Two Long Beach councilwomen are urging the city’s health department to be more independent from Los Angles County’s when it sets COVID-19 restrictions on outdoor dinning and other businesses.
During a three-hour study session about the recent restaurant closures, councilwomen Suzie Price and Stacy Mungo Flanigan criticized the city’s decision to shut down all in-person dining amid a massive surge in coronavirus cases.
To the ire of local bar and restaurant owners, Long Beach made the decisions to do so shortly after LA County health officials did.
“We put almost no thought into following LA County into closing outside dining,” Price said. “We almost immediately adopted it.”
Mungo Flanigan went even further than Price, saying that the city should break with the county when it has the opportunity.
“Even if our numbers are worse, we should separate,” Mungo Flanigan said. “Our fate should be in our hands.”
Long Beach has the power to break with county coronavirus rules because it has its own health department, but currently its hands are tied on the issue while under a state-mandated stay-at-home order that’s set to last a minimum of three weeks.
But Mayor Robert Garcia pointed out Tuesday that it’s likely to last much longer than that, possibly running into January.
Garcia, who lost his parents to the virus earlier this year, gave a sobering message prior to the discussion stating that “9/11 is repeating itself every single day” in the country as death tolls in the United States have surpassed 2,000 per day.
“This pandemic is not getting better, it is getting worse across the country and that is true in California and here in Long Beach,” Garcia said.
The political jousting Tuesday night played out while hospitals around the city continue filling with new COVID-19 cases—reaching record highs on a regular basis. Shortly before the study session, health officials announced over 800 new cases in the city, which continues to propel an over 550% increase in cases since the beginning of November.
The Long Beach Council has limited power to set local health policies. That power rests with the local health officer, so Tuesday night’s meeting was mostly informational.
Nevertheless, Councilwoman Price requested the discussion nearly two weeks ago, before the county implemented a stricter health order and the state broke the state into regions with triggers for shutting regions down being based on ICU capacity.
Price again called for a deeper look at the data related to outdoor dining and its role in spreading the virus and asked for a more autonomous approach in the future. Critics of the restaurant ban have called for proof that outdoor eating was causing the recent spike.
Health officials say it’s impossible to provide detailed breakdowns of where everyone is catching the virus because most people don’t know where they were infected. Also, those who have been questioned through contact tracing have declined to describe the kinds of gatherings or activities they participated in.
Nevertheless, they decided to close outdoor dining because it’s one of the few places that people spend extended periods of time with others and have their masks off.
Long Beach Director of Health and Human Services Kelly Colopy said that a study from the CDC found that people who tested positive were twice as likely to have dined at a restaurant, coffee shop or bar. However, that study did not differentiate outdoor versus indoor dining. A separate study from Stanford University found indoor dining to be a “super spreader” event, she added.
After the study session, the council also approved a number of items aimed at helping restaurants survive the recent closures including a $5 million fund that could be infused with new federal stimulus money as well as asking for future measures like capping the fees that third-party delivery services can charge restaurants, something that owners have complained are eating into their already slim profits.
That delivery fee limit was requested to be set at 15%.