OPINION
BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
A year after it was due, Santa Clara County has finally released a state-required “after-action” report that analyzes how well the county government handled the Covid pandemic.
I guess it’s too much to ask the county to do a straight-forward, honest assessment of its own performance.
This report comes up short in many ways:
Deaths
• The report didn’t explain why Santa Clara County’s per capita Covid death rate was higher than other Bay Area counties.
Related deaths
• The report was silent about the number of “deaths of desperation,” the number of people who died of suicide, drug addiction or booze because their lives were ruined by the shutdown. If we ever go through a lockdown again, we should know how to avoid these deaths. But this report doesn’t help us.
Church crackdown
• The report doesn’t shed any light on the county’s decision to ban indoor church services. Churches said the ban was unfair because they were being held to a different standard than secular places such as Home Depot or Costco, which were allowed to stay open. The U.S. Supreme Court, in an unusual evening hearing, struck down the county’s ban on indoor worship services. The high court’s intervention in the dispute was an embarrassment for Santa Clara County, the only county in the United States to be rebuked by the high court for its heavy-handed pandemic rules.
Testing and vaccination
• The report doesn’t address why the county got off to a slow start administering Covid tests or distributing the vaccine.
The report should have assumed that this pandemic will repeat itself in the future, and county officials could improve the systems for testing and vaccine distribution. But there’s nothing like that in this report. It’s as if everything they did was OK, and there’s no need for improvement.
Impact on business
• There’s no discussion about the shut down of local businesses.
Nationally, about a third of small, independent businesses were wiped out by forced shutdowns even though there wasn’t any evidence that they were spreading the virus.
This report didn’t say how many businesses permanently closed in the county, or how many employees lost their jobs.
And the report didn’t answer the question that many local business people were asking — why were the national chains allowed to stay open, but the local independents forced to close?
Covid fines
• The report was honest in admitting that Santa Clara County was much more aggressive in penalizing businesses for Covid violations than other counties. Nearly 400 businesses were hit with a combined $5 million in fines. But the report, written by an outside consultant, said that it was “challenging” for businesses to follow the county’s rules because they would frequently change, sometimes daily. As a result, businesses were fined even though they were trying to obey the law.
Inconsistency
• The report didn’t address a glaring inconsistency in the social distancing rules. No distancing rules were enforced during the George Floyd protests in May and June 2020. Yet, at the same time, county rules prohibited crowds at movie theaters, Sharks games, high school sports and churches. The report doesn’t explain the inconsistency.
• As for closing schools, the report kicked the blame to the state government.
No names
The report didn’t mention any names of decision-makers in the county, so there’s no way to hold individuals accountable. I guess that’s something you’d expect from a county that paid $2,500 Covid bonuses to all employees, even those who worked entirely from home. That money should have gone to the businesses and individuals who were harmed by the lockdowns.
The county should have convened a panel of citizens — like the civil grand jury — to independently investigate its handling of the pandemic. The panel could have been given a budget to hire an investigator.
As it stands, this report is flawed and it’s obvious why — the county, with the help of a consultant — was evaluating its own job performance. Given that flaw, it’s obvious that shortcomings would be papered over and successes would be trumpeted. The public deserves objectivity. And a useful, unbiased report would prepare us if we are ever faced with a pandemic again.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays in the Daily Post.
To read the report, open this link and go to Item 6. Click “a. Attachment A – OEM COVID-19 AAR.”
“The report didn’t mention any names of decision-makers in the county, so there’s no way to hold individuals accountable.”
It seems the whole point if this report is to comply with the state requirement of an “after action” report but whitewash the evidence to protect the county employees of legitimate criticism. I’ll bet the two candidates running to replace Simitian on the BOS won’t say a word about this. And neither will the state-controlled media like the Weekly, Merc and SF Comical.
The law gave health officers like Sara Cody too much power and they abused it. She issued more fines to local businesses than any other county and our death toll per capita turned out much higher. She was focused on the wrong things and now we should be evaluating those mistakes to make sure it doesn’t happen next time. But all the county cares about is covering its butt.
There were unbelievable levels of hysteria promulgated by the national media that the more authoritarian in government readily took advantage of. Everyone should read Stnaley Milgram’s book on “Obedience to Authority” is why the Nazis were able to kills so many people. The critical thinkers in the Silicon Valley tried to warn our friends and family about the overreach, overreaction, and the blatant authoritarianism. Customers who came into my store who saw me working without a mask would actually yell at me. Unbelieveable levels of in humanity. I saw no need for masks and did not require that for my employees or customers during that time.
Can’t really comment on this report because I pulled my family from Kalifornia in 2017, after the family arrived in 1867.
Thank God there are a few real “news” sources like the Palo Alto Daily.
If as you’ve stated for the record, Mr Price, in a previous public opinon piece that it was “not the county’s job to combat loneliness”, but is it therefore now the county’s job to combat suicide, drug addiction, and alcoholism? Depression, being one of the pivotal primary elements having an indirect causal relationship to all four conditions, I’d say you’re picking and choosing your argument with the county, as it concerns their handling of the covid pandemic, with information not fully complete, or disclosed here.
There’s a difference between people feeling lonely due to normal circumstances in life and people who have lost their businesses or jobs due to the county’s overreach. We literally had people committing suicide during the lockdown because they were forced into bankruptcy. I know of one Palo Alto business owner who went to a park in Menlo Park, pulled out a gun and took his own life. The note he left talked about how the shutdown. That’s very different from a lonely person who can’t get a date. It’s like comparing oranges to apples. I’m guessing that Maximillion is a county employee who was responsible for some of this and doesn’t want to get blamed for these “deaths of despair.”
For the sake of comparison, let’s examine how many business owners committed suicide, or drank themselves to death, after losing their business due to pandemic restrictions imposed by the county, and compare that death statistic to how many business owners, countywide, filed for bankruptcy or were put out of busness due to the bogus ADA lawsuit claims that ran rampant over the local business community recently. How many of those ADA victims committed suicide after brankruptcy, or losing their livelihood? Ruth, business owners dying from suicide, or people with depression leading to social loneliness and isolation are not apples and oranges. They’re people. I’m guessing Ruth, that guessing someone’s occupation is the talent of an uncritical mind.
Max, you can breathe a sigh of relief. The report doesn’t address deaths of despair, so you’ve got nothing to worry about. Methinks thou doth protest too much.