Tag Archives: Solano County Health Officer Bela Matyas

Coronavirus – Solano County Health Officer will not require masks, waiting on State order

Coronavirus: Masks remain a recommendation in Solano County, not a requirement

The Reporter, by Nick Sestanovich, April 23, 2020

As the global coronavirus pandemic continues to show no signs of slowing down, five Bay Area counties and at least three cities have made it a requirement for residents to wear face coverings when going outside to help stop the spread.

This tally does not include Solano County just yet.

Dr. Bela Matyas, the county’s public health officer, said Solano may consider it down the line if the resources are available but there were a number of things preventing it being a requirement for the time being. The first, he said, was a lack of evidence that wearing masks reduces the transmission of the virus.

“From a public health standpoint, I don’t feel like there’s any reason to implement it, based on the absence of evidence that it provides usefulness,” he said.

The other drawback, Matyas said, was an issue of timing, noting that mandating wearing face coverings would be “making things stricter” at a time when jurisdictions have discussed relaxing their stay-at-home orders.

“It feels a little bit ironic to be, on the one hand, talking about relaxing the order and, on the other hand, implementing something that makes the order stricter,” he said.

Matyas also said that even with the recent orders, there has not been a consensus among Bay Area public health officers about requiring masks. Santa Clara County, for example, has opted not to issue a requirement, despite being the location of the first known coronavirus-related death in the U.S.

Finally, Matyas said that if Solano were to require face coverings, it would be obliged to provide them to residents who are unable to afford or obtain them.

“We can’t, in good conscience, be asking people to do something that they can’t do and then enforce on it,” he said.

However, Matyas said that if Solano were given the resources to provide masks to ensure everyone has one, it would consider a requirement.

“We’re not dogmatically opposed to it by any means, but there’s issues of timing and issues of being able to require something and then making it possible for people to be able to implement that requirement,” he said.

Matyas said the county is also waiting to see if the state requires it.

“This issue has been brought up to the state,” he said. “We’re waiting to see what their response is.”

“The expectation is that we can get something from the state that would be broader in its applicability,” he added.

On April 3, Solano Public Health issued its first notice recommending that residents wear masks when going out in public while still adhering to social distancing guidelines. The notice was not a strict requirement and suggested that the masks be fabric or homemade and not be medical grade.

On April 17, health officials in the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo and Sonoma mandated that people wear face coverings when going outdoors, which went into effect Tuesday. Similar ordinances were also issued in Fremont, Pleasant Hill and San Francisco.

The ordinances tend to vary by jurisdiction, but they do not require masks or face coverings to be worn by children ages 12 and under and children ages 2 and under are prohibited from wearing masks because of suffocation issues. The orders also do not apply to people traveling alone or with family members in their cars or while exercising and are mainly intended for people standing in line at businesses, using public transit or going to a hospital.

Enforcements vary by jurisdiction, but many of the ordinances classify violations as misdemeanors punishable by fine or imprisonment.

Supervisor Skip Thomson said he felt requiring residents to wear masks was “a wonderful idea” but felt that there may not be enough masks available for everyone, particularly homeless individuals, to wear.

“It should be seriously considered, but until we’re able to give out masks to everyone, it just doesn’t work,” he said.

As of Wednesday, there have been 186 confirmed cases since the start of the outbreak — including 21 cases that remain active — as well as 48 hospitalizations and three deaths. The data by city includes 76 confirmed cases in Vallejo, 47 in Fairfield, 26 in Vacaville, 12 in Benicia and 11 in Suisun City. Dixon, Rio Vista and the unincorporated areas of Solano have all had confirmed cases of 10 or fewer, a sample size too small for the county to fully report.

Thomson acknowledged that a lot of residents are awaiting a return to normalcy but felt full testing and tracing needed to be done to paint a clearer picture of the data.

“There’s a lot of work yet to be done before we can reopen this economy,” he said. “As all the experts are saying, if we open it prematurely, we’re gonna have a resurgence of the virus infections. There’s certainly a balancing act between opening up the economy but not opening it up too soon to where we have another spike in cases.”

