Late last week, Santa Barbara Mayor Randy Rowse tested positive for COVID-19, and then earlier this week he tested negative. Rowse said he would retest on Wednesday and then check with his doctor how well the ceremonial scene would do. for this year’s Festival, the first to be held in 3 years.
Even if it marks negative, Rowse said the “optics” of showing up so soon after a positive check can prove to be a distraction for other people. “A lot of other people communicate about optics,” Rowse said.
Rowse tested positive a while after Tuesday’s board meeting last week. “I’ve never had any symptoms; I was just paying attention,” he said. , so I thought about getting tested. “
Rowse expressed some fear about the speed at which other people, specifically President Joe Biden, become reinfected some time after testing negative. “In fact, I hope it’s not like the Biden deal,” he said. Biden’s Saturday reinfection is a rare case of COVID “rebound” after remedy with the antiviral Paxlovid; Rowse also took the medication before testing negative.
If Rowse were to relinquish her ceremonial role, it would fall to Councilwoman Meagan Harmon, who is the council’s acting mayor. Harmon has been willing to take COVID-related precautionary measures since the birth of his son in December and has been careful to avoid the giant crowds. If she were selected for the role of mayor, Harmon said she would look for Party clothes.
Two other councilmembers, Eric Friedman and Mike Jordan, are out of town for a family circle holiday and will miss the Fiesta. Rowse did not wear a mask at last week’s board meeting. it may have made a difference given the excessive transmissibility of the newer variant.
“I know other people who have done each and every thing according to the book, and they are positive; I know other people who do each and every thing with surely wrong tactics and yet remain perfectly clean,” Rowse said, expressing a sense of frustration. and futility in the face of a pandemic that continues to grow and minimize after first hitting about 3 years ago. “Are we going to do this for the rest of our lives?”he asked rhetorically. ” How many other people do I see every day?”
In Santa Barbara County, COVID numbers continue to fluctuate and, for now, appear to be heading for a downward trend. Within a few weeks, county fitness officials reported 50 new cases consistent with 100,000, that number, as of July 29. 33. Again, since the maximum number of checks is placed at home and passes without reporting, the reliability of any positive check count is highly problematic. cases consistent with 100,000, but not so opposed to San Luis Obispo, which published nine new cases consistent with 100,000.
The main reference for fitness directors now is the effect on hospital beds. In Santa Barbara, local hospitals report 33 patients occupying hospital beds infected with COVID. Many of them are not there because of COVID, but because of other causes. Of these, five occupy extensive care beds. This leaves 22 extensive care beds available.
It remains to be seen what effect COVID will have on this year’s Fiesta, and vice versa. For Mayor Rowse, this would be his first time at the Fiesta as mayor, having attended nine in the afterlife as a council member. Rowse actually experienced Fiesta as the owner of the Paradise Café, one of Santa Barbara’s many 0 margarita and strong drink problems during beyond the Fiestas.
Rowse remembers the Fiesta when it was still a game of touches and he allowed himself to drink in the street. “When the parade moved from Thursday afternoon to Friday, and street drinking was banned,” Rowse said, the occasion became more tame and lucrative from his perspective. People were having dinner, he exclaimed, and a larger demographic—not just young white men—showed up.
Perhaps the most productive film ever made about Fiesta, Cutter’s Way, features a scene shot in the predecessor of Paradise Café, a place to eat then, as it is today, called La Paloma Café. (Rowse bought La Paloma in 1983, at one time after the release of this film in 1981, and then in 2019 sold it to another operator who changed Paradise’s name to its original name. )
Cutter’s Way starred Jeff Bridges, who had yet to move to Santa Barbara, as a failed budding gigolo absorbed into a blackmail scheme to extort millions from that year’s President for the Fiesta parade. In this film, The President threw the frame of a teenage woman he had picked up to make love into a dumpster in the center of town. The film features an exquisite scene of the Fiesta parade climbing up a resplendent State Street with the waves of heat waves.
Correction: Some other council members were dressed in masks that day, only Mayor Rowse.
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