In spite of the ever-growing death toll, the COVID-19 pandemic itself appears to be easing even as the economic fallout continues to pile up.
We all know someone — or several someones — who went toe to toe with the coronavirus, and many of us are at least acquainted with one of the more than 85,000 Americans who have died of the disease.
Almost all of us have suffered tremendous personal losses, or will have by the time we get out of the downturn that is strangling the economy from here to eternity. In less than two months, more than 36 million people — a quarter of the U.S. workforce — have filed for unemployment and 100,000 small businesses have closed.
Amid such circumstances, it’s easy to succumb to despair, but I’ve actually spied several encouraging signs this past week — and three of them were the most-read stories on Noozhawk.
Or maybe I’m just delirious after serving three to five years in quarantine jail.
There really is hope, however.
Kim Clark, one of my business partners and Noozhawk’s business development vice president, was the featured speaker for this week’s Weathering the Storm web series conducted by the Center for Community and Ethnic Media at City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Listening to her describe how she and her team of Sheridan Taphorn and Collin Nathanson have confronted the COVID-19 challenge was a terrific reminder that, when the pressure’s way too great, the diamond starts to show.
Noozhawk has a team of diamonds on our news side, and multifaceted managing editor Giana Magnoli has been particularly sparkly.
In the last several weeks she learned she had earned a Solutions Journalism Network grant to lead a project exploring district elections, and she was just accepted into the Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship program at the Charles Koch Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
Because even in a pandemic, even if we descend into a second Great Depression, life must go on.
Noozhawk must go on, too, and we need your help. While not everyone can afford to invest in local journalism right now, we also can’t afford to lose it. Can we count on you?
Your contribution, at any amount, will help us stay focused on what’s important to you: keeping you informed with trustworthy reporting on the latest local news in Santa Barbara County.
Thank you for your support, and your readership.
According to our Google Analytics, Noozhawk had an audience of 135,085 readers this past week, and what follows is my take on the Top 5 stories you were reading.
As you read on, please remember that this is my opinion column as Noozhawk’s publisher. It is not a news story and I am not a reporter.
1. BizHawk: Iconic Nordstrom in Santa Barbara’s Paseo Nuevo to Close by August
Nordstrom has been rumored to be a dead man walking — almost from the time the Seattle-based luxury department store opened its doors at the northwest corner of Paseo Nuevo in downtown Santa Barbara.
As our Josh Molina was first to report May 7, the store will be closing up shop for good and will be gone by August. With Macy’s having left its building years ago, both of the mall’s hulking anchor corners will soon be vacant.
Nordstrom’s departure is hardly a canary in a coal mine for the South Coast’s chronically adrift, leaderless downtown. At this point in the saga, it’s more like an albatross dropping a massive pile of bird poop on the city’s carefully cultivated image of sophistication and couture.
It turns out that Santa Barbara is no better than Santa Maria or Ventura, two similar sized, regional neighbors many locals like to look down on. I suppose the city could reach out to a big box store to try to save us, but it’s a cruel irony that we’re just not their type. That’s gotta hurt.
Rather than doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, perhaps our “Nordstrom moment” will be the catalyst to finally make a truly bold move to transform the heart of our community.
With the economic collapse already starting to pulverize us, this is a historic opportunity not unlike what followed the 1925 earthquake that laid waste to block after block after block, including the two that Paseo Nuevo straddles.
Pearl Chase, Dwight Murphy and Tom Storke had a vision for leaving Santa Barbara better than they found it. What’s ours?
2. Santa Barbara Wants to Reopen City With Social Distancing Measures
Like many business owners, I’ve been underwhelmed by the City of Santa Barbara’s usual understanding of the role that small business plays in a community’s quality of life. Hint: It’s not just to serve as an ATM for pet projects and policies.
And as readers of these Best of Bill columns know, I’ve been beyond frustrated by government’s seeming indifference toward the economic health aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic. The two are inextricably linked, and must be fought simultaneously — and just as urgently — if we are going to get through this crisis.
So you can imagine my surprise when I read the quotes from Mayor Cathy Murillo and City Administrator Paul Casey in our Josh Molina’s latest reporting on the City Council. I couldn’t have said it better myself!
To her credit, Murillo last month formed a task force of do-ers from the business community and asked them to help her come up with a plan to reopen the economy. They took her at her word and did.
In an unequivocal letter to Santa Barbara County Public Health director Van Do-Reynoso and a panel of medical experts, Murillo and her team outlined why the city should be allowed to move to the next phase of reopening, which includes allowing seated restaurant dining that meets social distancing requirements, among other things.
