnen gives them individual feedback on their growth and the final product.
He says the method is effective, but still not the same as group practice. In order to help inspire his students, Mr. Krijnen has reached out to recording engineers who will be mixing and producing hundreds of individual audio tracks to help his classes recreate the quality and sound of their live performances. His goal is to have every level of his orchestra produce a track so that they have a final performance for the year!
We didn’t want to share any student videos for privacy reasons, but Mr. Krijnen was able to provide an example of a video that mixes individual performances into a single synchronous track. The following piece, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” by Randy Newman, was performed by Mr. Krijnen and two of his Castillero colleagues:
I’m grateful for teachers like Mr. Krijnen, who are finding creative ways to teach and inspire our kids.
That’s it for this update. Stay safe, stay positive and, as always, please keep sending me your ideas and feedback on the newsletter or any of the issues facing our community.
Sincerely,
Matt
Councilmember-elect, San Jose District 10; matt@mahanforsanjose.com, 408–891–9708
Matt is Councilmember-elect for San Jose District 10, which includes the Almaden, Blossom Hill, Santa Teresa and Vista Park neighborhoods. Matt and his wife, Silvia, are proud to be raising their two young children, Nina and Luke, in District 10. You can subscribe to Matt’s newsletter here: https://forms.gle/ycvcf3fbKSFU2JfA6
