Coronavirus in San Francisco : How City Flattened the Curve - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-san-francisco-london-breed/609808
London breed wasn’t going to wait around for COVID-19.
San Francisco had yet to confirm a single case of the coronavirus when Breed, the city’s 45-year-old first-term mayor, declared a state of emergency in late February.
(...)
Breed ordered businesses closed and issued a citywide shelter-in-place policy effective on March 17, at a point when San Francisco had fewer than 50 confirmed coronavirus cases.
(...) The economic hardship a shutdown would cause was not lost on Breed. She was raised in a public-housing project by her grandmother, from whom, Harris said, Breed inherited a practical streak. Breed’s sister died of a drug overdose, while her brother is currently incarcerated on a 44-year sentence for manslaughter. “Her grandmother was a tough lady,” recalled Harris, who has known Breed for years. “She was practical, practical to her core.”
“Hindsight these days is not years later; it’s weeks later,” the senator said. “So hindsight tells us London Breed was really smart. She did the right thing at the right time, even though it’s not what people wanted to hear.”
(...) “This virus has been ahead of us from day one,” Cuomo lamented on Thursday, as he announced that, once again, New York had seen a daily record—799—in coronavirus deaths. That may be true for Cuomo and de Blasio, who dragged their feet, not to mention Donald Trump. But it is not true for Breed.
(...) Public-health officials in san francisco began monitoring the coronavirus outbreak around the holidays in *December*, Mary Ellen Carroll, who runs the city’s Department of Emergency Management, told me. *By late January, Breed had activated San Francisco’s emergency-operations center* in preparation for an outbreak—the first such move in any major city in the country. (...) Everyone, including Breed, wears a mask when they meet, Carroll said.
Politiquement pas très à gauche au sein du parti démocrate :
Breed, a Democrat aligned with the party’s establishment wing, won the mayoralty in a close special election a few months later, defeating two more progressive candidates with the help of tabulations from San Francisco’s system of ranked-choice voting. She won election to a full term in 2019, but spent much of the year battling progressives on the city’s pervasive homelessness problem and in local elections where candidates she endorsed were defeated.
