When I was a young man, I bought several Dr. Seuss books to help teach my children how to read. These were wonderful little stories, cleverly illustrated with words young children could easily learn in a few minutes each evening.
One of the characters was a cynical grump Seuss named “Grinch” who wanted to steal Christmas but was eventually persuaded to scuttle the plan by a small child. The book became the idea line for movies in the early 1960s, and its popularity grew from the fact that the Grinch repented when faced the grim reality of what he was about to do.
Let’s fast forward to 2020; we have our own real-life Grinch in Sacramento who doesn’t have the cognitive ability of the mythical Grinch. On Dec. 6 our governor issued stay-at-home and business closure orders for the lower half of California. This action put hundreds of thousands of low- and moderate-income families out of work and closed struggling mom-and-pop businesses two weeks before Christmas.
What were the criteria for this action? His public health team lumped our county in with the larger and highly populated counties stretching from Paso Robles to the Mexican border to the south, and the state line to the east. Meanwhile, in Northern California regions were much smaller and sparsely populated.
Gov. Gavin Newsom claims that all his draconian actions related to business shutdowns, suspension of civil liberties, and restriction of free movement are “science based.”
For months, state and federal government health officials have been predicting a surge in COVID-19 cases as winter sets in and holiday gatherings started occurring. The Newsom administration has published colorful charts and graphs; warned and regulated the population with ever-changing versions of population restrictions; and implemented various shutdown plans.
None of these actions stopped the surge. All of them appear to be a feeble effort to demonstrate that he is “doing something” to solve the problem, and all of it has been superficial and ineffective.
Many thought that the state and local government would marshal the resources necessary to create an action plan to treat the increase in sick people until a preventive protocol could be developed; they were wrong.
Did Newsom and his medical experts try to address treating the anticipated increase in patient loads in our hospitals with tangible improvements? Even though he and his medical teams have had several months to make some progress on a plan to deal with the surge, all we are left with is a near total shutdown of the state and the subsequent loss of jobs, paychecks, and more. So, it appears that they did absolutely nothing!
This isn’t a science issue; it is simply a logistics issue. Health officials knew that more treatment capacity would be needed; certainly, they knew that the California Air and Army National Guard units were trained to set up and operate field hospitals that could have accepted routine cases or could have provided staff that could have augmented hospital wards. What happened to all those overload locations that were set up with much fanfare and weren’t used in the early months of this crisis; did they forget how to set them up?
Over the decades, many have said that “government efficiency” is an oxymoron; in this case, the absence of any form of contingency planning as it relates to the long-anticipated COVID-19 surge is the result of totally of incompetent leadership.
Meanwhile the folks who aren’t sick are suffering as they try to cope with closed schools, lost income, and mounting bills for deferred rent or house payments, and are trying to provide food for their families amid the uncertainty of when all this will finally end.
In Lompoc and other communities, it has had a devastating impact on small businesses that have been struggling to stay afloat for the last nine months throughout this mismanaged medical emergency.
Since there is no logic to all those restrictions maybe it’s time for local governments to do what nearby Solvang did and simply refuse to take any action to enforce orders that have not been justified with data that indicates that the actions being ordered are a direct result of an increase in COVID-19 cases.
In the meantime, the governor and many other political “leaders” dine out, attend gatherings, and socialize while mandating that the general public can’t do it. I guess in the governor’s mind, this constitutes “science based” decision-making.
Ron Fink writes to the Sun from Lompoc. Send your thoughts, comments, and opinionated letters to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 17-24, 2020.
