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Seattle Mayor on city's Covid-19 response

Yahoo Finance's Akiko Fujita spoke with Seattle's mayor Jenny Durkan on the city's response to the coronavirus outbreak being one of the biggest epicenter's in the United States.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right, so from, talking about the beginnings of this story, really, the first hotspot here in the US was the greater Seattle metro area, the state of Washington. We have seen a flattening of the curve there. Want to bring in Akiko Fujita now for a little more, Akiko, about your conversation with Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, and how she and her team have responded there in Seattle. I mean, certainly, a high number of cases, and they have had deaths in the hundreds. But it does seem that Seattle, with strict measures, is starting to move a little bit past their worst point.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, you're right about that, Myles. The Seattle area and Washington state more broadly, has kind of emerged as this glimmer of hope, as we continue to see the Coronavirus cases, those numbers tick up from day to day. As you point out, it was the earliest hotspot. 37 out of the first 50 deaths that were recorded here in the US came from this state. But since then, they have started to see a flattening of the curve, as you point out.

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One number that I think is quite impressive, the transmission rate, which is how one person can spread to how many others, that has been cut from 2.7 to 1.4. So they believe that their strict measures, the early action is starting to show some results here. And keep in mind, they started a month ago, so they are several weeks ahead of New York City.

Now having said that, there is, of course, the economic fallout. When you look at the unemployment claims, huge numbers last week nationally. In the Seattle area, they saw 900% increase in unemployment claims. So the mayor is certainly looking at what more she needs to do, but also what more she wants the federal government to do to help stimulate the economy. One thing I did ask her was about the potential infrastructure bill. You saw President Trump tweet about that today, saying the rates are low enough, we should go big. Here's what she had to say about that.

MAYOR JENNY DURKAN: The cities are going to come out of this at different points. We're very hopeful in Seattle, that the measures we've taken will continue to pay off. But we're a month or two away also from being able to relax those. And so infrastructure projects are only possible if you can have the conditions to get workers to and from a job site and keep them safe at the job site. We're doing that in a number of places here in Washington state. But it's got to be very carefully calibrated. So the federal government has got to have plans in place to surge this economy in different places, and not just sequentially, but parallel at times.

AKIKO FUJITA: Even with the success they've seen so far, they are one to two months away from really starting to think about reopening and really getting the economy going. The one thing I did ask her about, when you look at the Seattle area, there are certainly some big names there that have their headquarters. Of course, Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks.

But also Boeing. I did ask her, given the politics around Boeing the company, and what preceded the economic fallout they've seen from the Coronavirus, specifically talking about the 737 Max, whether she believed the company deserved to get a bailout from the government. And she was diplomatic about it, but she did say that we want to think about this not just in the next few years, but in a long term thought, just thinking about the blue collar jobs that come with Boeing need to continue to thrive and stay within the Seattle area.

RICK NEWMAN: Hey, Akiko, Rick Newman. Has Seattle, the Seattle area, have they established SOPs for the rest of the country? It's kind of curious that Seattle does seem to have arrested the spread of the virus, even though they're still dealing with it obviously on a large scale, whereas we're nowhere near that point here in the New York area. And they came first. I mean, should we have learned something from them that we didn't?

AKIKO FUJITA: So there's a number of things that the mayor mentioned that could be very specific to Seattle. One of the things she mentioned was, when they saw the initial numbers, and particularly that hotspot in that nursing care facility out in Kirkland, they immediately adopted social distancing measures. But it was also easier for them to transition that work from home setup, because of the tech companies they have there.

You remember, Amazon, Microsoft, they pretty early on told employees to stay at home. And so she said look, it was easier for us to enact that right away. Some cities don't have that. And so that may be something that's unique to Seattle. And also, we should keep in mind, they've got some big names that have allowed for private-public partnerships. We were talking about GM and that company, Ventec, the ventilator company. They're just outside of Seattle. So the city itself, and Washington state as a whole, has been able to tap into what is more of a diversified economy and some of the big names they already had in place to respond to the outbreak as a whole.