If that unelected panel of experts agrees, the request would be forwarded on to Gov. Gavin Newsom, which is hardly reassuring. After a brief period of decisive leadership weeks ago, Newsom has become a paragon of inconsistency, contradictions and nonsensical decrees.
As an aside, I find it amusing that Santa Barbara officials are at last fully experiencing what it’s like when someone else holds your future in their hands and won’t give you any clear guidelines on what to expect or what the outcome will be, or even a timeline. Not so fun, is it? Every local business can relate.
But I digress.
Josh obtained a copy of Murillo’s letter, which argues that “restaurants should not be grouped together with theaters, sporting venues or places of worship as they do not have the same congregate activity or seating arrangements. Bars should be allowed to open in Phase 2 if they can meet the physical distancing protocols.”
The letter explains that “operating protocols and guidelines must be clear, and should be based on the ability to meet social distancing requirements, not on occupancy-percentage restrictions.”
As Josh reported May 12, this week’s City Council meeting was all business. Casey was refreshingly blunt.
“I want to caution us not to be too slow,” he told the council. “This is the worst disaster in 100 years to face the city and we have to be responsive with some quick intermittent measures.”
Casey rejected complaints that the city may be moving too fast. Nothing focuses the mind quite like evaporating tax revenue, gaping budget deficits and still-spiraling pension obligations.
“Does there need to be a process?” he asked. “Yes.
“Can it be a two-year Santa Barbara process? No. We don’t have time.”
Godspeed. And welcome to the small business reality.
3. COVID-19 Cases Spike Again in Santa Barbara County, Almost All Lompoc Prison Inmates
Santa Barbara County’s coronavirus crisis got progressively worse May 9 with another spike of 224 cases of the highly contagious disease, which has been running amok the world over since erupting in Wuhan, China, late last year.
That brought the total county caseload to 1,250, although that figure had reached 1,387 by May 15.
So what are we doing wrong? Actually, not much.
Most county residents are practicing social distancing, wearing masks, washing their hands with the zeal of Lady Macbeth and keeping local hospital capacity far below critical levels.
The problem is the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex, a three-ring circus of incompetence that would be comical if real lives weren’t at stake.
Almost every day, county officials announce a rising toll of infections followed by some variation of the postscript: “nearly all of them are inmates at the Lompoc penitentiary complex.”
It’s getting old — for the inmates, for the guards and staff, for locals and, increasingly, for county elected officials who are finally finding their voice on the issue.
There actually are two forces at work. First, the external public health threat is real, but the prison complex’s internal conditions have been reported to be abominable, there is an almost absolute lockdown of information and communication from the federal Bureau of Prisons, and prison officials sure seem to behave like they’ve got something to hide. It’s disgraceful.
The second force is Gov. Gavin Newsom’s exceedingly misleading proclamations about a phased reopening of the economy.
According to Newsom, to even be considered for a relaxing of his stay-at-home order, counties can have a maximum of 45 COVID-19 cases and no deaths over a 14-day period, and their public health departments must have extensive, labor-intensive contact-tracing protocols in place.
Like a potentate, he has reserved unto himself sole discretion to approve or deny county requests, and may change his mind on a whim.
Santa Barbara County officials are now calling B.S.
“As we all know, the governor is making the decisions about when all of us can return to our normal lives, when the restrictions of the stay-at-home order can be loosened — the governor and (the) California Department of Public Health,” County Executive Officer Mona Miyasato said at the May 12 Board of Supervisors meeting.
Our Giana Magnoli reported that the board voted to send Newsom a letter asking the state to reconsider the metrics and exclude Lompoc prison complex cases when evaluating the county’s readiness.
Even mild-mannered Public Health director Van Do-Reynoso is exasperated.
“Well, last week seems like eons ago,” she told the board. “With the metrics that were proposed last week, yes, we would have been in a good state. However, with the epi metrics, with no more than 45 cases and zero deaths, we are not achieving that.
“It’s unreasonable for us to achieve that.”
Second District Supervisor Gregg Hart, the board’s chairman, has also been more pointed in his remarks at the county’s regular coronavirus briefings.
“We are prepared to be responsible for the (prison) staff, but cannot be responsible for the inmates,” he said at the May 8 briefing, noting that local officials have no authority on the inside.
