06/04/2020
Thank you, Mayor O’Neil and Chief Lewis...We are all Blessed to live and work in Newport Beach. 🇺🇸⚓️🌞
Quick morning update. We had five separate protests yesterday in our city. The smallest was around 100 people, the largest around 1,000. I hope that we can all agree with messages denouncing racism. We had a couple of incidents on the peninsula, most visibly a driver going through protestors walking against traffic. The driver was arrested quickly by our NBPD. To my knowledge, we had no property damage; certainly no rioting or looting that some of our LA neighbors have seen. The protestors who came were organized, on point, and disbursed quietly. There will be a number of other cities seeing protests in the coming days.
Speaking of the coming days, a number of our businesses - especially in CdM - had their windows boarded up and closed early yesterday. After waiting so long to reopen due to COVID restrictions, any day lost is tough. So please get out there and patronize our local businesses. As I've said before, if you want to see them survive into next month or next year, shop there today.
And speaking of COVID, the virus is not gone. OC reported 8 more deaths yesterday, bringing the total to 158. Now, a full 44% of those deaths have come from Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs), despite SNFs representing only 11% of the positive cases. Hospitalization remains under 5% of the total County hospital beds. And here in Newport Beach, we have only seen 14 total positive tests in the past 23 days. You can compare that favorably to most cities in Orange County: Irvine +63; Costa Mesa +81; HB +83; Anaheim +615; Santa Ana +736, etc. No doubt there are specific reasons in each of these cities to see the increase, but I point them out for context and to remind our city to keep up the good job on hygiene.
Last but certainly not least, I express my sincere thanks to our Newport Beach Police Department. They took lessons learned from surrounding cities and implemented them in ways that allowed for people to exercise their First Amendment right while also maintaining order and safety for our businesses and residents who lived in the areas. They remained professional and stayed on mission. We are a community that rallies around our PD because they have earned that trust.
As the sun shines on a new day in our city, I encourage you to show your support for our PD in any number of ways. If you'd like to coordinate delivering lunch for the department (like many of you said you were), give them a call at 949-644-3717. You can send them notes at the address here: http://www.nbpd.org/. You can simply thank an officer when you see them. Use your imagination for ways to serve those who are called to protect and serve us.