Vallejo Mayor Bob Sampayan said the city is following the direction of the Solano County Health Department, and the state of California when it comes to requiring residents to wear masks.

“I strongly recommend residents wear some sort of mask when they go out into public,” Sampayan said.

Sampayan said he has spoken to Matyas about issuing an order requiring masks.

“His position has been that because Solano County is sparsely populated, and not densely populated like other local counties, he doesn’t believe masks should be mandatory here.”

Sampayan said that when he goes out, he sees people not observing the six-feet social distancing requirement and not wearing masks.

“I wish we all would be more concerned about our safety,” he added.

Matyas said masks and face coverings are recommended in Solano in situations where maintaining a distance of 6 feet from others outside their home is impossible. The county recommends the coverings be made from materials such as fabric, scarves, bandanas or towels and worn in a manner that covers the nose and mouth. The coverings are encouraged to be washed frequently, ideally after each use.

For more information, including a video on how to make your own face coverings, go to admin.solanocounty.com:4433/depts/ph/coronavirus_links/faq___face_coverings.asp.

John Glidden contributed to this report.

Coronavirus – Contact tracing efforts in Solano County back in February

[Editor: the link in the first paragraph to “the patient in her 40s” is a fascinating account by 10 UC Davis physicians, covering Solano County’s first-in-the-nation community transmitted case of COVID-19.  The narrative covers everything from initial intake to the patient’s stable condition and discharge, along with x-rays and treatment timeline.  – R.S.]

Coronavirus detectives: Here’s how counties try to track everyone exposed

CalMatters, by Rachel Becker, April 23, 2020
California needs thousands of contact tracers. But counties and cities are overwhelmed and understaffed. “Woefully inadequate,” said one public health director.

By the time public health officer Bela Matyas learned that the novel coronavirus was spreading in Solano County, the patient in her 40s was already on a ventilator.

Back in February, the woman was the first in the nation known to be infected without traveling or being around someone who was sick. But she was too ill to answer questions about where she’d been and whom she had talked to, worked with and touched.

Dozens of public health investigators from local, state and federal agencies fanned out like detectives, questioning the family members who had visited her and the hospitals that had orchestrated her care — even staking out the store where she worked. Their mission: to piece together a list of people who could have been exposed to the virus.

In the end, the list totaled more than 300 people spanning six California counties, Matyas estimated. Four — including three healthcare workers — tested positive, each prompting their own investigation.

This process, called contact tracing, is a critical element in containing the spread of the novel coronavirus. But the ability of California’s 61 county and city public health departments varies greatly as they struggle to keep pace with rising numbers of patients.

“What we had to do was clear from the beginning,” Matyas said. “But actually being able to do it was very hard.”

Some local health departments, like Madera County’s, have managed to trace the contacts of every person who tests positive for the coronavirus. Others, like the city of Long Beach and Placer County, are so overburdened that they are only trying to trace contacts that could put vulnerable people at risk, such as healthcare workers or people in nursing homes.

To handle the pandemic, the nation will need 30 contact tracers for every 100,000 Americans, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials. But no California city or county has anywhere near that many. Under that formula, for example, Long Beach would need 140 investigators, seven to nine times more than it has now.

North of Sacramento, Placer County, with a population of almost 400,000, would need 120 tracers.

“It certainly illustrates the point that 18 — which is our expanded capacity, which is more than our baseline of six — is woefully inadequate,” said Aimee Sisson, Placer County’s public health director.

Contact tracing will become even more important as the state starts reopening parts of its economy. The concern is that more human interaction could cause flare-ups, especially since people can spread the virus before feeling ill and limited testing leaves people unaware they’re infectious.

“We need to make sure that there is capacity in every county to do adequate contact tracing. That’s part of containing the disease,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California. “Are we ready today? No. When will we be ready? I don’t know.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom addressed the concern about inadequate contact tracing on Wednesday, announcing plans to train 10,000 people to help local health departments. “The good news is we believe we have the capacity to build an army of tracers,” Newsom said, although he did not say when they’d be ready to deploy.


Jeffrey Martin, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, said that fighting an epidemic is like fighting a wildfire: The state can’t afford to mess up containment.

