Open Up Economy

Honorable Mayor: It’s time to break ranks with the County of Los Angeles regarding the “Stay at Home Order.”

I consider myself a pretty reasonable guy. My family is 4th generation Long Beach and my kids are 5th. My parents are still alive at 89 and 88 and live in 90807. I live in 90803 have lived through four recessions and we are now staring in the face of depression and Armageddon.

We need to open up our economy. If we don’t the death and carnage will be unfathomable. And I am not an overreactor.

Fifty deaths. 50 with pre-existing conditions. 80% from nursing homes. 470,000 people. 1 out of every 9,400. One hundredth of one percent. Yet our entire economy is shut down. Businesses are shuttering their doors. Tenants incomes have been suffocated. I could go on and on but I’m sure you are hearing the same song from all your constituents. So, I thought it would be good to put it in writing.

You all have done a great job to slow the spread but let the “at risk” stay home and let the rest go back to living. We can all accept and manage the risk.

R. Whitney Latimer
President, Bancap

 

These forced lock downs by local and state politicians are finally coming to an end. Why? Because it became apparent that common people were no longer going to tolerate it and revolts were starting across the country. Those leaders and experts who acted as if they knew what they were doing were proven to be wrong over and over with projections of massive death that never materialized, but we had to be locked down.

For perspective, in California we have about 3,000 deaths linked to COVID-19 with a now flattening curve. In 2018, we had 6,917 deaths in our state from influenza. During the same year, California had over 3,200 opioid and fentanyl deaths from overdoses. That’s 10,000 deaths in a year in only two categories. No lock down was implemented.

These are the same bureaucrats and experts who already demonstrated their incompetence with this misery called homelessness. They can’t get people off the streets, but they are going to lead us during a pandemic? Now that’s scary.

They pick winners and losers in the business community by way of forced closures. The essential vs. non-essential was flawed, maybe a joke. I couldn’t go buy shoes or get a haircut, but I could go to most big box stores where dozens of employees were not distancing, not wearing masks and probably not washing their hands while mingling among dozens of customers as if nothing were going on while COVID-19 cases climbed. This finally changed about two months in. 

I believe in constructive criticism, so here’s what I think should have happened. Businesses remain open under strict guidelines of distancing, disinfecting facilities and hands, masks and gloves. Citizens, if they choose, can go where they want with the same strict guidelines. This is exactly what the doctor who lead the war on COVID-19 in the New York City disaster said, and he never got sick. The key would be enforcement by the city and the proprietors themselves. It’s called personal responsibility, not the nanny state acting like a ruler. Nanny doesn’t know everything and in fact is kinda dumb and incompetent in a lot of areas.

Robert Van der Upwich

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Honorable Mayor????

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