Seattle Mayor takes your calls about coronavirus

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is back for our weekly check-in on how the city is handling the coronavirus crisis.

This is an abbreviated transcript of Bill Radke's conversation with Mayor Jenny Durkan. It has been edited for clarity.

What are your greatest concerns?

My greatest concern is, number one, the support we need for our frontline health care workers and first responders. It's not just masks. It's a range of equipment that we're going to need for them to save our lives.

Two, we need testing, testing, testing. We still virtually have almost no testing capability in our region. And we've just started to see more outbreaks in senior centers throughout the region. We need to get in there and make sure we do testing and the medical triage, and isolation we need to do to save lives.

We absolutely have to get those extra hospital beds. And also I've talked to the governor every week and he supports me in this -- but we need help getting mass sheltering capabilities to bring homeless people inside and make sure they have the medical support in isolation that they need. They are some of our most vulnerable people here and we can't do it alone. King County and Seattle has stood up a significant number of shelter beds to bring over a thousand people what they need, but a lot of that is just having less density in existing shelters. So those are some of the things we need here in Seattle.

And I'm happy to see that Congress passed something. But now we gotta unlock that money and we've got to get resources into the pockets of our workers and our small businesses who have just been devastated in the last three weeks.

Can we start with the state of our hospital system? What kind of shortages are we seeing in terms of beds, personal protective equipment, ventilators, respirators? How is our health system holding up?

Well, the good news is that we still have some bed capacity, including ICUs. And we also have some great tech teams coming together, both at the state level and the county level and with the city, to build some tools we didn't have in place so that we will be able to see what the capacity is in real time at any hospital for beds, ventilators, ICUs, equipment and personnel. Right now, we don't have that ability to look inside of that. So we're hoping we can get that quickly.

But there's a lot of hospitals that were very low on not just the personal protective equipment, but on other equipment that they needed just from the day-to-day usage, and a lot of staff that's been pulled off the line because they themselves have been exposed. And so keeping those hospital folks and first responders, fire and police in good shape, is a critical function.

More and more people who get sick are calling 9-1-1. And the first people they're going to see are firefighters or medics. And so we've got to keep that link strong. And we have a couple dozen firefighters who are been pulled out of duty. We've had one firefighter test positive. And so we're working really hard to protect that first line and then making sure as we go out that we're staying healthy as a community.

And I just gotta urge everybody, if you think you need to go out, go watch some of the videos of just the enormous suffering in the emergency rooms in New York and in Italy and Wuhan. It's not worth it. It's not worth it not to do the social distancing. By taking that small step, you can save lives and help our hospital workers.

We got an email from a Harborview worker who says they might be called in as a backup if hospitals start getting overwhelmed: "If I do get called in, my family is considering whether it would make sense to rent a place close to the hospital to keep the family from getting exposed." Mayor, can you arrange for hotels that are largely empty now to house frontline health care workers?

We're already starting to do that. We've talked to FEMA. We've locked down a block of hotel rooms by the city of Seattle. We're talking to the county, the state and FEMA for a range of things because we know we're gonna need it for isolation rooms, for first responders, for health care workers, so that they can both be closer to where they work, but also so they don't expose their own families.

A lot of them can't go home because they have vulnerable people living at home where they just don't want to take the risk. So we've got that underway. It's not perfect yet, but the hotels in the city have been very great in coming forward. And we already locked down one block of rooms and we're trying to lock down more.

Jesse: I am a West Seattleite and I am really concerned about my community. As you know, the West Seattle Bridge was closed indefinitely on us very suddenly. And I am worried about our ability to get health care and to get emergency services, because, as you know, the only way directly into West is the lower bridge.

Yesterday I was on the phone with both [Seattle City Councilor] Lisa Herbold, who is your representative, and some of the other city council members and county council members who live in West Seattle, and [SDOT Director] Sam Zimbabwe.

We're gonna do everything we can -- a range of things. We're looking, for example, to see if we can add additional fire facilities into West Seattle like a ladder truck or the like, and whether there can be more police so we don't lose the response times. We also are looking to see how do we preserve the capacity we do have to make sure that emergency services can get to and from West Seattle.