4. Older Residents Bearing Brunt of COVID-19 Infections, Deaths in Santa Barbara County
Our Tom Bolton excels at deep dives into data sets, and for my money does it better than any journalist on the Central Coast. He recently took a thorough look at Santa Barbara County’s COVID-19 numbers and confirmed widely held observations that age and underlying health conditions are significant factors in the lethality of the disease.
Age Group 0-17 18-29 30-49 50-69 70+ Share of Population 22.3% 22.9% 23.1% 21.6% 10.1% Number of Cases 25 84 156 139 46 Share of Cases 5.6% 18.7% 34.7% 30.9% 10.2% Deaths 0 0 1 4 3 Share of Deaths 0% 0% 12.5% 50.5% 37.5%
Specifically, the older you are, the more at risk you are. Mostly.
Tom’s analysis of county Public Health Department data determined that people aged 70 and older account for 10.2 percent of coronavirus patients, about the same as their population proportion.
But he also found that the age group’s three deaths make up about 37.5 percent of the county’s now 11 fatalities, which is nearly four times their share of the population.
“Older people have a weaker immune system,” Dr. Henning Ansorg, the county’s public health officer, told Tom. “They very frequently die from an infection that younger people would recover from.”
While “elderly” seems more of a state of mind the nearer I get to it, my age group — 50-69 — doesn’t have anything to chortle about, as you can see from the nearby table.
It should be noted that Tom conducted his analysis before the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex finally started to come clean about its dirty massive secret. Turns out that being an inmate in that cesspool is the riskiest demographic of all.
5. 2 Injured in Collision on Highway 154 at Top of San Marcos Pass
A May 8 collision on Highway 154 injured both drivers, but the crash scene at the top of San Marcos Pass above Santa Barbara could have been a lot worse.
According to the California Highway Patrol, a Toyota RAV4 and a Volkswagen Golf GTI collided about 2 p.m. at the intersection of East Camino Cielo.
Witnesses said one of the vehicles was making a lefthand turn when it was broadsided by the other. The Volkswagen ended up down an embankment about 30 feet off the roadway.
Santa Barbara County fire Capt. Daniel Bertucelli said firefighters had to extricate one victim from the wreckage.
He said one driver suffered moderate injuries and was taken by American Medical Response ambulance to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. The other declined treatment after being examined by paramedics.
The CHP is investigating the circumstances of the crash.
• • •
Last Year on Noozhawk
What was our most-read story this time last year? Woman Rescued After Crashing Car 200 Feet Off Highway 154 Near Santa Barbara.
• • •
Bill Macfadyen’s Story of the Week
Mike McPhate of the California Sun reports on geographer Sean Conway’s depiction of California’s “jaggedness, using a 1944 Interior Department map and exaggerated elevation data.” Click here for the Golden State, and follow Conway on Instagram for more of his geospatial specializations.
• • •
Best of Bill’s Instagram
My Instagram feed included a long overdue return to upper Montecito’s Romero Creek and a sofa sibling #doubletake for @sadiethealaskanmalamute.
• • •
Watch It
Their buildings may be closed, but the church is very much alive. It’s a blessing in the United Kingdom.
(The UK Blessing video)
• • •
How You Can Help Noozhawk
Noozhawk is proud to be the go-to source of news for locals like yourself. You trust and rely on us to provide timely, relevant and thorough coverage of the issues that shape Santa Barbara County.
And we get up early — and stay up late — excited to report what’s going on in our community so we can keep you informed and engaged.
While most of Noozhawk’s revenue comes from advertising and sponsorships, we believe that reader contributions are a vital source of support — financially and fundamentally. We believe that if we ask our readers to contribute what you think we’re worth, we can build a sustainable business model for local news.
Yes, I’ll set up a monthly donation today!
Yes, I’ll set up a monthly donation today!
Yes, I’ll set up a monthly donation today!
Yes, I’ll set up a monthly donation today!
Yes, I’ll set up a monthly donation today!
Yes, I’ll set up a monthly donation today!
Yes, I’ll set up a monthly donation today!
Yes, I’ll set up a monthly donation today!
Yes, I’ll set up a monthly donation today! Yes, I’ll set up a monthly donation today!
Your loyalty membership helps us continue to provide you with unmatched local news and in-depth reporting on the issues that you care about.
Please note that personal contributions to Noozhawk are not deductible as charitable donations.
Thank you for your support.
— Bill Macfadyen is Noozhawk’s founder and publisher. Contact him at wmacfadyen@noozhawk.com, follow him on Twitter: @noozhawk and Instagram: @bill.macfadyen, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.