Of COVID and Voldemort: A year later, Tacoma mayor no longer slow to speak of virus
What a difference a year makes when it comes to Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards and her comfort level speaking about a deadly virus that rocked her city.
The first-term mayor delivered her annual priority-setting speech last year with barely an acknowledgment that COVID-19 existed. She’s delivering it this year with her eyes and lips wide open about the havoc the pandemic has wreaked across all facets of Tacoma life, and the necessity of not letting down our guard.
Woodards is a high-profile example of the learning curve that people everywhere have had to climb. Perhaps she also represents the begrudging acceptance of tragedy and loss we’ve all had to come to grips with.
“Didn’t the whole country underestimate COVID-19?” Woodards reflected when I spoke with her this week. “Do you remember those conversations that it would be over last summer? The national rhetoric was that it was going to be gone by Easter. I don’t think anybody could’ve predicted that we would still be here now.”
Clearly she didn’t.
When Woodards delivered her State of the City address on March 4, 2020, she pivoted late in the planning and recorded it in an empty studio rather than in front of a live audience. The governor had declared a statewide public health emergency, King County had reached double-digit deaths and coronavirus was hovering at Tacoma’s doorstep. The first confirmed case in Pierce County would be announced two days later.
Yet Woodards mentioned none of this in her 64-minute talk. The theme was “Focus on the Future,” but the vision she laid out in her customary optimistic tone turned out to be myopic — a mix of hope, ambitious projects and big public events that ultimately would be canceled.
I criticized Woodards at the time for not talking frankly to Tacomans about this inescapable new threat. I compared her to the young students in the mega-selling “Harry Potter” fantasy book series, too afraid of the evil Lord Voldemort to speak his name aloud.
Today a healthy fear of COVID-19 isn’t gone, but Woodards’ reluctance to speak about it definitely is. She has to publicly confront the disease and its attendant shutdowns nearly every day, whether memorializing the 200-plus Tacomans who’ve died, helping authorize nearly $3 million in business grants or lobbying the governor to postpone rolling back Pierce County to a lower phase in his recovery plan.
She’s also confronting the pandemic head on in this year’s unique spin on the State of the City address — her fourth since she was elected mayor in 2017. (She’s running for reelection this year.)
Rather than a single speech, this year’s version is broken into four weekly pre-recorded installments in May. And rather than standing alone in front of a camera, Woodards sits down with local stakeholders and interviews them about everything from the economy to affordable housing, from city government operations to non-profits.
Front and center is COVID-19 and its heavy toll on all of the above. The pandemic was mentioned well over a dozen times in the first installment, which aired Monday.
It’s good to see the many ways that Woodards is now heeding the advice of Albus Dumbledore, the heroic master wizard of the “Harry Potter” books, who warned not to be silenced by a nemesis that seems unutterably terrifying. “Always use the proper name for things,” Dumbledore tells young Harry. “Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”
Woodards told me some reasons why she was mum about the virus in her address 14 months ago. She’d just returned from a sister city trip overseas. The virus had only recently arrived, and nobody (including epidemiologists) knew much about it.
She also noted the pressure on a mayor not to come across as alarmist. She recalled how Dr. Anthony Chen, the local health department director, wasn’t thrilled when she decided not to deliver the address in front of a live audience.
Still, if she could do it all over again with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, Woodards said she’d rewrite that speech. “Absolutely I regret that I didn’t say anything, and this year we may have gone too far the other way.”
Let me assure you, mayor: It’s impossible to go too far or talk about this virus too much.
So keep on preaching about the ongoing threat, the need to vaccinate, mask up, social distance and look out for the interests of your community, while preserving the positive outlook that defines your administration.
Reach News Tribune opinion editor Matt Misterek at matt.misterek@thenewstribune.com