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May 19, 2021 8:07 AM |
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How will historians remember the coronavirus pandemic in San Francisco?
Peter Hartlaub
May 12, 2021
Updated: May 12, 2021 4 a.m.
For a few weeks, at least, San Franciscans spent the 1918-19 influenza looking out for each other. They closed businesses. They masked. They followed the rules. And then they quickly lost their minds.
In November 1918, San Francisco public health officials declared premature victory over the pandemic and residents tossed their masks in the gutter, only to watch the flu return the following year and kill nearly twice as many citizens. With more than 3,200 influenza victims, the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918-19 was responsible for more dead San Franciscans than the 1906 earthquake and fire.
As we continue to look back and wince at the city’s hubris and negligence, we’ve reached the point in the COVID-19 pandemic where we can dare to look forward. A century from now, when almost all of us are gone, what will Bay Area residents have to say about our actions?
The pandemic is still far from over, with worrying variants circulating and continued tragedy unfolding in other parts of the U.S. and the world. But it is also increasingly clear that when the story is told, San Francisco will be noted for its successes, not its blunders. Officials say it has the lowest rate of deaths per 100,000 of any major U.S. city.
The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in San Francisco recently dipped into the teens. (We’re close to the point where there are more members in the band Tower of Power than people in S.F. with an inpatient-worthy COVID-19 diagnosis.) If we can’t formally declare victory, we can see it on the horizon . . . .
When the second life-upending pandemic in San Francisco history arrived last year, it brought to light how atrociously the city handled the first one.
Like COVID-19, the 1918-19 flu hit the East Coast hard first before making San Francisco headlines in September 1918. City leaders closed theaters, dance halls, schools and churches as hospitals filled, and hustled out a mask ordinance, but they sent mixed messages from the start. Mayor Sunny Jim Rolph was fined $50 by the police chief for lowering his mask at a boxing match.
Weeks later infection numbers started to rise quickly again, with San Francisco’s political strife resembling Trump-era Michigan or Florida. S.F. citizens started culture wars, refused to wear their masks and claimed dubious miracle cures. A local “Anti-Mask League” was formed and drew thousands of science-disbelieving citizens. At least 1,400 San Franciscans died of influenza in 1919 — after officials had declared the danger past.
Over the last 14 months, San Francisco has seen 538 deaths due to COVID-19 at a rate of about 62 deaths per 100,000 residents. That’s well below the current national average of 175, and less than one-tenth S.F.’s 643 per 100,000 mortality rate in 1918-1919. Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine, has noted that if San Francisco’s rate of COVID mortality was mirrored across the nation, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.
“There are some reasons that are intrinsic to San Francisco,” Wachter said in a March interview. “Yes it’s a reasonably wealthy city, yes a lot of people work in tech and can work at home. A lot of people have the privilege — including me — to spend a lot days on Zoom and a lot of nights on Netflix. And yet there are other places that have economic advantages and got creamed.”
(In New York City, which started its shelter-in-place later than the Bay Area, the population has suffered nearly 400 deaths per 100,000 residents.)
San Francisco Mayor London Breed predicted that the post-COVID city “is going to be the Roaring ’20s all over again,” with excitement slowly building up until New Year’s Eve.
That happened in 1919 too. Even after the virus catastrophe early in the year, every downtown San Francisco hotel and live theater sold out on New Year’s Eve.
But the difference is, that when we go to concerts, movies and dive bars in 2021 and 2022, we’ll be shoulder-to-shoulder with people who looked out for each other. When anniversaries are marked at Giants and A’s games, we’ll be cheering in ballparks filled with citizens who were united, not divided. When gatherings in other parts of the nation are filled with conflicted emotions, our community will swell with pride at the memory of the Moscone Center and Oakland Coliseum vaccination hubs, porch concerts, courageous essential workers, near-consensus mask adherence and all the sacrifices we made as a group.
“The city did this and they served the public and the public listened,” Carroll said. “And in a time when science wasn’t valued very much, San Francisco followed the science.”
And 100 years from now, when this world-changing moment is all but lost in history and someone digs through an archive to remember, they won’t see a blunder in the Bay Area. They’ll see a group of politicians and health care workers and community members who rose together to confront one of the city’s greatest challenges, from beginning to end.
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https://www.sfchronicle.com/oursf/ar...s-16169923.php |
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