Wear a mask to save lives, small businesses
no easy way to say this: America’s small businesses are dying. Small businesses in some industries – retail, restaurant, travel, hospitality – can now be considered endangered species. If you want to help them survive – if you want your own small business to survive – the most important thing you can do is simple: Wear a mask. Wear a mask. It’s not a political statement. It’s a way to try to stop the spread of the coronavirus, get this country reopened and save lives and businesses, especially small businesses. Consider just a few statistics: Yelp reported 71,500 businesses that were listed on their site have closed for good since March 1. 80% of independent restaurants aren’t sure they’ll survive the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly half of all small-business members of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce lost 100% of their sales or closed down completely. The real extent of the loss won’t be known for some time, but I’ve seen it up close as I watched my favorite mom-and-pop pet store close after 38 years in business. How can we prevent this from happening to other small businesses? Wear a mask. If we wait for a vaccine to save us, it will be far too late for small businesses. Even if a vaccine is developed and tested by the beginning of 2021, it will take months to get it widely produced, distributed, and have sufficient people vaccinated. The majority of small businesses do not have the funds to survive that long. “Despair is now the right word to use,” said Amanda Ballantyne, executive director of Main Street Alliance. “As people (small business owners) watch the numbers of the virus spike, they’re calculating how long is it worth hanging on … and the ones who’ve reopened, they’ve realized the cost of reopening is surprisingly more expensive than they thought it would be.” It’s not just Main Street small businesses – restaurants, retailers, hairdressers, child care centers – in danger. When a small business closes, gone are clients of accountants and lawyers, graphic designers, janitors, IT consultants. As small business employees lose their jobs, they spend less on dentists and doctors, on entertainment and sporting equipment, on new electronic devices, on cars. So, please, just wear a mask. Yes, yes, I know you’ve done your part; Americans have done their part. For months, we stayed home, washed our hands, supervised kids’ schooling while working from home. We missed weddings and funerals and going to churches and sporting events. We didn’t complain (much). We did our part. Unfortunately, the federal government squandered that time. Other countries – such as Germany – implemented national programs for testing and tracing, enabling their economies and schools and sports to now safely reopen. But the Trump administration provided no leadership, leading us to our current state. So, if we want to quickly defeat the virus, we have to take the fight into our own hands. We have to pick up a mask and put it on. “If we could get everybody to wear a mask right now, I really think in the next four, six, eight weeks, we could bring this epidemic under control,” said Robert Redfield,a Trump appointee as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “We can virtually eliminate the virus any time we decide to,” said Andy Slavitt, former President Barack Obama’s head of Medicare and Medicaid. Slavitt says we could be open for business by October – schools, sports, business – if we “threw the kitchen sink” at COVID-19. And the No. 1 step: Wear a mask.