“There is no evidence tourists spread COVID.” That was what Dr. Thomas Locke, Jefferson County’s Public Health Officer, told the Board of Health. Unfortunately for Jefferson County his words at the BOH’s pivotal May 21 meeting were quickly forgotten.

Driven by fear, almost all members of the Jefferson County Board of Health voted to keep sending the county’s consumer dollars to Big Box stores and to kill off many of our restaurants. What they did, in their words, was to prohibit in-store retail sales and even limited dine-in restaurant service until Kitsap County, with its quarter million population, and Clallam County, with 78,000 people amass sufficient medical resources and hospital space, implement plans for any potential future outbreak and suppress COVID sufficiently to move into Phase 2 of the Governor’s reopen scheme.

No matter what we do here, no matter how hard our businesses and their employees try, no matter how negligible the virus risk here, the fate of many of our retail businesses and all our restaurants will hinge on what happens elsewhere.

More than a month ago, Georgia allowed its restaurants, retail stores and just about everything else to reopen. The press went into a gleeful frenzy of feigned concern. People were going to die by the tens of thousands. Inhumane madness, they cried. The media has since lost interest in Georgia. Why? Because Georgia’s rapid and robust reopening is doing just fine. Consider this graph from the Atlanta Journal Constitution showing hospitalizations dropping by over a third since Georgia reopened:

COVID related deaths in Georgia are also down by nearly 25% since reopening. We could learn from Georgia. But never mind science and data.

County Commissioner Kate Dean led the opposition to reopening our restaurants and retail stores. From the start of the meeting she had been throwing procedural roadblocks in the way, such as wanting to wordsmith and rewrite Dr. Locke’s entire proposal. She was the first to shoot down a motion by Commissioner Greg Brotherton and seconded by Hospital Commissioner Kees Kolff to allow Jefferson County restaurants and retails stores to get the same green light as restaurants and retail stores have now received in 20 other Washington counties.

Dean’s reasoning: She agreed with Brotherton that our business people are responsible and trustworthy. She “has faith in them,” and is convinced they would do everything to operate as safely as the other retail establishments the Governor never closed, from grocery stores to wine sellers to pot shops to convenience stores. But she “distrusted” (her word) people from places like Kitsap County. “There is something psychological” she declared that makes people coming here irresponsible and a danger to our community.

As every day of closure is critical for businesses on the brink, you would think, were she acting responsibly, that she would have had something solid to justify forcing our stores and restaurants to continue to suffer.

So what was the basis for her insights into the despicable people who live across the Hood Canal? What does she imagine someone from Port Gamble or Kingston would do in our town but not at home? Spit at clerks, cough in the face of waiters, smear saliva on contact surfaces? Dr. Locke said at the start of the meeting that investigations have found no evidence of tourists spreading the virus. What evidence did Dean have to contradict the Public Health Officer?

She just made stuff up. Her imagination supplied an excuse for keeping scores of Jefferson County businesses closed, bleeding red ink, their owners draining the last of their life savings, and their employees on the phone trying to get unemployment benefits from a dysfunctional state agency that only doles out money quickly to Nigerian crooks.

Watch the video of the meeting. Brotherton starts his valiant effort to help our economy at 2:02:59 and makes his motion to open retail at 2:08:3. Dean is the first to speak in opposition and spouts her prejudices and fantasies about people she’s never met.

Dean wasn’t the only local official wigging out at the idea of our stores reopening. Denis Stearns, the citizen-at-large member of the Board of Health, a wealthy semi-retired lawyer, had from the beginning expressed resistance to an “early open.” He’d only “just gotten over being paranoid about going into the Co-op.” He says he sits in the parking lot, counting cars, and won’t enter if he thinks “it is too busy.” So he, what, drives home, comes back in an hour, counts cars, freaks out, drives off, comes back, counts again…..? How many attempts does he make in a day to score some lettuce and cereal?

Stearns spoke sternly against letting retail stores reopen. His frame of reference was always his own “risk tolerance” (to use his words) until condescension and arrogance took over. Unlike Dean and Brotherton, he has no confidence in our local business people. Never mind the small shops that have been operating for two months without spreading the virus, places on Water Street that sell wine, ice cream and candy. Never mind the spacious Quimper Mercantile, closed as a “non-essential” business or the open floor plans in our women’s clothing and shoe stores, or the other stores that are larger than some of the pot shops that have been open since the start of the lock down. He lumped all our downtown retail stores into the “too cramped to operate” category. Why bother? Allowing any of them to even try would be “inviting [them] to fail,” and he did not want to trouble the Board with a “symbolic gesture” of permitting any to reopen.

