🚨 BREAKING 🚨 Mayoral Candidate Sarah Iannarone Calls for Immediate Community Action to Mitigate COVID-19 Outbreak (THREAD)
Sarah is calling on the Mayor’s office to immediately declare a citywide policy of social distancing paired with self-imposed quarantine of ill Portlanders alongside the necessary financial and policy supports and partnerships to better protect the people in our community --
Especially those who are most vulnerable to the looming Coronavirus outbreak: elders; renters; people without housing; and small business owners, their employees, and other vulnerable low- and moderate-wage hourly workers, especially in the service industry.
The Coronavirus cannot be controlled; mitigation is our only alternative. There are two dominant approaches to containing this crisis: one model followed by Italy and Iran, in which they tried to trace the virus from carrier to carrier;
The other approach, deployed in Shanghai and Wuhan, in which they paired social distancing with mandatory quarantine.
As we’ve witnessed with the collapse of the healthcare system and total shut-down in Italy this week, the latter model is the more effective for minimizing the duration and severity of the outbreak and impacts on the public health and economy of a place.
This is a scary outbreak that will push us out of our comfort zones. Sarah has campaigned on the premise that we have everything we need to address our most pressing problems when we defy status quo, sidestep bureaucratic red tape & operate from a model of community resiliency.
There are far more questions than answers at this time; however, if we take strong measures now, we may be able to reduce disruption to people’s lives and blunt the impact for our community as the virus runs its course.
In the face of our current crisis, our city government MUST ACT with clarity, urgency, and creativity.
Sunday 3/8, @OregonGovBrown declared via executive order a 60 day State of Emergency surrounding the outbreak of COVID-19 in Oregon to “swiftly deploy the personnel and resources” needed to combat the virus.
This is necessary but insufficient to ensure the needs of Portlanders are being met in the short term and to minimize the duration and severity of the inevitable outbreak in our city.
The City of Portland must deploy the necessary staff and resources to support our neighbors as we innovate solutions and help each other get through this.
We recognize that a citywide policy of social distancing paired with self-imposed quarantine of ill Portlanders comes with short term costs, but the savings in the long term will be worth it.
For this strategy to succeed, the City must provide the following community supports for the duration of the Governor’s State of Emergency:
1. Foremost, the City must adopt a rapid response team approach to deal with the level of uncertainty and rapid pace of development as this crisis unfolds. This will ensure our policies, resource allocation, and communication models are effective and efficient.
2. We must keep the public informed and be transparent about why certain measures are being implemented. This includes providing individuals and businesses with information that is reliable, accessible, and frequent.
3. Ensure emergency financial support for small business owners, their employees, and other vulnerable low- and moderate-wage hourly workers (especially in the service industry) affected by social distancing policies.
3. (cont.) Help may come from a variety of sources (including zero-interest peer-to-peer lending) but the coordinating effort should be resourced by the City and led by the small business community, organized labor unions and other worker organizations.
4. Declare a moratorium on evictions. Many Portlanders will become financially burdened because of the economic impacts of COVID-19. Evictions will place more people outside of their self-quarantine and make the entire community more susceptible to contraction.
4. (cont.) Affected Portlanders would be required to notify their landlords of their inability to pay before their rent is due.
5. Declare a moratorium on involuntary displacement and criminalization of unhoused Portlanders (aka “sweeps”). Mass shelters could be a death sentence in an epidemic and displacing people from location to location makes life difficult for the people experiencing homelessness.
5. (cont.) Access to clean, fresh air for people experiencing respiratory illness can be beneficial. Let's welcome people w/o housing to situate themselves in highly treed areas off transit corridors, out from beneath freeways, away from polluted industrial areas when possible.
6. Deploy emergency community health measures to assist people w/o access to housing. This includes hand-washing stations, personal latrines with pick-up service, wellness checks, food delivery, first-aid, medicine delivery, and other personal safety assistance as needed.
6. (cont.) This effort can be undertaken in partnership w/ Multnomah County & through direct funding and other institutional support to a diverse network of grassroots & peer support orgs already operating on our streets, deeply familiar w/ the needs of our neighbors w/o housing.
7. Ensure that Portlanders in quarantine (in housing and unhoused) are having their daily needs met. At this critical time, we must intentionally mobilize the City’s civic capacity, formal and informal, including Neighborhood Emergency Teams and (cont.)
7. (cont.) ...Neighborhood Association networks, to conduct outreach, provide training and information, help with wellness checks, and assist with distributing food and supplies.
8. Fully and actively enforce hate crimes legislation and Sanctuary City policies. Reports of heightened stigmatization and discrimination in response to the outbreak of Coronavirus require that we actively safeguard Portlanders of Asian descent —
8. (cont.) as well as our immigrant and refugee communities. We must instruct City officials & employees to speak out against negative behaviors (including on social media) about groups of people & prevent exclusion of people from info, healthcare, housing, & financial assistance
This isn't going to be easy, Portland. We're going to be forced into making some tough decisions about trade-offs. Community resilience should drive our decision-making. What we learn from this crisis will better prepare us for challenges ahead.
We got this. #OurPortland
We got this. #OurPortland
