Commentary: Small businesses need life support, help to heal
Published 1:30 am Sunday, April 26, 2020
By Yoo Jung Kim / For The Herald
My family has been running our restaurant at the Everett Mall for more than 15 years.
We’ve weathered the bankruptcies and dissolution of the mall’s anchor stores, including Mervyn’s, Borders, and more recently, Macy’s. Despite it all, we kept on chugging along, gaining the trust of regulars and updating offerings to attract new customers. Moreover, through our small business, I was able to attend college and medical school. Now, just as I am about to graduate with my medical degree, our restaurant faces an existential crisis because of COVID-19.
For months after the first reported case of COVID-19 in Everett, the business was as usual. Then Gov. Jay Inslee’s stay-at-home order came into effect. While the order limited our business to take-out orders and cut into revenues, we wanted to keep the store open for our workers, many of whom had been with the restaurant for years. However, the final blow came from a mayoral decree from the city of Everett, leading to the temporary closure of the mall and all the businesses therein.
I came back home to help out with the family business while waiting for my intern year to start in July. I’ve communicated with mall owners and business utility companies to defer payment plans and to apply for emergency assistance. We’ve also applied for one of the first-come, first-served small-business aid loans through the CARES Act.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear end in sight. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, remarked on the futility of putting an end date to the current pandemic, stating “You don’t make the timeline. The virus makes the timeline.” Considering this uncertainty, many small businesses simply will not be able to survive the pandemic.
When we emerge on the other side of this pandemic, the retail landscape, the restaurant industry, and the availability of jobs will have shifted dramatically. The $2.2 trillion emergency package and about $350 billion in additional assistance passed by Congress last week cannot be the be-all, end-all of support for the workers and business owners who find themselves affected by the COVID-19 crisis. This time, our leaders at every scale of government need to plan ahead by preparing for the aftermath of the pandemic, including maintaining the expanded unemployment resources and passing additional stimulus bills down the line.
Moreover, to help individuals and small businesses plan ahead, state and federal governments also need to create carefully considered, evidence-based directives on what needs to happen before businesses can safely resume activity without contributing to further spread of COVID-19. This may require extensive disease testing to identify workers and consumers who have developed immunity to COVID-19 to start reviving the economy.
In a couple of months, I’ll be in the front-lines of helping treat COVID-19 patients, and hopefully, utilizing medicine and science to help our communities and the country to revitalize the economy safely. As a physician, protecting is and will be my utmost priority; however, we cannot ignore the plight of everyday workers and small businesses.
We need to plan for how to save livelihoods while maintaining the safety of the public. Now that we’ve placed the economy on life support, we need to plan ahead for its resuscitation and rehabilitation.
Yoo Jung Kim is a fourth-year medical student at the Stanford University School of Medicine and will begin an internship at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in June. She has previously written commentaries for The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, Nature, KevinMD and Doximity, and she is the co-author of “What Every Science Student Should Know.”