We know that this is such a huge significant impact on West Seattle. You know, and I was one of the people who lived through when the bridge was taken out decades ago, and we've only grown since then. It's one of our most traveled bridges. We want to make sure it's safe and we wanna make sure the lower bridge is safe. So we're building transit capacity, we're looking at additional foot [unintelligible].

And we will know soon what the engineering tells us about what repairs, how long it will take, and what it'll cost. So we're sorry we had to close it, but when the engineers came to us and said there was an immediate safety danger, we didn't feel we had a choice.

The governor's stay home order started last night. Only essential businesses are allowed open. And some listeners are asking us about businesses they don't find essential: a self-storage business, a paint store, a construction project. Are you seeing any businesses open that you would like to be closed?

I think the number one thing people can focus on first is their own behavior. Stay home yourself. Don't go out unless you need to. And then let's focus on those folks that are working to see if they really need to be working.

And if people at the workplace are keeping a safe distance and we need it -- like we need our grocery stores, we need our supply chains, we need our pharmacies, small business restaurants that can have takeout are going to be really important to communities, there's some public works projects that we have to do -- so I know it's really hard and people are trying to make sense of it, but the first thing people can do is modify their own behavior. And if we come together and do that, the minority of people we have to remind to be safe and to take care of the rest of us, will really limit in numbers.

Richard: My question is concern with regards to our jails and people that need to go into the jails -- the public defenders, the prosecutors who have to interview prisoners. And it sounds to me, from what I'm told, that there's not a lot of concern for safety for those individuals.

I know that the county executive has been working on this together with [King County] Sheriff Johanknecht, who runs our jails. But [Seattle Police] Chief Best has been working with the jails to make sure they had to reduce the density in the jail, so that people wouldn't be more vulnerable to the virus. So they've done that.

They're trying to move to as much videotaping as they can for court sessions. And we have -- are, really trying to focus on making sure that it is the most dangerous offenders who are getting arrested and processed into the jail. So it's a big thing that we have to do and not just the jail here in King County, but all the prisons. And both the governor and the county executives are very focused on that.

Is crime up, down, nothing in particular, the last three weeks?

We're seeing it's pretty static, it can still be in some areas have seen enhanced property crimes as the economy has gone down. It's not surprising in times like this, there's a lot less people out, so the need to have some of our emphasis patrols is not what it was three weeks ago.

So [Seattle Police] Chief Best has been really working to assess the each community by community where businesses are closed to keep those safe. So she's tracking that very carefully on a regular basis.

I haven't been downtown in a while because of these orders. I have read that there are businesses literally boarded up. How much economic damage do you think will be temporary and how much will be longer term?

It's one of the things that we don't know yet, but the devastating impacts of this are even more than I imagined two weeks ago. The city of Seattle could lose half of its revenue base coming through this, depending on how long it lasts. We thought two weeks ago, we estimated maybe about $100 million, given the number of businesses that have closed in the -- no B&O taxes, no sales taxes -- the things we rely on. So there will be long term impacts on this.

The federal government relief, we're just still trying to unlock it anytime they pass this big a bill. It takes a while to figure out exactly what's in there. But we have people, a team of people in my budget office -- their only job is to see how do we get as much of this federal funding as we can as quickly as we can, so the city can continue to offer its basic services, so we help our workers and small businesses, and so we help the people most vulnerable in Seattle.

Is there any sense you can give us on what in the House and Senate stimulus package -- what's going to be the biggest effect on our listeners?

I think, number one is depending on your income level (if you still have a job), you will get an automatic check for you and everyone in your household. For children, it's a smaller amount. If you're unemployed, even if you're a gig economy worker, you will be eligible for unemployment benefits. And the state of Washington is trying to accelerate its capacity to get those dollars into pockets.

Go to the state website. Don't go yet because they don't have the system up yet, but they're quickly trying to build their unemployment. There's gonna be small business loans, very, very low interest, for when people come out of this, to be able to get businesses back up and running. And there's flexible dollars for this at the city level that we can use for our most vulnerable and for some of our basic services.

Also know that if you go to www.seattle.gov, we have a special icon you can click on to see what programs that we've already stepped up you might be eligible for. We've got, you know, some grocery vouchers, we've got food services for seniors. We've done a range of programs together with a lot of philanthropy and people stepping up in the community who raised over $27 million in a very short time to really fund those basic needs with United Way, Seattle Foundation and others.

