Last night on my birthday I’m happy to share that our San Mateo City Council passed a temporary ban on evictions for small businesses and nonprofits during this health emergency. Our Council is continuing to meet weekly and formed an ad hoc COVID-19 policy subcommittee. Councilwoman Papan and I will serve on the subcommittee to focus on economic recovery efforts.
You may notice more police presence in San Mateo because we have increased patrolling of essential businesses such as grocery stores and security of our businesses that are closed. The San Mateo Police HOT Team is working to search out the unhoused to connect them to housing resources and support. Our County has helped 89 homeless individuals to date and is seeking additional shelter space to safely accommodate more. In the coming weeks you will also start to see bilingual English/Spanish signs in our parks and public spaces to educate the public about social distancing and the Shelter in Place Order.
This afternoon the County Supervisors passed a county-wide temporary ban on residential evictions and established a $3M San Mateo County Strong Fund. All donations will stay inside our County, so you can have confidence that you are helping your neighbors. I hope you will consider donating and please share with your friends.
Our SMC COVID-19 cases reached 161 today, but this number is expected to be very low due to the limited access to testing. Louise Rogers, County Chief of Health, said today that it’s possible that the real number is more than 20X our current case count and a projected surge could occur in late April or May. However, we cannot know the true prevalence in our community without increased access to testing and modeling. Please be reassured that many efforts are underway to ramp up testing and secure supply of personal protective equipment for first responders, and increase the capacity of hospital beds through use-agreements with hotels, Seton Hospital, and the Event Center.
For some non-COVID-19 news… this is an important reminder to please go online to fill out your Census Questionnaire. The 10-minutes it takes to complete the questionnaire is equivalent to about $10,000 in Federal funding to our County to support essential health, safety and education services. Visit https://2020census.gov to take the Census in over 40 languages!
In the midst of all of this, we’re holding our kids closer and feeling grateful to be part of this strong and resilient community.