Dave Price:

A year after it was due, Santa Clara County has finally released a state-required “after-action” report that analyzes how well the county government handled the Covid pandemic. 

I guess it’s too much to ask the county to do a straight-forward, honest assessment of its own performance. 

This report comes up short in many ways:

Deaths

• The report didn’t explain why Santa Clara County’s per capita Covid death rate was higher than other Bay Area counties.

Related deaths

• The report was silent about the number of “deaths of desperation,” the number of people who died of suicide, drug addiction or booze because their lives were ruined by the shutdown. If we ever go through a lockdown again, we should know how to avoid these deaths. But this report doesn’t help us.

Church crackdown

• The report doesn’t shed any light on the county’s decision to ban indoor church services. Churches said the ban was unfair because they were being held to a different standard than secular places such as Home Depot or Costco, which were allowed to stay open. The U.S. Supreme Court, in an unusual evening hearing, struck down the county’s ban on indoor worship services. The high court’s intervention in the dispute was an embarrassment for Santa Clara County, the only county in the United States to be rebuked by the high court for its heavy-handed pandemic rules.