kristen: you are watching getting answers on abc seven. every day we talk with experts about things important to the bay area and get answers in a real-time. we have the leader of a new group in san francisco that has been getting a lot of attention. they say they know why san francisco is broken and how to fix it. we will introduce you to together sf action. with the covid emergency ending in the bay area, many cities and counties will be lifting the moratorium on evictions. our media partner has the story of the landlord on a hunger strike begging to be heard as he nears bankruptcy. first, today is the last day of

the covid health emergency for the state of california. nearly three years after the pandemic began. we checked for you and all bay area counties, including santa cruz are lifting that county level public health emergency today. what does it really mean? is the health emergency truly over? joining us now is an infectious disease doctor and researcher at stanford university. thank you for your time. guest: thanks so much for having me. kristen: are you surprised the state and counties are ending the emergency before the federal government, which is in may? guest: i'm not surprised in the sense that we knew this was the day set by the governor. in terms of the biden administration to extend the federal emergency, i read their rationale for doing this, to give a little more time for hospitals and health care systems to adjust to some of the regulatory changes.

some counties, l.a. county, for instance, will extend their emergency orders for longer than the state, so there will be some fragmentation on how this is implemented. i'm not terribly surprised. a few still have it in place and we knew this day was coming. kristen: lots of policies will change, ranging from requirements for employers giving additional sick days to if action moratoriums ending. is there some aspect of this you are most concerned about? guest: one of the least on the federal level, the regulatory changes to medicaid and medi-cal are going to be particularly important to look at. we know the pandemic has affected those who are reliant upon these services for their health insurance and this will be important. we have some safeguards in place, so we think about access

to testing, access to vaccinations, and access to treatments like antivirals. that should not affect many people for quite some time, even in california, despite the emergency ending. many of the services will be covered, even if it is from someone out of network. one of the points brought up by someone from the kaiser family foundation is people that have disabilities, people for whom english is not a first language, they have a tougher time navigating these changes in terms of renewing their medicaid or medi-cal. we need to be really careful to make sure those who are already at highest risk and have the fewest resources to protect themselves if they do get sick from economic harms and whatnot, that we focus on how they may be affected by some of these changes. kristen: there certainly is an equity aspect to this the needs to be addressed.

what does the -- ending the emergency really mean for our day-to-day lives? what might change or what shouldn't change? guest: i can give you the perspective from infectious disease and an infectious disease epidemiology. we are looking at how the virus is mutating, do we have good surveillance measures in place to keep track of those mutations, which variants are out competing which other ones and how does this have an impact on the actual disease it causes and people? what kind of things will he be saying -- we saw pneumonia and other complications over the last couple of years. for people in their day to day life, the typeso i stld be mas? do i still need to be getting vaccinated? those decisions are ones i'm finding people having a little trouble navigating because there may not be a one-size-fits-all

formula for some of these questions and i think that's fair. some of these questions can be a little more complicated. the benefits of getting additional booster doses may be differential depending on if you are someone very old with comorbidities or someone very young. i think it can be a tough time for people to navigate and this is not that surprising. these are very tricky times in epidemics where people are trying to figure out how they get back to whatever normal they can at this point. kristen: what is your suggestion on who should continue to wear masks and who should continue to get updated boosters? guest: their key take away i want people to realize is masks, especially those of higher quality, when they are worn correctly, reduce the risk of infection, reduce the chance of you are infected that you are going to infect other people

around you. when you are in public spaces being utilized by all of us, there are many people who are immunocompromised, many people have comorbidities like lung disease. i try to focus on equity in those places that are public spaces where we can easily wear a mask utilized by everybody, grocery stores and public transit, here the university at stanford, we are still wearing masks on campus when we are in close classroom settings. those are important things and that's a part many people can play. i don't want to make people to get confused because there was an interview that came out looking at mask mandates and the policy. that's different as whether a high filtration mask can reduce your risk. kristen: should people even be concerned? i know for a lot of people, lifting this emergency is symbolic and there is a big

psychological factor like we are moving forward. do you think people should be concerned about covid and as we look at deaths and where we are now? guest: for those of us working on covid-19 that are treating patients at our infectious disease doctors, we will be watching it very closely. for people that this is not their primary focus of work and daily life, what they should know is getting vaccinated, getting boosted, especially if you are older and have comb abilities will reduce risks of bad outcomes. knowing how they would get paxlovid, having access to a physician they can call and how they would arrange this would be important. wearing masks in certain settings is important. the bigger point to the and federal government is the true emergency is our level of preparedness. if we were hit with another bad

respiratory virus or another bad variant, are we prepared to deal with that? that's a fundamental question i don't think we have the answer to quite yet because a lot of the changes we need to be making in our surveillance and people's ability to get vaccinated quickly or their interest in doing so or putting masks back on, those are challenges i don't think we are ready to deal with urgency -- urgently if we needed to. kristen: sounds like there is still work to be done. in terms of positives that came out of find 8 -- fighting the pandemic, what would you point to as far as we are better off in this area? guest: absolutely i would say our vaccines. our vaccines are excellent come our bivalent vaccines are excellent. our antivirals are excellent, we have had great data showing that these can prevent severe disease and reduce the incidence of long covid and inflammatory

