City Manager's New Update Silent on COVID-19

After a gap of a little over two months, the City published a "City Manager's update" on Tuesday.

The weekly newsletter (inset) kept advertising them

In January and February it was a little amusing to see at the end of the City's "Community Connection" newsletter each week that we should read the City Manager's Updates. It was clearly just careless boilerplate, not at all linked to the existence of any new update.

And this new one dated March 6th is a little longer than usual.

Praise for the City

It leads with Praise for the City. I suppose the ritual acclamation and anodyne tone could be a good way to start, but what is alarming is the utter silence on coronavirus and Covid-19.

Are we performing a revival of the cyanotoxin fiasco? (And on something that has a much greater known lethality?) As of this morning the City's page on the coronavirus is dated March 2nd, and still seems dominated by a "this is like the the flu" sensibility and does not meet its severity.

The City is mainly "monitoring" - here's a message to monitor!
WHO declared it a "pandemic" today

If we wait until people start getting sick and dying here, we will be too late. We are already too late for serious containment. On mitigation and treatment Salem Reporter notes

Salem Hospital has 48 ICU capable beds & 27 negative air flow rooms, per spokesman

That capacity will get maxed out real fast in a wave of illness.

The City should be more proactive about discouraging public meetings and large association. They should advocate real social distancing now, not merely three-foot spacing, but on all gatherings, before we have the wave of illness, not after.

Even if they are trying to follow the lead of the State and County Public Health, there should have been some acknowledgement of the crisis and preparation for things to follow. All in all this is a strange and worrisome omission. "We hope it won't be as bad" is not a strategy.

We need more institutional support for social distancing
via twitter