Lock it up

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus in the US, elected leaders at every level have struggled and failed to agree on an effective and consistent policy response to contain it. Rules promulgated for public gatherings, mask wearing, and business operations have had wide variance from town to town or state to state.  Over the past year, these rules have expanded and contracted again in "phases" shaped not so much by the public health interest as by political pressure from influential wealth holders.  

A mayor might shut down because the cases are spiking but keep inviting tourists to town anyway.  A school board might cave to pressure from bosses to open and deprive parents of an excuse not to come in to work. But if the virus spreads among the school population, officials have plenty of excuses on hand as to why that isn't their fault.

This is the sixth week that the district has reported cases on its website. While there have been new cases each week, officials say they are relatively small numbers and Avegno said new cases don’t appear to come from the classroom. 

“Where we are seeing cases is in gatherings and extracurricular activities outside school. So the slumber party … and we have seen some outbreaks on athletic teams,” she said, noting there hadn’t been athletic outbreaks in the two weeks.

“With teachers, if it’s more than one teacher, it’s if they went out to dinner after school,” Avegno said. “Just like office spread, like in a breakroom. That’s not anything unique to schools.”

Hotel stays, yes. "Slumber parties, no."  Bars and restaurants are open but only the ones that serve the tourists. The more local clientele had better stay home... especially if they happen to be teachers. And this has been the situation in every city and in every state. The resulting chaos has claimed hundreds of thousands more lives than were ever necessary while piling ever greater fortune upon the world's billionaire class. 

Remarkably this situation has only been made worse by the arrival of the vaccines this year.  Policymakers could have taken advantage of the clear "light at the end of the tunnel" offered by vaccination. They could have heeded the advice of most health experts to keep restrictions in place for a few more months until a significant portion of the population was vaccinated.  Instead they quickly shifted into Mission Accomplished mode and loosened the rules around all sorts of activities. It's quite likely that the resulting sense in the public that the pandemic is already over has slowed the pace of vaccinations thus extending the threat further and endangering even more lives. 

Now as the virus seems to be spreading once again, Governors and mayors are even more hesitant than before to take the steps necessary to stop it. Many of them, in fact, are giving up altogether. 

And this spring, many American mayors are explaining their decision to leave office with the same reason: that the pandemic response demanded so much that they could not both campaign and perform their duties; or that the work had become so stressful that their families had recommended that they step away.

“They are just spent,” said Katharine Lusk, executive director of Boston University’s Initiative on Cities, which carries out an annual survey of mayors. Mayors surveyed last summer expressed deep anxiety about the effects of lost tax revenue on their budgets, as they juggled the pandemic, economic recovery and their core responsibilities.

Meanwhile the ones who have decided to stick it out are content to leave it all up to the vaccines and shift the blame for anything that goes wrong to the "personal responsibility" of individuals to take them. Inevitably this will mean more people will die than have to. But that's all part of the political cost/benefit analysis. 

Anyway it's only appropriate now that we're back to doing the bare minimum to protect the public health that the one thing we know we can do about the coronavirus is put it in jail. That is going about how you might expect.

Starting in March of last year, New York Times reporters tracked every known coronavirus case in every correctional setting in the United States, including state and federal prisons, immigrant detention centers, juvenile detention facilities, and county and regional jails.

We measured the pandemic’s excruciating impact on prisoners using records requests and interviews with people from all corners of the system. We spoke with incarcerated people and their families, prison wardens, jailers, prosecutors, defense attorneys and civil rights groups.

A year later, one in three inmates in state prisons are known to have had the virus, the data shows. In federal facilities, at least 39 percent of prisoners are known to have been infected. The true count is most likely higher because of a dearth of testing, but the findings align with reports from The Marshall Project and the Associated Press, U.C.L.A. Law and The COVID Prison Project that track Covid-19 in prisons.

The virus has caused misery and loss in many places, but its destructive power has been felt intensely among the incarcerated, who have been infected at rates several times higher than those of their surrounding communities.

Last week, The Lens reported that only a quarter of the  more than 800 people detained at the Orleans Parish jail have been vaccinated. That is a rate comparable with the city's population at large.  The state prisons are a bit behind.  But, as the same article points out, prison is a particularly dangerous place to be during a pandemic. 

Throughout the pandemic, prisons and jails have been particularly vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19 due to the inability of prisoners to social distance. There have been over 3,000 reported cases of the virus in Louisiana’s prisons, according to data from the DOC, and 36 people have died.

And so you may be thinking all of this should raise the obvious question, why are we still putting so many people in jail? Of course we should be asking that question anyway but especially now, under these circumstances, why are we needlessly endangering more lives?  Well, actually, that question was already asked of the mayor under arguably more dangerous circumstances during the height of the pandemic last year.  Here is what she said.

She has stoutly resisted more recent pressure from advocacy groups urging that police release nonviolent suspects from custody. “You’re worried about criminals catching coronavirus? Tell them to stop breaking the damn law,” snaps Cantrell, a streetwise woman known for her salty tongue.