Rob: I'm wondering what provisions are being made for people who are living homeless, who can't come back into a family or a friend's home because they're ill and need housing

That's a great question, and that's the one that the last three weeks we have been working urgently on and asking for help from the state and the feds.

So the county and the city together announced today or yesterday a number of things we're doing, creating both quarantine and isolation facilities so that people experiencing homelessness who do have symptoms of Covid or who have tested positive for Covid can isolate or quarantine away.

We have stood up over 500 new shelter beds just to take people out of existing shelters so they can have more distance. We're standing up a range of other shelters for new capacity. We'll be rolling out hygiene and hand-washing stations for folks to do that. But among the top priorities, the [King] County Executive Dow Constantine and I have -- and we've been asking FEMA for and we're hoping to get -- is the ability to have some mass shelter capability that will give people experiencing homelessness a safe place to be, food, hygiene and access to medical assistance.

Have you seen any positive cases in our homeless community?

We have seen some that have symptoms. And where we are, we are relying on public health. Some of their data has been imperfect and able to report to us where the positive cases are.

We learned yesterday that there may be a number of senior centers in the region that have outbreaks, and there are some reports from both our permanent supportive housing and shelters that they believe there some cases that are positive, but we don't have definitive proof, but we're treating every case as we can, like it is.

But again, we don't have the testing capability we need and we don't have the elasticity in our health care system right now to respond as we could. So I would say to everybody, if you are sick, you know, you should be staying home no matter what. But if you're sick, don't just immediately go to the emergency room, even if they're those flu symptoms, we really want the emergency room and hospitals preserved for those people who truly are sick. And so see how you are and then call help if you need it.

Seattle's created almost, I think, 1900 shelter spaces for homeless people. Are those going to stay open after the pandemic is over?

We're going to have to, you know, continue to evaluate as we go. I think this process is so quickly evolving.

I will be honest with you, I can't predict where the city is going to be in 30, 60 and 90 days almost on any of these fronts. We're in really unprecedented times. Obviously, we want to bring people inside and keep them inside. And so we'll have to, you know, assess as we go how we best get people into shelter and then hopefully long term housing.

All the listeners who want to know, what's the latest on corona virus testing? Who can get tested? Who should get tested? Is there one website you're sending people to or one one rule of thumb?

Public health is standing up a better website on that. But I will be honest with you, we still do not have the testing capability we need in Seattle, in Washington state. And so they are reserving testing for those people who are symptomatic or those people in very high risk groups.

We're trying to get enough testing so that we can test our health care workers and our first responders who are exposed and then have symptoms. And those are kind of the first categories.

We should have more and we should be able to do broad-based testing in our community. But we do not have that capability right now. So what people need to remember, though, is 97 to 99 percent of the people who get Covid-19 will recover. So getting it is not the same as a death sentence. But we know that it is so much, has such higher mortality in certain people. And we want to make sure that we have our health care resources available to those people who are most vulnerable and who will get the most sick.

So while I know it is causing everyone anxiety and fear and frustration, we locally at the city level, the public health level, the state level, we have been pushing really hard to get testing capabilities, we've ramped it up some, but we don't have what we need. But we will continue to push for that.

Carolyn: Coronavirus has had such a dramatic impact on our community. What are some ways that we can come together as a community to help each other out? What are some things that I personally can do to help my neighbors need?

First, I think that expression of hope and solidarity helps people more than she knows.

Second, to anybody who does have the ability to donate financially, there's a number of websites stood up. I would go to either United Way or the Seattle Foundation or All In Seattle, which has a very great website that goes -- if you want to give to food, people who have food insecurity. If you want to do food banks, if you want to do workers -- all those great urgent needs, you can do it.

Also, I think just being kind and compassionate is really important.

The number one thing you can do and I know it sounds small, but the number one thing you can do is stay home and urge everybody you know to stay home. Because the only way we have to stop this virus from duplicating as quickly as it is, is to stay apart from one another. And that goes against all our instincts as social beings. And we want to help each other.

So, you know, if you have access to the internet, there's a lot of great virtual places you can go for support too. People need to take care of themselves. And if we take care of ourselves and take care of each other, I think we're gonna make it through this. We will get through it. It's going to be painful and hard on so many people, but by pulling together, we will come out more resilient.