You can calculate Quincy's fight to keep Boston from rebuilding the Long Island Bridge in years, or you can count the lives lost to the drug crisis exacerbated by the delay.
Keeping the cleaning apparatus assigned to just the Mass and Cass area is not akin to the panic experienced during the AIDS crisis. It's just a careful consideration about how to best cope with an unsanitary encampment the Wu administration inherited and can't seem to fix.