Some Decisions Don’t Add Up in California’s COVID-19 Spending and Policy

While California residents have been under strict stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus crisis, the homeless vagrants living on city streets have been exempted from the city, county and statewide orders. Living in unsheltered filth, together with diseases many already have, more have also contracted coronavirus.

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, California already had a health crisis looming – the 160,000+ homeless vagrants, drug addicts and mentally ill living unsheltered on streets, in parks, under freeways, on parkways, bike trails, and rivers. Cities and counties feigned budget whoas when it came to shelling out the funding needed to get these people off the street before another hepatitis outbreak, or worse, a bubonic plague outbreak as many physicians feared.

And then the coronavirus hit.

While Californians were ordered to close their businesses and leave jobs and schools for shelter-at-home, the homeless still roamed the streets.

Some big city mayors welcomed brand new RV trailers to house what amounts to only a handful of the state’s homeless. In Sacramento, KFBK radio reported on the city’s 63 brand new RV trailers, sitting empty while Mayor Darrell Steinberg and his team figured out what to do next. Would they hook up to sewer and water? If so, where? How about the propane needed for the water heater and showers? How many to a trailer? And what if they are trashed, as all previous trailer experiments have been with homeless?

Governor Newsom during the April 4th briefing said the state now also has access to approximately 7,000 hotel and motel rooms to house some of the homeless with a goal of getting them off the streets. But we are talking about 160,000+ homeless persons in the state. Doing so, said the Governor, will make it less likely that the California medical system will be overwhelmed during the virus outbreak, KFBK reported. Who is paying for this? Is the funding from the federal government as part of the coronavirus emergency funding?

Is the COVID-19 emergency funding paying for California’s homeless population’s RVs and hotel rooms?

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said in a Breitbart interview last month the best solution for the homeless was to build tent cities on public lands, where the spread of coronavirus would be less likely:

There are some federal lands, and some state lands, that can be contributed, and we can put up various types of structures that can be put up relatively inexpensively, which give people a clean bed, a safe environment, a place where their basic medical needs can be taken care of, where we can deal with the drug addition, where we can deal with the illness, and also “wraparound” services, because many of these people are very salvageable, and can be returned to a state of self-sufficiency. But if we don’t concentrate on doing that, what we will do is accumulate more and more and more dependent people, and pretty soon the total will be so great we will not be able to handle it. 

Carson said we should “use this as an impetus to get rid of homelessness in the country altogether.”

In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti has been converting recreation centers in residential neighborhoods to emergency homeless shelters, where the coronavirus is sure to spread.

Of San Francisco’s 8,000 homeless, 70 in a homeless shelter contracted coronavirus. Mayor London Breed has been trying to move homeless people off the streets and in to hotels.

California Globe has spoken with Dr. Drew Pinsky numerous times about the homeless epidemic, and each time he warned of the serious potential of a bubonic plague outbreak among homeless throughout California’s largest cities, if they were not moved into tent shelters and triaged by medical and mental health experts. Pinsky says leaving them on the streets is not an option, as well as inhumane.

Conflicting decisions

Rather than require the ill and most vulnerable to seek medical attention and shelter at home, governors across the country issued stay-at-home orders for the general populations.

Most restaurants and businesses are shuttered, while Lowe’s, Home Depot, Walmart, COSTCO, pharmacies, and grocery stores are still open.

Some cities and counties are requiring masks to be worn outside of the home by everyone at all times. But we’ve been told that the masks don’t really help the non-sick, and are more of a courtesy by someone who is sick.

Some bike trails, all state parks, some regional parks’ equipment and playgrounds, have been closed by local officials. Some golf courses have closed. Those which have not closed are under exceeding pressure from angry brown-shirt types, who stand at the first hole and harass golfers and take photos of them. Golf Course managers report they’ve had to bring in extra volunteers to help manage the angry harassers.

Is this the “social pressure” Gov. Gavin Newsom was expecting from the people to provide the day he issued his stay-at-home order? “That social pressure we’re seeing out there for people to do the right thing is the most powerful enforcement tool we have, and we’ll continue to use that as our moral authority advanced all throughout the state of California,” Newsom said March 19. Newsom’s Executive Order requires the state’s 40 million residents to remain in their homes, except for necessary trips to the grocery store, pharmacy or doctor.

Seventeen million people in the U.S. have become unemployed, which many medical experts along with economists say is an unmitigated disaster even larger than the virus itself. California has more than 3 million unemployment claims so far – and just .002% death rate in the state from COVID-19.

Lastly, as California Globe reported Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom just approved spending $1 Billion on surgical masks from Chinese company BYD, just as it was announced that health experts at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington lowered COVID-19 coronavirus death projections for California substantially.

Notably, BYD is an electric bus manufacturer, and only just started last month manufacturing surgical masks.

One Globe reader noted, “Newsom’s weird purchase of masks from China coincided with antibody tests being conducted in the Bay Area and L.A. County. Such tests will determine, among other things, if huge numbers of Californians have already achieved herd immunity from CV19 from some 8,000 travelers from China (Wuhan too) arriving daily in West Coast cities in the last several months of 2019. To find already-existing herd immunity in California would be to put into question many of the directives the politicians and bureaucrats have been issuing and patting themselves on the back about since early March; e.g., lockdowns, distancing, masks, etc.”