The citizens of San Francisco have a long, rich history of joining together and looking after one another, from rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake, to transforming our city into Gotham in 2013 to make a young child’s wish come true.

Now our city needs saving again and we are rallying again. 

The COVID-19 lockdowns in place since March have decimated San Francisco businesses and its people. The singular focus on treating one crisis at all cost has created a multitude of other crises:  ~250,000 unemployment claims, 50% of businesses have closed for good, 85% of restaurants in SoMa and FiDi permanently shuttered, more than 600 fatal drug overdoses (3x COVID-19 attributed deaths), and “increased rates of depression, anxiety, drug overdoses and suicidal thoughts among adolescents.”

City Hall has picked the winners and losers, while ignoring their own rules and budgeting $59 million to give themselves raises. And none of them have missed a paycheck. They have expected small business and restaurant owners, and their employees, to accept the loss of their life savings and often the roofs over their own heads, for the sake of public health. It’s particularly cruel to let them reopen for a few weeks, spend thousands in mitigation efforts, only to shut them down again.

The children of San Francisco, who are at near zero risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19, and whose development determine the future success of all societies, have been treated by City Hall as if they are invisible. The neglect includes shuttered public schools, closed playgrounds for the majority of the year, mask mandates for those as young as 2-years-old, the elimination of all activities (such as access to learning the life saving skill of swimming), and banning play with anyone outside their own homes.

By assuming the disease affects everyone equally in its criteria for closing and reopening, and by declaring wild projections which have never come close to coming true, the county and state has forced unnecessary restrictions on a large healthy segment of the population and needlessly devastated the lives of thousands of San Franciscans. This is nothing more than totalitarian control being passed off as science.

We demand Mayor London Breed, Dr. Grant Colfax, the Board of Supervisors and their fellow decision makers adhere to the following list of criteria for COVID-19 mitigation going forward and work with citizens to find the right balance of freedom and protection:

1. Educate the public on their COVID-19 risk. For the vast majority of the population, COVID-19 is not a deadly threat. For some in certain demographics, it poses a more serious one. The more honest we can be about personal risk levels and the likelihood of one person infecting another, the more we can strike a balance between nonchalance and undeserved fear.

2. Offer paid sick leave for those who need to stay home and stop quarantining healthy people.

3. Give practical health advice. There is plenty of information on the positive impact of washing hands, Vitamin D, zinc, a nutritious diet, exercise, opening windows, etc. This kind of mitigation should be encouraged beyond simply “stay at home.”

4. Provide visibility into city testing and health data. What tests are being used, the PCR cycle thresholds, false positives, how many individuals result in multiple positive tests, how many people have recovered, and how many active infections we currently have is just some of the valuable information the public is lacking. If testing is being used to drive decisions that have severe consequences for thousands of business owners, workers, and children, the public deserves absolute transparency about how it is being performed. We also deserve insight into contact tracing data so that future decisions are made based on real evidence and not conjecture or supposition.

5. Replace and recoup the financial losses by the small businesses and restaurants that have been forced to close or operate at extremely limited capacity this year. When city policy destroys the value of private property, the Constitution requires they provide just compensation to the owners.

6. Children are not major vectors of the disease. Reopen schools, youth sports, swimming schools, and similar activities with mitigation appropriate for the age, developmental needs, and low risk level of children.

7. Any rise in hospitalizations must be held in context. What is the true impact on the hospitals compared to normal? Give data on who is in observational beds and differentiate between actual COVID-19 hospitalizations and incidental (e.g., an expectant mother who happens to have an asymptomatic positive), and how ICU capacity compares to a typical flu season. If our current capacity is below the normal baseline for this time of year, there is no justification for anything in the city to close.

8. Expand ICU capacity immediately. If the closure of business is contingent upon ICU capacity, the city must do everything in its power to expand ICU capacity before demanding anything close. The costs of creating additional ICU capacity and staffing are presumably less than the inordinate economic destruction of jobs and businesses. Bring in retired nurses and doctors and arrange for additional ICU staffing to help expand ICU capacity to deal with rising hospitalization needs. Closing businesses should be an absolute last resort.

9. Share data on how deaths are coded. Deaths can be counted as COVID-19 deaths, no matter where on the death certificate COVID-19 is mentioned and even if it refers to, for example, a months old asymptomatic COVID-19 positive test. Visibility needs to be given into which deaths were actually caused by and which simply have a COVID-19 listed on the death certificate.

10. Clearly communicate which benchmarks return San Francisco to normal. There needs to be visibility into when and how businesses can return to operating at full capacity, schools can reopen, and mask mandates and and social distancing guidelines end.

There is a middle ground to protecting public health and destroying a city. Our politicians have punted their responsibility to both. Our current approach has been a blunderbuss — indiscriminate, blanket shutdowns based on questionable data and metrics with disastrous consequences for the working and middle class members of our city, let alone the health and well being for thousands of others isolated or simply afraid.

It is time to change our policy to targeted, strategic measures based on transparent data and credible science that aim to meaningfully slow spread while ensuring San Francisco society can function. 

COVID-19 does pose a threat. But San Francisco’s current COVID-19 response is now posing a much larger one.

Stay in touch: bit.ly/opensanfrancisco