Mayor London Breed’s early and aggressive moves to contain the outbreak have made San Francisco a national model in fighting the pandemic

From the article:

Epidemiologists told me that San Francisco and other West Coast cities likely benefited from the Trump administration’s late-January restrictions on travel from China, while the president’s delay in banning flights from Europe, which he didn’t do until mid-March, hit New York hard. (New research backs this up, indicating that most of New York’s early cases came from Europe in mid-February, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.)

[...]

By late January, Breed had activated San Francisco’s emergency-operations center in preparation for an outbreak—the first such move in any major city in the country.

[...]

On February 25, a top CDC official, Nancy Messonnier, told reporters on a conference call that the coronavirus outbreak in the United States “may be severe” and that people should prepare for disruptions in daily life, including school closures. In D.C., Trump was reportedly incensed that Messonnier was raising such alarm. In San Francisco, Breed declared a state of emergency that very day.

[...]

By her own admission, Breed had no particular experience with pandemic response prior to the coronavirus. The disasters San Francisco spends the most time practicing for are earthquakes and fires, although it did have an epidemic-response plan on hand. “This is not one we had practiced. But it is one that we were prepared for,” Breed said.

Breed may be relatively new to public-health crises, but the officials she has leaned on—Grant Colfax, a former director of HIV/AIDS policy in the Obama administration; Tomás Aragón, the county’s public-health chief; and Carroll—have decades of experience. Colfax began his career in the 1980s during the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, and the epidemiologists I spoke with said the lessons from that period likely contributed to the city’s fast response to the current outbreak.

“I think they remember how hard it was when we didn’t close down the bathhouses and saw what happened to the epidemic at that point,” said Maldonado, the Stanford epidemiologist.