SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Saho Ueyema’s family owns Shoki Ramen House on R Street in Midtown Sacramento. She knows first hand how difficult living under the constant threat of shutdown can be.
“It’s definitely keeping us on our toes,” Ueyema admitted. “But we really just have to make the best of every day.”
This seems to be a motto of many local Sacramento businesses: Try to make the best of a terrible situation and focus on the light at the end of the tunnel. Ueyema explained what waiting for the call to shutdown is like for local businesses.
“We try to support each other as much as we can,” she said. “We really don’t know if we can be open tomorrow or there could be an emergency shutdown like last time. So we really don’t know what’s going on.”
Sacramento County Health Director Dr. Peter Beilenson explained how dire things have gotten locally.
“We’re up at 43,000 cases which is up from 30,000 just a few weeks ago,” Dr. Beilenson said. “So we’re growing at a much greater clip.”
Dr. Belienson believes the Greater Sacramento Region could fall below the 15% ICU capacity in the very near future.
“Not terribly long,” he said. “I think it will probably be by the end of the week.”
He said that the current hospital numbers don’t even reflect Thanksgiving spread.
“We are seeing the cases that come from Thanksgiving now,” said Dr. Beilenson. “What we are not seeing yet are the hospitalizations which tend to follow by two weeks. So we’re talking about hospitalizations due to Thanksgiving gatherings coming about in the next couple of weeks coming up to Christmas time. And then deaths, following that, by another two weeks.”
He said vigilance is now more important than ever.
“We’re in a surge now, it’s dangerous,” Dr. Beilenson said. “We want to work very hard during the next 6-8 weeks to decrease the curve, to bend the curve. And the reason we want to do that is to decrease the number of people who would be unnecessarily hospitalized or die due to this disease which would be truly tragic. Because the good news is that the vaccination is coming in the next few months.”
For now, local business just continue to operate in the uncertainty.
“We really don’t know until we wake up the next day. We just have to see what it is going on in the world and go on from there,” Ueyema said.
