San Francisco Mayor London Breed said Sunday the need for a "federal, coordinated effort" remains as cities and states scramble for PPE and other essential items in the fight against the coronavirus.
"We should not still be having these conversations, which is a big reason why we have to put these shelter-in-place orders because we don’t have the resources that we need to keep people safe, especially around testing," Breed said.
Breed made the comments while appearing on CBS’ "Face the Nation."
"It’s been very difficult sometimes getting things through customs or needing to use a ship rather than a plane," Breed told moderator Margaret Brennan. "We have been resourceful. We are lucky to have incredible people like (Salesforce CEO) Marc Benioff, who has really helped to work with UCSF to get PPE and to bring it to the hospital and we’ve shared our resources with one another."
New figures from the San Francisco Department of Public Health released Sunday show 1,408 positive COVID-19 cases, a jump of 54 new cases in the last 24 hours.
No new deaths were reported.
The total number of deaths from complications related to COVID-19 sits at 22 in San Francisco.
San Francisco Mayor @LondonBreed tells @margbrennan that the city’s aggressive approach to combating #coronavirus was to ensure the city’s hospital system was not overloaded. pic.twitter.com/7PqcsCDGdi
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) April 26, 2020"I think the biggest challenge we have is we need to make sure we are looking at the facts and the data from our public health experts so we can make good decisions to protect public health," Breed said. "The challenges that we face still around PPE, around testing kits is just absolutely insane. We have known this crisis was coming to our country for a long time now. And the fact that, as of April, we’re still having the same conversations about the challenges. I know that most cities are seeing the same data I’m seeing, that if we do absolutely nothing, it gets worse."
Breed was the first major city mayor to declare a shelter-in-place order in early March, having already declared a state of emergency in San Francisco on February 25 before a single positive coronavirus case had been discovered in the city.
"We had been monitoring this situation since December of last year, we set in place a declaration of emergency back in February, we operated our emergency operations center because of those relationships between people who live in San Francisco and their relatives and their friends in various parts of China," Breed said.
On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed autopsy samples from two people who died in their homes in Santa Clara County on February 6 and February 17 were positive for the virus.
Before that, the country’s first coronavirus-related death was thought to have occurred February 29 in the Seattle area.
“I think it had been in the community for sometime” San Francisco Mayor @LondonBreed tells @margbrennan of news that the first U.S. case of #coronavirus was actually in Santa Clara County in California. pic.twitter.com/RPetPcD3MJ
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) April 26, 2020"I think that (coronavirus) has been in the community for some time," Breed said. "But again, the lack of testing and resources available made it difficult to really get the facts around who had actually contracted COVID-19 before we started to announce the numbers."
Breed told Brennan that Gov. Gavin Newsom has asked for more testing of people who passed away during that time period to determine whether they were COVID-19 positive.
While San Francisco has not officially extended its shelter-in-place order beyond early May yet, Mayor London Breed said this past week "the likelihood that will happen is very likely."