complications. more people are aware of the different kinds of masks there are. so i would say there are a lot of positives, certainly but airborne respiratory threats are very, very tough to deal with, so the better we can get at wbe ody. kristen: is it still important at this point to stay home from school or work if you have covid? guest: if you have covid and you are contagious, the best thing to do would be to not go in while you are contagious so y p, and infect other people. one thing we did not discuss is with some of the sick paid leave for covid becoming more complicated for people, where they may not be able to get covered, you may have people going and when they are sick. we will have to navigate some of

those more challenging positive decisions. i hear the other side, we don't know if people got sick at work or not but regardless from a public health standpoint, you don't want people to go and when they are contagious. kristen: it is tempting when you look at and do not have sick days left. thank you so much. always appreciate the conversation. coming up next, tackling one of san francisco's guest challenges -- a group takes aim at ending the open air drug mas and tell us how they plan to see it

kristen: here at abc 7, we are committed to building a bay area. we wanted to shine a light on an organization trying to build a better san francisco. sf action has launched an initiative to end the cities open-air drug markets. here to talk about how they plan took a compass that is sf actions executive director. you have been holding a lot of community meetings, going to a lot of supervisors meetings and hearings. who are you and what are you about? guest: my background for the city. i worked as an aide to mayor breed, an aide to supervisors, by training, i'm a city planner. with all that information, i founded together sf and sf action to connect san franciscans with let's happening in their local government to make sure they are more informed and empowered to hold their leaders accountable to outcomes. that's what all is about, making

sure our well-funded city is also well led in delivering a better quality of life for all of our citizens. kristen: in trying to do that, you have this brochure that says why san francisco is broken and how to fix it. let's start with the first part -- why san francisco is broken. why? guest: we talk a lot about the structural problems and 10 francisco's government. we believe if you consider the mayor of our city aligned with a ceo of a $14 billion organization, which is what our city is, a $14 billion budget, you want that ceo to have the authority to effectuate outcomes and manager departments. that is currently not the case because most of our city's departments are overseen by commissions that the mayor does not have the authority to manage. she has appointments on those commissions but many of them require the board of supervisors to confirm them. one part of this problem is the commissions other part is the board of supervisors.

the mayor and the board of supervisors are not aligned, so imagine being an executive trying to administer an organization to have goals and outcomes and a vision and having a board that does not agree with you on those goals come outcomes or vision and often does not want you to be successful. that is unfortunately help politics works in the structural problems are creating stalemates and logjams in our government and that is affecting us as residents. so we are talking to residents about what these structural problems are and how we can work together to change them and demand better outcomes from our leaders. kristen: what is a practical way of unlocking the governmental gridlock you just spoke with and the lack of alignment? guest: the easiest way is to organize more residents to tell their supervisors what it is they want. in the brochure you are holding, we do an event called why sf is broken and we talk about how in san francisco, a district supervisors race can be won by

sometimes as little as 125 votes compared to a mayor's race where a mayor has to run a citywide campaign and appeal to a vast diversity of voters which automatically forces them to talk to more voters in the middle, those centerleft voters in san francisco. but when you are running for supervisors and you can find a subset of a subset, and talk to just them, that creates an incentive system or supervisors only have to appeal to a very vocal minority in their district to keep them happy to win their reelection. our approach to change that is to try to get more people to speak up to their supervisors, their supervisor hears for more voices because the squeaky wheels really do affect outcomes. kristen: i understand you have a few priorities lifted. the first one is ending open-air drug markets. talk about what you think needs to be done to achieve some change there. guest: the biggest thing is we don't have our city's leadership

stating that this is a priority for them. so that is wild to think about. it is not a unified priority of the city to end the open-air drug markets in san francisco. instead we have representatives having political fights over ideas and solutions. we know this is a problem, they want a solution. the solution we articulate in is it has to be twofold. it has to include a law enforcement response. we as a city have to be ok with arresting drug dealers. we have to address the supply of these drugs. the other part is the demand. we have to provide robust recovery services and options to meet users and those struggling with substance use disorder and help them into recovery because at the end of the day, what we are doing now allowed the people on our streets is not compassionate and not aligned with san francisco's values. kristen: the law-enforcement part, within the city there is a

lot of debate, but another point you make is the city has an all or nothing ideology. give a concrete example of what you mean by that and how that gets in the way of progress, for example, when it comes to homelessness or drug use. guest: let's talk about it as it applies to drug crisis. for the last two years, we had a d.a. that did not want to that happened at the same time as the pandemic happened, as people are stuck at home and we had the rise of fentanyl nationally and this confluence of events created the crisis we are in. san francisco decided we can't prosecute drug dealers, so instead we are going to just let this keep happening. that's an example of all or nothing. we couldn't find a middle ground to find a way to prosecute some regulars. we have had the same thing happened with police. we have decided police response is not what we want to see too many drug-related crimes. so we had a huge decline in police officers in san

