The most telling piece of news of late in California may be a story that didn’t pan out as expected in Los Angeles. And that would be the county’s top health official deciding not to return her constituents to a universal indoor mask mandate—in doing so, offering a tale of what maybe frustrates individuals with government’s COVID-related decisions, plus the shaky state of government in California’s largest city.
But first, a little bit of background.
A week ago, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, LA County’s public health director, announced that her department would not reinstate the aforementioned mask mandate, citing a declining countywide COVID-19 transmission rate as her rationale. Ferrer backed up her decision with data—county data, actually, instead of numbers from the federal US Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention.
What Los Angeles officials had ascertained: the county was averaging 9.7 new COVID hospital admissions a week per 100,000 residents, which constituted only a “medium” community level for infection and thus requiring no need for taking the added step of asking Angelenos to mask up for the good of the greater order.
(In case you’re curious, three CDC-defined metrics that determine county transmission rates are: (a) new cases per 100,000 residents over a weekly period; (b) new COVID hospital admissions per 100,000 a week [which Ferrer used); or (c) the percentage of staffed inpatient hospital beds occupied by COVID patients.)
Ordinarily, in this space, we’d be cheering Los Angeles’s action—or non-action, if you will—as a victory for common sense. But, as is the case with many aspects of the management of state and local government in the Golden State, there’s cause for skepticism.
First, there’s Ferrer’s decision to use locally ginned data rather than waiting for input from her counterparts at the federal level.
Ferrer’s defense: the county had fresher numbers (she told reporters that Los Angeles’s data is two days ahead of Washington’s). However, by not waiting for the CDC to update its findings—a week before Ferrer’s announcement, CDC numbers had shown the proportion of staffed hospital beds with COVID patients having more than doubled, from 5.4% to 11.7%, over a seven-day period in mid-July—was Los Angeles’s top health official basing her decision on currency (fresher data) or convenience (the county data offering a path toward a policy choice that wouldn’t anger the masses)?
Which leads to a second concern: Los Angeles’s dwindling supply of trustworthy government officials—both elected and non-elected.
The problem begins at the very top, with a distracted LA mayor who’s been in political limbo for over 18 months now—Eric Garcetti awaiting Senate confirmation to be the next US ambassador to India (in the mayor’s words, “between two worlds”), with the process grinding to a halt in Washington while the city awaits a new mayor to be chosen by voters in November.
There’s also trouble (to put it mildly) in the county’s district attorney’s office—the embattled George Gascón perhaps soon to be the subject of a recall campaign spurred by local voters upset with his approach to crime fighting (the same process recently took out San Francisco’s DA, Chesa Boudin—an office, ironically, also once held by Gascón, before he relocated to Los Angeles).
Moving along, there’s also controversy in the county sheriff’s office, where Alex Villanueva, who’s up for re-election in November, continues to defy multiple subpoenas to appear before the Civilian Oversight Commission and testify about the presence of “deputy gangs” within his department (at various points, Villanueva has either said he’s too busy with his day job to appear before the commission or has dismissed the inquiry as a “fishing expedition”).
Now, add Dr. Barbara Ferrer and the county’s Department of Public Health to the list.
Her trouble begins with this scathing Los Angeles Daily News editorial calling for her resignation. The Daily News’s gripe (and this was before she did the unexpected and didn’t reimpose the mask mandate): talk to medical doctors, which Dr. Ferrer is not (more on that in a moment), and they don’t convey a sense of urgency to return to masking (“It is not the same pandemic that it was, despite all of the media hype to the contrary,” one physician was quoted as saying in the editorial).
Add to Ferrer’s woes: allegations (which Ferrer has since denied) that, as the county’s public health director, she relied on a school mask-mandate study coauthored by her daughter—a study that concluded, conveniently enough, that masks in Los Angeles schools were “highly effective” in slowing COVID spread (the mother–daughter connection, which would seem a professional conflict of interest, wasn’t noted in the report).
Will such bad press actually cost Ferrer her job? (Under the category of “good work if you can get it: LA’s public health director receives total compensation slightly more than the $400,000 salary and $50,000 expense account given annually to the president of the United States.)
Maybe not, but there is a question of her credibility moving forward.
And that begins with the question of whether Angelenos will continue to take COVID guidance from a public health official who’s . . . well, not a physician or an epidemiologist. Barbara Ferrer’s honorific refers to a PhD in social welfare from Brandeis University, not an MD. Her biography cites three decades of experience as a “philanthropic strategist” as well as “public health director, educational leader, researcher and community advocate.” As the Daily News observed in calling for Ferrer’s ouster:
A “philanthropic strategist” raises money, and one way to do that is to shout that there is a terrifying crisis and everyone must immediately stop what they’re doing to focus on the need to do whatever the philanthropic strategist is requesting.
The difference between a philanthropic strategist and a public health director is that a public health director can shut down your business by revoking the necessary health permits to keep it open.
Meanwhile, there’s dissension within the ranks of the local governments in greater Los Angeles when it comes to mask mandates. In recent weeks, as indications were that the county wanted to return to the indoor mandate, officials within nearby cities with their own governments—Beverly Hills, Long Beach, Pasadena—said they wouldn’t comply with the county’s dictate. (As these cities have their own public health departments, they’re free to decide whether to align their own masking rules or with those established by the county.)
Coincidentally, that defiant gesture comes at the same time that the governor of the drought-stricken Golden State, Gavin Newsom, has been urging his fellow Californians to voluntarily cut back on their water use. Call it H2-woes: Newsom asked for a 15% reduction in urban water use, only to see it fall by only 2% overall since the governor made his first entreaty last summer, with the 15% goal reached only once, in December.
Angelenos not interested in taking doctors’ orders?
Californians telling the governor he’s “all wet”?
The same state that once introduced America to a “summer of love” seems to be living a dry and COVID-weary summer of defiance.