Yesterday we watched yet another horrific instance of state cruelty in the form of body cam footage of yet another cop murdering yet another Black person for "breaking the damn law" against having an air freshener hanging from a mirror. Do those of us who are worried about that require a similar talking to from a "streetwise salty tongue?" Or is the summary death sentence for minor offense only acceptable when administered by virus instead of by gunshot?

Nobody actually lives there

No better indication of what our tourism bloodsuckers have done to the French Quarter than this.  

Louis and his brother John Matassa have long run the grocery together. The store wends across a number of connected buildings, filled with narrow aisles and a small deli known for its plate lunches, breakfast biscuits and po-boys. Matassa's sturdy delivery bicycles have been a common sight bouncing along French Quarter streets, bringing sacks of grocery and cases of beer to customers’ doors.

But Catalanotto said slow business during the pandemic has been “the last straw” for a grocery that had struggled over the years as the French Quarter’s residential population declined and one-time homes were converted to condos and short-term rentals.

“People say this is a great time for the grocery business and that’s true, but not in the French Quarter,” he said. “It’s a different market here.”

Can't "shop local" when there are no locals. There could be a lesson here for what we want our city to look like after COVID. But we all know we're going to double down on turning our historic neighborhoods into theme parks.

Tourist area

A city shouldn't have "tourist areas" It can have neighborhoods that tourists enjoy seeing and visiting. But a "tourist area" is an amusement park where nobody actually lives. This is a plan to sacrifice what remains of our city's most famous neighborhood as a tourist area. 

French Quarter streets where cars aren’t welcome. Sidewalks converted to outdoor patios. And lower speed limits for the cars that do travel through.

Those are just some of the ways New Orleans officials are considering transforming the French Quarter and surrounding areas, according to documents released by the city Tuesday. The draft plans are all aimed at making the city's most important tourist areas more pedestrian friendly, though some critics worry about the effect on residents and necessary vehicle traffic.

If this were a plan to make the entire city more pedestrian friendly, reduce the need for there to be as many cars on the streets, and help people connect to their jobs or their social lives without having to own a vehicle themselves, it would be a good idea. That's not what it is, though. It's a plan to further isolate a "tourist area" from local access depriving it of even the pretense of the character that made it a tourist attraction in the first place.  Because, as always, step 3 is profit.

City officials view the effort as one that will put New Orleans on a par with Paris, the town of Vicchio in Florence, Italy, and other cities that have prioritized pedestrians in tourist-heavy corridors and enjoyed increased tourism as a result, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Ramsey Green said. He argued that the push is all the more critical now, as the city grapples with a sharp drop-off in tourists and the sales-tax dollars they bring, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and to local restrictions on French Quarter businesses.

"Our small businesses, our restaurants, our places that people want to visit, how do we give them more space than perhaps fits in their four walls? And that's kind of what this is," Green said.

Not sure what the actual logic is here so we're hesitant to even argue with it.  But to say the least it's a dubious notion that a travel business depressed by fear of a still raging pandemic is alleviated by a car-less Quarter. Worried about the health consequences of flying across the country, sleeping in a strange bed, and dining out in public?  Well what if we told you nobody can park there now?  Feel better? Besides, aren't the marketing people focusing more on the "drive-in" traveler now, anyway?  What are we going to do with all those cars?

Hard Rock Parking Garage & Golf Cart Rental

— jabco (@JABC0) July 1, 2020

Oh dear. 

Even in better times, the desperate pursuit of tourism at the expense of residents' priorities has become a global scourge. Cities all over the world, including some of those cited by Cantrell officials have been struggling with the consequences of allowing their culturally significant neighborhoods to become playgrounds for the wealthy where nobody actually lives.

Attracting 14 million tourists a year, Florence is Italy’s most-visited city after Venice and Rome. Boasting a huge and rich variety of the world’s heritage and surrounded by Tuscany’s rolling hills, the city’s popularity is easy to understand.

But as with Venice and Rome, the growth in tourism has seen residents driven out of town by the rising cost of living and arrival of Airbnb: according to a Siena university study, one in five properties in the historic centre is advertised as a short-term let.

Some measures, however, seem to be paying off. “One of the main issues is that everyone is so focused on the historic centre, which is only a 5km sq area in a city of 105km sq,” said Del Re. “So we are heavily promoting areas outside of the centre.

Which is why reasonable people are suspicious of the motivation behind the plans in New Orleans. The laudable stated purpose of reducing vehicular traffic in general is a flimsy rationalization offered in bad faith. In truth we're just offering the tourism industry something it's been wanting forever but we're only now desperate enough to give.

Plans to restrict more traffic in the French Quarter have been floated before, only to be killed after critics accused the city of trying to make the half square-mile area more palatable to tourists and said the changes would make things harder for residents.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu backed down from a 2017 plan to permanently bar cars on Bourbon Street.

But the potential this time around to recoup revenues lost to the coronavirus contagion has apparently sold many bars, restaurants and businesses on the idea after Mayor LaToya Cantrell first floated it in May.

It's a classic example of how capitalism commoditizes and consumes everything and how a crisis like the pandemic only accelerates that process.  In case of emergency just pull the lever that makes all the unjust and policies that benefit the wealthiest people go even faster.  It's all we're ever capable of.