TUPELO • When the COVID-19 crisis began to reveal the full extent of its brunt last spring, elected officials in Northeast Mississippi were among the first in the state to take action.Although the pandemic’s reach was worldwide, the front-line response largely fell on local communities. Federal agencies issued guidelines, gathered data and coordinated resources, but states and municipal governments were where the reality of the disease made most immediate contact with the work of policy making.
“It feels like 10 minutes and 10 years at the same time,” said Oxford Mayor Robyn Tannehill, looking back across the last year. “I can still feel those emotions from the very beginning, but it feels like we’ve been doing this forever.”
Here now at last, just past the one-year mark of Mississippi’s first confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, falling case-loads, declining hospitalizations and expanding vaccine access have fostered hope that spikes and surges have finally receded, giving way to a manageable retreat of the disease.
Reviewing these trends, Tupelo Mayor Jason Shelton sees “light at the end of the tunnel.”
But like Tannehill, the intensity of exercising political power during an event unlike any in a century has left its mark – and the darkest moments remain fresh.
“You think back to living through the last year, and it’s been trying, it’s been difficult, it’s been frustrating for everybody involved,” Shelton said in an interview last week.
Even though elected officials actively seek the responsibility with which they are entrusted, the management of a pandemic response goes well beyond anything most Mississippi mayors could have expected.
This time four years ago, Lynn Spruill was running for her first term as mayor of Starkville – and a generational moment like a pandemic seemed very far away.
“No, heck no, I didn’t think my time had come,” Spruill told the Daily Journal.
Early warning signs
Spruill, like Tannehill and Shelton, remembers first paying attention in January to what was widely known at the time as simply “the coronavirus.”
First in the Wuhan province of China, and in European cities, hospitals began buckling amid rapidly mounting cases of a previously unknown disease.
“When it was impacting Europe and Italy so dramatically, that’s my recollection of when I thought, ‘Holy Cow, we’ve got to get ready,’” Spruill said.
By late February, Tannehill called Oxford’s municipal department heads together and delivered words that felt unprecedented: “That was when I said, I think we are on the cusp of having to deal with a pandemic.”
By late February and early March, an eerie set of parallel worlds had developed. Some voices were sounding the alarm, pointing to places like Italy and warning that American hospitals could likewise fill up, and that normal life had to change.
But for weeks, life largely didn’t change. Not until, one by one, states after state identified and reported the first cases. The borders between these parallel words began to collapse, and the alarmists started looking like realists.
Even for Tannehill, who’d braced herself for weeks, when the inevitable become reality, it was still devastating.
“You knew it was coming, but still I remember the emotion so well of getting the call that we had our first case in Oxford,” said the first-term mayor. “It was like, OK, here we go.”
Cities took first action
Even as some other governors took sweeping actions, Mississippi’s Gov. Tate Reeves took a more cautious stance toward executive action, prompting mayors – especially in Northeast Mississippi – to assume prominent roles in guiding the early response in their communities.
And these responses felt unprecedented, even for the mayors signing the orders.
“Very quickly, we ended up responding in ways that were fairly dramatic for any city, but certainly for the city of Starkville,” Spruill said.
Likewise, in Oxford, the Board of Aldermen took early action at Tannehill’s recommendation and closed the dining rooms of restaurants and bars throughout the city, beginning on March 18, 2020.
“This absolutely breaks my heart to do, but I’m going to err on the side of protecting our community,” Tannehill said at the time.
Then, late on March 23, 2020, a Saturday, Shelton issued the state’s very first shelter-in-place order in the city of Tupelo.
However, even after taking early action, these cities would soon expand and sometimes revise orders as recommendations and circumstances changed.
“You had to make decisions so quickly and be fluid,” Tannehill said. “We would look at things and it would change. And our measuring stick would change. Are we looking at infections, or hospitalizations?”
Shelton previously cut a fairly cautious and restrained political profile. But the pressures of the pandemic soon saw his rhetoric directed at Gov. Tate Reeves and President Donald Trump grow heated.
Even now, Shelton has strong criticism of Reeves for his early handling of the pandemic, though he praises the governor’s handling of vaccine rollout.
“We needed governors, especially Republican governors, to be on the side of science,” Shelton said. “The piecemeal approach, it still, to this day makes no sense and is overtly political to be able to brag to right-wing groups, ‘I didn’t do that in Mississippi. I didn’t do a statewide mandate.’”
Lessons learned
As she announced some of Oxford’s earliest restrictions, Tannehill in videotaped remarks offered hope that decisive, early action could forestall a protracted crisis.
“We hope that these measures will be the difference between a two to four-week emergency situation and a six to eight-week emergency situation,” Tannehill said. “We want to stay ahead of it as much as we can.”
A year later, that timeline is obviously not what happened.
Still, looking toward the months to come, Northeast Mississippi’s mayors are hopeful for the future.
“I’m always amazed by the people of the city of Tupelo,” Shelton said, revealing that planning has begun to resume city festivals again in May.
In Starkville and Oxford – heavily reliant on student populations and out-of-town traffic linked to athletic events – economic losses have not been as sharp as first feared.
Taking stock of the economic conditions and their early responses, all three mayors agreed the essential/non-essential business distinction used to guide early shutdown orders in the state and across the country was a mistake. Reeves has offered the same view.
Even so, all three municipal leaders remain largely confident in the decisions they’ve made as based on the best information available and expressed gratitude for the privilege of serving their communities in a time of great and pressing need.
“Where the rubber meets the road is where the difference is made,” Tannehill said.
"local" - Google News
March 21, 2021 at 04:00PM
https://ift.tt/2QqYtqJ
Local government leaders reflect on pandemic policy response - Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal
"local" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2WoMCc3
https://ift.tt/2KVQLik
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Local government leaders reflect on pandemic policy response - Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal"
Post a Comment