“[It’s] important to track all of those people down to extinguish all the embers in that brushfire,” Martin said. “If we don’t do it right, and if the brush fires are not extinguished, you’d have to be a magical, wishful thinker, to think that there would not be a raging wildfire.”

Some counties keep up, others can’t

The San Joaquin Valley county of Madera typically has two to three people keeping tabs on tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections in its population of roughly 157,000 people.

Then, the coronavirus hit — and the initial cluster encompassed about 200 patients and potential contacts, said Madera County public health director Sara BosseThirty-six people have tested positive.

Still, by teaming with the sheriff’s department and probation investigators, the county has managed to keep up contact tracing, isolation and quarantine for everyone potentially exposed.

Madera is unusual in that investigators, typically in plain clothes, visit patients and their contacts in person — sort of. They drop off packets of information as well as a letter excusing work absences to employers. Then they get back into their cars, and answer questions face-to-face through the window, over the phone.

“Then they can explain to them what’s going on,” Bosse said. “We understand that people are experiencing a lot of anxiety and it’s difficult for people to hear this news that they might have been exposed.”

For now, the spread of the virus seems to be slowing. “We’re really hopeful that it’s at least in part due to the active contact tracing that we’ve implemented,” Bosse said.

The spread of the novel coronavirus in Madera County appears to be slowing, according to county data.

In Riverside County, cases are coming in faster than the county’s 30-plus person team can investigate them, according to Barbara Cole, branch chief of disease control for the county’s public health department. The county has 3,084 confirmed cases.

It can take multiple phone calls to build enough trust to reconstruct someone’s string of contacts, Cole said.

“It’s about trying to establish a rapport, stressing how we’re going to protect their confidentiality,” she said. “The majority of people, they’re concerned about their friends and their family.”

In the Northern California county of Solano, Matyas quickly realized that tracing and quarantining all contacts would be impossible for every case. To date, 186 people have tested positive in the county.

Instead, the county focuses on tracking the risk to vulnerable populations, including people who are older, have underlying medical conditions, or live without shelter.

Solano County’s communicable disease team, which has shrunk to its original staff of six, first interviews anyone who tests positive about where they work and who they came in contact with. That in some cases is a long list: people who visit their homes, coworkers who sit close or share food.

Then a member of the team calls all of the contacts. The idea is to identify and isolate people who are feeling ill or whose jobs put them at risk of infecting others in nursing homes, hospitals, or homeless shelters.

“We no longer pretend that we can do any kind of active quarantine,” Matyas said. “There’s no bandwidth to check on them to see if they’re doing it.”

Workers are conducting patient interviews and case followup at the Long Beach health department’s operations center. Photo by epidemiologist Nora Barin.

Long Beach and Sacramento and Placer counties also are only tracing the virus’s spread through vulnerable populations.

“Instead of asking every place you went to, every person you came into contact with, we say, ‘Have you been in contact with vulnerable populations?’” said Sisson in Placer County. “We just have too many cases for that full interview.” In the county, which is home to the first person to die of the novel coronavirus in California133 people have tested positive.

In Long Beach, every case initially was tracked. But then people kept getting sick, and most of the deaths are in long-term care facilities

As people sheltered in place, contact tracing didn’t have to be as extensive. “Now we’re to the point where we have more than 400 cases, and we’re really focusing on our healthcare worker cases, and our cases in our long-term care facilities,” said Emily Holman, communicable disease controller for the city’s health department.

Tracing contacts of people in long-term care facilities is different than in the community at large. Instead of focusing on reconstructing a web of contacts, the aim is to rapidly identify and separate infected and potentially exposed people from healthy people. Speed is key, so if someone’s symptomatic, they’re treated as a case even with no test results.

“Every minute in those facilities can be crucial and could prevent an exposure,” Holman said.

Staffing up

Former CDC Director Tom Frieden called for an army of more than 300,000 contact tracers in an interview with STAT. And current CDC head Robert Redfield announced plans to hire 650 more public health personnel, including to help with contact tracing, the Washington Post reported.

Local health departments have been bolstering their workforces on their own. San Francisco plans to recruit and train as many as 150 people to conduct contact tracing, including librarians, city attorney staff and medical students.