City Councilor Pam Adams, Vice Chair of the BOH and remarkably unconcerned about the devastation to Port Townsend’s downtown, joined in the chorus drowning out hope for retailers and restaurants. This is not surprising. As we’ve reported over the past months, the Port Townsend City Council hasn’t even talked about helping the city’s struggling businesses. A letter to the BOH from Kris Nelson, the city’s leading restaurant entrepreneur, about the “important lifeline” the restaurant industry provides for many families was found to be “moving,” as several BOH members said. The risk that restaurants may never reopen is very real and will seriously damage the fabric of life here. But, meh, let’s put this off until Kitsap and Clallam Counties get their act together, whenever that may be.  Restaurants and retail have already been locked down for over two months. What’s another couple weeks of going broke and being unemployed? Don’t forget, we’re all in this together.

(On a side note, it has to be disconcerting to businesses that their fate is in the hands of two of the key players behind the lamentable Cherry Street Project: Dean, who is a leader of the group that has been bungling the project for 3 years, and Adams, who voted to get taxpayers into the mess.)

County Commissioner David Sullivan stuck his knife in the back of retail and restaurant businesses by also just making stuff up.  You can tell he’s motivated by fear, not science. He spouted off about how the COVID virus strikes down children and kills teenagers. The Washington Department of Health has reported not a single death of anyone under age 20 caused in any way by COVID.  The overwhelming majority of young people (that is anyone under 60, for this county) experience few or no symptoms and have not required hospitalization. Only 6 people in this county have been hospitalized for any period of time, some for only a night. One individual did require being moved to Harbor View, but has recovered. Six people hospitalized in a county of 32,000, so, yes, by all means, let’s kill small businesses and push people onto welfare.

One fact Mr. Sullivan chose to ignore: with our grocery stores, pot shops, wine store, hardware stores, equipment rentals, and convenience stores open the whole time, Jefferson County still had only 30 COVID diagnoses and nobody died. So why can’t the rest of our stores open to sell clothing, shoes, books, records, yarn, tea, spices, furniture, artwork?

Dean and Sullivan pay no price for keeping businesses shuttered and sputtering. Without interruption they have continued to receive their full pay, over $81,000 annually with great benefits paid by the same taxpayers they are driving toward bankruptcy and homelessness.

Board of Health Chair Sheila Westerman oversaw a meeting that only occasionally stumbled into following Robert’s Rules of Order. I lost track of the number of times she announced, “I’m confused,” “I don’t understand,” or “I am very confused.” She said she was “concerned” how many people in their comments to the BOH wanted to reopen now. Just as she and the majority of the BOH disregarded input from the business community showing overwhelming support for reopening, she disregarded any public comment except ones that fed her own overblown fears of a virus we now know is much less a threat what we were told back in March. We have learned it leaves untroubled 35% of those it infects, results in manageable, frequently minor symptoms for the vast majority of its hosts, and kills almost exclusively the elderly, and then only those with preexisting, severe health conditions that were already life threatening.  Out of a state population of nearly 8 million, with 331,000 tested so far, only 20,065 have been diagnosed positive.

Westerman lamented that so many people remained “uneducated” about the virus, when to the contrary, they may have learned more than her.

Not all members of the Board of Health are guilty of malfeasance. We should recognize the compassion and selflessness of Kees Kolff, age 74, who argued for a full move into Phase 2. He argued for allowing the young to get back to their lives and jobs and for the vulnerable to protect themselves instead of forcing the low risk population to continue to sacrifice. “I don’t have to go [to that open restaurant or store] and expose myself,” he said.

And kudos to Brotherton for trying, repeatedly, for common sense moves to lift the lock down order. And, Commissioner Brotherton, thanks for asking the direct question of Dr. Locke that should have been asked as soon as we qualified for an early open. “Is there any evidence that tourists have been spreading the virus?” Unfortunately Dr. Locke’s answer–“There is not””–fell on too many ears deafened by fear.

UPDATE 6/30/2020: A reader in the comments asked us to update the information on how Georgia is doing with its robust reo-open, now several months old. While Georgia is testing thousands more and seeing an increase in positive diagnosis, and a bump in hospitalizations, its death rate continues to drop. This graph shows the latest on Georgia’s seven-day rolling average for deaths. During the time since Georgia reopened it also experienced the riots and protests when thousands of people congregated together, frequently in close quarters and with no social distancing or mask protections.  Georgia’s daily case totals and hospitalizations were either flat or declining until about a week after the riots and protests started. The good news, as this graph shows, is that with its robust reopening and the riots and protests, the state’s death rate continues to drop.