The numbers jump off the page. In the first week of this year, Los Angeles County recorded 950 deaths from coronavirus – four times more deaths than San Francisco during the entire pandemic.
While my colleagues and I wrote in an article about the winter wave, California is experiencing two distinct pandemics, north and south. In almost all measures – hospitalizations, cases per capita and deaths – the pandemic is much worse in Southern California.
It was not always so.
Dr. Bob Wachter, professor and head of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said the summer wave saw the first divergence and the winter wave brought an even greater dichotomy, a trend he said was intriguing. .
“It’s the same state government, the same basic climate,” said Wachter. “But you see extremely divergent results.”
There are only theories as to what is behind the divergence. San Francisco has a higher average household income than Los Angeles, giving people more resources to protect themselves. The technology industry allows more people to work from home. But Dr. Wachter said that these differences alone do not provide a complete explanation.
“I think it’s more in the overarching cultures of places, people’s willingness to buy science and do what they’re told is the right thing to do,” said Wachter.
Rosie Cornwell, a science professor who moved from San Francisco to Koreatown, Los Angeles, in October, said she immediately noticed differences in the way the pandemic was being treated.
In San Francisco, she said, she saw multilingual information posted everywhere advising residents to protect themselves from the virus and information about free trial sites.
“There was a lot of information not just online, but printed on the street,” said Cornwell. “I didn’t see it to the same degree in LA”
Masks are also more common in the bay area, she said.
“I would say that on an average San Francisco walk down the street, 90 to 95% of people wear masks,” she said. “The other day I went for a walk in Los Angeles and about 30 or 40% of people didn’t wear masks.”
Joey Nygaard, a musician, lived in Los Angeles, returned to San Francisco for the spring quarantine and then returned to Mid City in Los Angeles.
“There are far fewer people who can work from home here,” he said of Los Angeles. “A lot of people go to work.”
He said Los Angeles’ vast size forces people to move farther and farther from their homes.
“When I got here, I drove very far for my day job and then I drove a lot for my night job,” he said.
Tenzin Seldon, 31, a San Francisco resident who works for a technology start-up, said he felt a sense of “psychological security” in San Francisco because of the mask and social distance.
“It is a very homogeneous group here, socially and educationally, and also politically,” he said. “Sometimes we are in our own bubble here.” – Thomas Fuller, head of the San Francisco office
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On Friday, baseball lost one of its most colorful characters. Tommy Lasorda – who became synonymous with Dodgers, managed them for 21 years from 1976 to 1996, won two World Series, served in a number of roles for the team and is in the National Baseball Hall of Fame – died of cardiopulmonary arrest in his home in Fullerton, California. He was 93 years old.
Lasorda was a coaching style now absent from the modern game. He was a motivator, a showman, a baseball philosopher and was known for his sense of humor – and his dirty mouth.
“He was an arsonist and wanted to win at all costs,” said Doug Rau, 72, who knew Lasorda’s fiery personality well by telephone on Friday night. He later added: “He was relentless, to say the least.”
A former pitcher, Rau played for the Dodgers from 1972 to 1979.
“I spent many, many, many hours – and many jokes and games – with him,” said Rau. “We had that kind of relationship with Tommy, where we can air and, the next day, go to dinner together.”
One of those indelible moments occurred during the 1977 World Series against the Yankees, in which Rau and Lasorda engaged in a heated and obscenity-laden exchange that survived, along with other classic Lasorda cartoons, thanks to YouTube.
The Dodgers were losing that best series of seven for two games to one, and Rau was throwing badly. Lasorda was using a microphone for the broadcast and was swearing a storm before emerging from the bench to remove Rau from the game.
Ashamed and furious, Rau lobbied to stay home. It didn’t go well, with apparently every word that came out of Lasorda’s mouth was a bad word, while the companions tried to spread the situation.
“I may be wrong, but this is my job,” said Lasorda to Rau, with some additional words that cannot be printed. “I will make the decisions here.”
Laughing about the incident now, Rau said he had no idea that Lasorda was using a microphone.
“Even though he probably knew he was using a microphone, Tommy probably forgot about it,” said Rau. “People used to sit on the chairs next to our bench just to hear Tommy talk about the game and the various bad words he used. It was very effective. There was nothing unusual about that conversation on the hill in 77 ”.
The Dodgers lost game 4, 4-2 and the World Series in six games.
Hiding in his Texas home, Rau said he has some cassette tapes of the colorful Lasorda club meetings “that would turn golden if I let them go.” But Rau had no plans to release them.
Anyway, there is already a lot of Lasorda on the internet. – James Wagner
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California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from UC Berkeley.