The Bay Area’s Alameda County also has ramped up from just seven staff investigating cases of communicable disease to 60 people assigned to the novel coronavirus — including 18 who follow up with contacts. As the epidemic progresses, “we anticipate deploying as many as 300 staff for contact tracing,” said Nicholas Moss, acting director of Alameda County’s Public Health Department.

Sacramento County is working to expand its six-person team to 30 by recruiting from other departments and training medical students to work with people who are homeless.

“We’re hoping that based on the modeling that’s occurring, that we will be ready — and actually, we’re hoping that there won’t be another wave,” said Public Health Officer Olivia Kasirye.

Is there an app for that?

Some counties are looking to technological help. San Francisco, for instance, is training its contact tracers to use a platform that Grant Colfax, director of public health, called “an integral part of our efforts going forward.”

The platform, developed by a software company called Dimagi, is not an app that people can download to their phones. Instead, it’s a web portal that public health workers can use to keep tabs on people with infections, list their contacts and keep in touch.

Apple and Google also have proposed tracking people’s proximities using Bluetooth. Newsom has said the state is vetting various technologies.

But Alameda County’s Moss is cautious about protecting the privacy of residents. 

“We want to make sure that any technological tool we employ where people’s health information is going to be input, that there are adequate safeguards for privacy,” Moss said. Plus, the app has to be easy to use, and it has to cough back up the data needed to keep tabs on the virus’s spread.

Eric Sergienko, Mariposa County’s health officer, worries that if each local health department ends up using different software, it might be hard to trace contacts that cross county lines.

That’s where Sergienko hopes the state steps in and standardizes the platform California’s counties use. “What can the state do for us? Just by finding the best one,” he said.

State Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly said that California will need 10,000 more contact tracers as it modifies its stay at home order. Between 2,000 and 3,000 people could test positive per day. And each of them could have ten contacts, he said.

California might not have needed to push quite so hard to ramp up during the crisis if it had funded enough public health workers to begin with. “We’ve been seeking increased funding for years,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California.

More trained health workers could be important in fending off the next pandemic.

“By having these trained contact tracing public health workers, we can actually prevent infections, prevent the severe disease from happening in the first place,” said Lee Riley, a professor of epidemiology and infectious diseases at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

“But right now, everything that we’ve been doing is just reactive to what’s already happened.”

Coronavirus: Solano doc says curve flattening, more work to be done

Board of Supervisors to return to the table to talk state funding usage

Vallejo Times-Herald, by Kim Fu, April 7, 2020

Positive coronavirus figures in Solano County are expected to rise but there’s no cause for alarm, as the numbers merely reflect an increase in testing.

Dr. Bela Matyas, Solano County Health

So explained Dr. Bela Matyas with Solano Public Health Tuesday as he addressed the county’s Board of Supervisors.

In his update, Matyas talked about recently-released data that shows a breakdown of coronavirus cases by city. Those with 10 or more show exact figures, those with less do not. As of Tuesday, two related deaths have been reported.

“The coronavirus continues to spread but the impact on our hospitals have so far been substantial but not overwhelming,” he advised, adding that there are “lots of ICU beds, lots of ventilators.”

The stay at home order issued in March appears to be working, he continued, but more must be done.

“We have to stay the course if we want this approach to work. We have to do this for as long as necessary,” he said. “The most critical of all this is protecting the most vulnerable.”

The latter has been defined as the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions.

Matyas guesstimated the virus peaking around late April to mid May.

Though the worst is expected to be over at that time, risks will remain and the virus will still exist.

“It may be substantially longer before we can consider us through the outbreak and see it behind us,” he clarified.

Drive-through coronavirus testing is expected to begin today at the Solano County Fairgrounds in Vallejo. First responders and healthcare workers only will be eligible for the test. Any remaining kits will be made available at a later date to other essential workers.

In other matters, an emergency grant from the state slated to go towards aiding homeless clients regarding COVID-19 prevention and containment efforts caused tension amongst the board.

At issue was the COVID-19 Emergency Homeless grant award agreement, which offered $206,370 from the California Homeless Coordinating and Financing Council.