francisco. we are short almost 600 officers. in response, we had unarmed ambassadors and community ambassadors from programs but we have seen some of those ambassadors face violence themselves and be shot or hurt by drug dealers. then we end up doing nothing to solve this problem. the same applies to recovery. our city has an approach of harm reduction only, so that means at the end of the day, we are providing people struggling with substancebu with the toolsgsut t getting them into recovery and serv we are almost out of time but if people want to engage in further conversation, where can they go to get more information? guest: tsf action.org. we have a virtual event tonight, we have an in personal and tomorrow. we will be talking about the pieces of legislation in front of the board of supervisors right now, including a really important vote on police

staffing and funding the board should be voting on next week. kristen: thank you so much. coming up, going days without food to raise awareness for a cause -- one bay area landlord is doing that right now. our media here to tell you about life insurance through the colonial penn program. if you're age 50 to 85, and looking to buy life insurance on a fixed budget, remember the three ps. the three what? the three ps? what are the three ps? the three ps of life insurance on a fixed budget are price, price, and price. a price you can afford, a price that can't increase, and a price that fits your budget. i'm y icnd was a smoker, but quit. u n geco for $9.95 a month. i'm 65, retired, and take medications. what's my price? also $9.95 a mononth.

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kristen: landlords are taking a stand, calling for an end of all affection moratoriums. as our media partners report, one landlord has resorted to a hunger strike hoping to draw attention to his cause and how he has suffered. 20th live is the author of that article and reporter for the fsf -- the sf standard. with all the public out the emergencies being dropped, i think very few cities still have eviction moratoriums. which cities or counties still have them? guest: california just dropped the covid emergency today, but

in san francisco and marin county, both of these counties do have the eviction moratorium protecting tenants from being evicted. kristen: there was a lot of praise for california and the counties when this happened. people couldn't go to work, people -- so people didn't end up in the streets and become vulnerable to catching and spreading covid. that can probably easily be absorbed by large landlords but what has been the impact on the mom-and-pop landlords? i assume we have many in the bay area. guest: a lot of the smaller landlords are providing housing to the rental market but sometimes, because of the financial hardship of the tenants, they cannot pay rent and that will have direct impact to smaller landlords like the mom-and-pop's. they will be very easily

impacted if there are small financial changes to their income. they are being impacted law. kristen: we are looking at the sign -- my tenant has not paid rent in three years. there are photos from other landlords -- there was one landlord in san leandro -- i think this is the gentleman, who is on the hunger strike. tell us his story. how much money has he lost and what is his situation? guest: i wrote the story yesterday about this landlord. he is a landlord and has a property in san leandro. he rented to tenants and starting in the pandemic, the tenants no longer paid rent, they stopped paying rent. for about three years, 37 months, owing about 120 k, which

is a big amount of money. which pushed bankruptcy right now, he has two go on this extreme way of hunger strike to protest. kristen: i think i saw his son can't pay tuition. i think a lot of people think of landlords as being wealthy. they are not all necessarily the case. isn't there supposed to be a relief fund for them? i thought landlords were getting money from the government as well to supplement the fact they are losing income from the rent. guest: there are a lot of rent relief programs but normally it would require both the landlord and the tenant to cooperate to apply for this relief fund because you have to show evidence of the tenants, because i no longer can work, so i don't have income, so i cannot pay the rent. you have to show the proof and the government will say you are

impacted, so here is over relief fund for you. but for his case, it is hard to cooperate with his tenants. he did apply for the relief fund but didn't get anything. kristen: so it takes the tenants cooperation as well. i think alameda county supervisors are meeting today. is this on the agenda? guest: it is on the the board of supervisors will talk about whether to end the eviction moratorium. if it ends, mr. wu will also stop hunger strike. but i have not followed that kristen: the bottom line, these landlords are all supposed to eventually paid back, right? these moratoriums don't say the renters never have to pay. guest: yes. there are federal or state or local level, all of these different kinds of tenant protections. but it is very confusing. a lot of people might think are

the rents being canceled? actually, no. all of this debt eventually but they are being protected for now for a time that they cannot pay the rent. but at the end, they still have to repay all the rent. kristen: seems like we are getting to the end in most places. thank you very much. you can check out the article and other san francisco standard original reporting on the more paper being crumpled music: “i wish” by skee-lo boom! sound of paper balls landing in bins office workers cheerings sound of paper balls landing in bins why do we shoot baskets with paper balls?

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kristen: thank you so much for joining us today forgetting answers.

we will be here every weekday at three answering your questions from experts around the bay area. world news tonight is next. tonight, several breaking stories as we come on the air. another train derailment, this time, with 30,000 gallons of propane fuel onboard. hazmat teams racing to the scene. and the scare onboard a jetblue flight. a close call again. this time at boston's logan airport. coming in for landing, suddenly climbing back up toavoid another plane. first, that train derailment in florida. the heightened concerns of tens of thousands of propane fuel after what played out in ohio, that toxic train derailment there. and the newest governor tonight to say that toxic waste isn't coming to my state.