The San Diego City Council voted unanimously to end the city's COVID-19 Emergency Declaration on Feb. 28 in order to be consistent with the county of San Diego and the state of California, both of which have also moved to end their states of emergency on that date.
City officials say they made their decision to end the declaration in the name of following public health guidance, as they have throughout the course of the pandemic. Experts and scientists believe that because COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalizations are all much lower throughout California that it is now appropriate to end the emergency declaration.
The state of emergency allowed the city to receive state, county and federal funds to respond more quickly to the crisis. The expiration of the emergency declaration would end the city-worker vaccine mandate and require city workers and elected officials to attend meetings in person.
Gloria said there are still several long-term effects from the pandemic that the city will be dealing with, including a spike in homelessness, substance abuse and fentanyl overdoses, and mental illness, but, he said, his plans to tackle those three issues include pursuing the area’s first CARE Court and reforming the conservatorship rules in California and are not dependent on the emergency declaration.
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“We have a multitude of ways and a number of strategies that we're trying to advance to do that, but none of those are dependent on the emergency declaration,” Gloria said. “My hope is this frees up the bandwidth to allow us to really tackle those issues with the time and resources that are currently — or in recent years — have been dedicated toward the pandemic, but now we can put toward homelessness, toward behavioral health, toward the other challenges of economic inequities that many San Diegans are dealing with, with or without the pandemic.”
Von Wilpert, co-chair of San Diego City Council’s COVID-19 Response and Recovery Committee, attributes San Diego’s progress and recovery to high vaccination rates.
“The city of San Diego has done incredibly well through this pandemic because we have had a higher vaccine rate than a lot of surrounding cities," said Von Wilpert. "We are still seeing, just next door, cities like Lakeside that are still seeing a higher death rate than we have here in San Diego because we’ve adopted vaccines."
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Von Wilpert also cautions that there is more work to be done to address inequities that surfaced and became exacerbated during the pandemic.
“One of the issues we still have to tackle is, honestly, the inequality in the economic recovery of the pandemic," Von Wilpert said. "We saw COVID hit communities of color much harder, low-income communities much harder."
