We've lost sight

I’ve repeated this often over the last few months. We have lost sight of the goal. I think it’s reasonable for everyone to take a step back and say how did we end up here? How did we go from we need to flatten the curve in the month of April to, we are going to shut your business down if you decide to stay open?

Almost all business owners set goals, they set goals as a way to look towards the future.

I look to Sacramento and I wonder, what is the goal? Is it hospital capacity? Is it a vaccine and extinction of the virus?

Yes, we should be working on a vaccine, but we should not put our economic future solely on it. We need to learn to live with this virus.

An Axios/Ipsos poll was done last week that said only 13% of Americans would be willing to try the vaccine when it comes out. So, if a vaccine is the goal, we need to win the trust of the public back.

We need to give them the facts and the facts are, if you are under the age of 50 you have a 99.98% chance of surviving COVID-19; if you are below 70 you have a 99.5% chance; 6% of our hospital beds are COVID-19 patients and we have thousands of hospital beds available in case of an increase. Those are the facts.

We need to quit playing with the emotions of business owners with a flawed color coded system and we need to start to be honest when it comes to the goals of COVID-19, because we are quickly losing the trust of the people.

Submitted by the office of San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond