Mayor London Breed said Wednesday evening that the city may adopt mask and vaccine mandates as the Delta variant continues to surge, and warned that the variant could imperil the fall reopening of in-person school.
“This Delta variant is real,” Mayor Breed said Wednesday evening during a conversation at Manny’s, a restaurant and civic space on 16th Street. “We also have to keep in mind, others can’t [get vaccinated, like those under 12]. They don’t have that option. So part of what I do is also for them.”
Wednesday’s conversation is part of a series, “What We Learned,” in which owner Manny Yekutiel interviews officials and researchers on the lessons learned during the pandemic. On Wednesday, however, both the Breed and Yekutiel acknowledged that the pandemic — seemingly over when the series was planned — was decidedly not over.
Breed said that the Delta variant could possibly derail the school district’s prior commitment to reopen for in-person learning in the fall. “It’ll continue to be a little bit of a challenge with this new variant. Now, I’m not so certain what will happen.”
In a reference to the recall effort directed at some members of the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education, she said that “there are people who are looking for ways to make changes to the school board and the makeup and how decisions are made.”
The effort began after a series of controversies at the school board, including parents’ dismay at the district’s slow pace toward reopening. Breed too said she was among the board’s constant critics.
Community learning hubs, which offered in-person help for students on Zoom, are still running.
Breed also talked about the low vaccination rates among the city’s Black residents.
“My people, Black people, in San Francisco, they have the lowest vaccination rates. I know how it is in my community,” Breed said, underscoring some historical distrust of the medical institution.
She shared that her grandmother was a sharecropper, and how the Tuskegee experiment in Alabama, in which Black men with syphilis went untreated for 40 years in a federal experiment, affected the mindset of numerous families like her own.
“I’ve been having a lot of conversations and arguments, and I have been able to luckily get people that have never been vaccinated their whole lives to do this,” Breed said, pointing to the early opening of vaccination sites in the Bayview and Western Addition neighborhoods.
When an audience member asked Breed’s advice on how to get Black youth vaccinated — previous community incentives like free Giants tickets haven’t worked, so he may try marijuana — the mayor urged him to keep trying. “We gotta keep having these conversations,” Breed said. “It’s going to be tough. We gotta look at some creative ways to do that, and people will judge us, but it’s San Francisco. It’s what we do.”
Yekutiel asked the mayor which pandemic policies would stay. Numerous programs popped up in the pandemic, including Shared Spaces parklets, Slow Streets, and weekend street closures.
Already, Breed said she “signed on the dotted line” to preserve the more than 2,000 parklets developed during Shared Spaces. She praised the Valencia Street closure, which Yekutiel helped launch, but didn’t commit to keeping it or other programs in perpetuity without designing guidelines that would benefit the whole city and without hearing what everyone in San Francisco thinks about it. Well, “almost everyone,” she joked.
Mostly, the mayor wants to maintain her special pandemic ability to streamline the city’s bureaucracy. She bemoaned the empty commercial storefronts, and how the San Francisco Fire Department would crack down on some Shared Spaces parklets that didn’t fit fire code regulations.
“It made me crazy,” Breed said. “I am trying to peel back the onion and get to the core and get rid of things that are unnecessary.”
As a nod to the devastating economic impact on local entrepreneurs, she vowed to find ways to waive all fees for small businesses. Other initiatives like Proposition H helped to ease small business openings, too. “If you have a dream and you have a talent, it should not be so hard,” Breed said.
Also on the table are other methods such as offering businesses grants instead of low-interest loans or negotiating down commercial rent from landlords. But, the mayor said, “There’s not enough money to save every business.”
For her, the pandemic meant turning into a plant mama — she cares for about three dozen plants, she said — and learned to be more zen. She doesn’t read the news right before bed.
Breed’s worst moment of the pandemic was when she had to ask people to shelter-in-place again, especially knowing that some residents just got their jobs back or were looking forward to normalcy. And the best day was the first time no new cases were reported.
She also felt that the pandemic, in many ways, brought out the best of the city. She noted a staff member who took care of multiple elderly neighbors’ grocery shopping and residents who became self-appointed “block captains” to look over their neighborhood.
And in the future, she wants to continue to see that. She dreams of a San Francisco that is like a utopia: “clean, green, I want people to have places to live, I want people to feel safe.”
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As a registered Democrat for over 40 years, I will not listen to anything that London Breed has to say! She is not only an embarrassment to the City and County of SF, she is so very unethical. So much so that she has been fined over $20K.
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I love Mission Local!! But why are you not writing about London Breed’s $22,000 fines for ethics violations? Let us be transparent even if it is what we do not want to see or hear.
Frank: Joe returns on Monday from a much deserved vacation and I’m guessing that will be on his list. Best, Lydia
No, we are opening the schools. Parents are not putting up with another year of distance learning.
the delta has nothing to do with San Francisco we are covered by 80 % vaccinations OK so please state the facts not paranoia we are not in any danger of another pandemic follow the science talk to real people that know science not people who try to spin the news if you guys are really local as you say talk to scientist not politicians go to neighborhoods please let get it together and let San francisco be the leader in facts and trend setters in how to get it done. we are San Francisco the city that gets things done not the city of paranoia delta cannot defeat us and as the mission real they made thrifty hire Latino’s or leave remember that so get it together please as a native i believe we can get the vax and move on. i say yay San Francisco GET VACCINATED ALL!
Or not: Between UCSF and San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH), the two hospitals recorded at least 233 COVID-19 infections amongst staff members. Of those infected, around 80% were fully inoculated against the disease — but just two vaccinated people were hospitalized in total.
Why is there not an online option for all kids under 12. They are obviously unvaccinated at this point, so is Mayor Breed not putting their health at risk and also sowing the seeds of another surge when schools open?
This nugget about schools – what is known and comes from the district? What is conjecture?
And the prioritizing the needs of business is why Grant Colfax and the Dept of Public Health flout California law and hide workplace outbreaks.
What more will it take to get Breed to reinstate a mask mandate? We have a massive surge and unvaccinated people are everywhere in the city, infecting more and more people, including children who have no access to vaccines, people with chronic illness, the immunocompromised, and older vaccinated people who are more liable to have breakthrough infections. Breed is an excellent bullshitter, but lousy at acting in any way counter to the needs of her wealthy friends and donors. It’s so obvious that businesses don’t want a mask mandate, so there won’t be one.
Wearing masks outside is useless, almost no one caught Covid outside in the first place.