The board needed to approve receipt of the funding, which would then “be provided as a non-county contribution to Community Action Partnership (CAP) Solano Joint Powers Authority,” slated to coordinate emergency COVID-19 efforts (a 4/5 vote required). The board’s approval would also authorize the county administrator to execute the agreement and subsequent agreements/amendments with the grantor to facilitate acceptance of the award.

Supervisor Skip Thomson adamantly refused to support the funding being placed in the hands of CAP Solano.

“I don’t think they’ve done a good job, to be honest,” he said, adding that the money could be better spent on four portable wash/restroom stations at a cost of about $50,000 each.

It would address hygiene issues, he said, pointing out that, with restroom facilities at fast food eateries, coffee shops, parks and more now closed, homeless residents have made bushes their new lavatories. That, he said, will soon become a public health crisis.

The mobile units could be deployed to Vallejo, Fairfield, Vacaville and other locales on a rotating basis, Thomson said, and also be used in conjunction with the Office of Emergency Services in the case of a natural disaster or other emergency.

Supervisor Jim Spering said he needed more information before supporting the mobile stations, but agreed with Thomson regarding CAP Solano. What assurances are there that the money will be spent where it’s supposed to be, he asked.

Chairwoman Erin Hannigan said a delayed decision regarding the funding could hurt the homeless now, as help is needed now.

Following much discussion, a motion to go forward with Thomson’s mobile wash station failed 2-3, with Hannigan, Spering and John Vasques dissenting.

The original motion also failed, 1-4, with Monica Brown, Spering, Vasquez and Thomson all dissenting.

A third and final motion to, among other things, accept the agreement regarding the funding, have staff return with more information regarding the mobile wash stations and hold an emergency board meeting Tuesday passed unanimously.

Solano County’s about-face: Why officials resisted, then adopted coronavirus shelter-at-home order

San Francisco Chronicle, by Rachel Swan, March 21, 2020 11:34 a.m
People under quarantine at Travis Air Force Base wander through the facility. Robert Archer, who is there with his wife, said the common areas get very crowded and long lines form for meals.
People under quarantine at Travis Air Force Base wander through the facility. Robert Archer, who is there with his wife, said the common areas get very crowded and long lines form for meals. Photo: Robert Archer / Robert Archer

Solano County Supervisor Skip Thomson was livid.

Coronavirus was rapidly spreading in the Bay Area, and county health leaders were uniting in unprecedented orders to the public: stay at home.

It started Monday, with six of the nine Bay Area counties issuing orders — San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa and Marin. On Tuesday, Sonoma County joined, and Napa signaled it would soon join.

But Solano County was a holdout.

“I had a talk with our county administrator,” on Tuesday, Thomson said. “I told her my thoughts about sheltering in place. She said ‘We don’t want to alarm the public.’”

County administrator Birgitta Corsello called Thomson’s recollection inaccurate, but she did not elaborate, according to spokesman Matthew Davis.

On Tuesday, Solano County Health Officer Bela Matyas released a statement to the public about the coronavirus and the shelter-in-place orders other counties had issued. He conveyed the message via a YouTube video posted on the county’s official website.

In the video, Matyas sat at a desk with his sleeves rolled up and delivered a nine-minute monologue over looped guitar music. He dismissed the shelter-in-place orders as essentially just social distancing orders that mirrored guidelines the state and federal government already put out.

“For those of you who are familiar with the concept of ‘shelter in place,’ it’s used in situations when it’s dangerous to go outside because the air is dangerous, so if there’s been a toxic chemical spill or a fire with smoke,” Matyas said. He added that “shelter in place” was not the right terminology for what’s actually social distancing.

Over the next few hours, emails poured into Thomson’s inbox. Most of them came from perplexed or frustrated residents, questioning why Solano County was not taking action.

By the end of the next day, Wednesday, the county did an about-face, issuing an order instructing residents to stay in their homes as much as possible. By Friday, Matyas’ video was made private, so the public could no longer view it.

Board of Supervisors President Erin Hannigan said she asked that the video be taken down.

“It wasn’t helpful anymore,” she said. “It needed to be altered. There were some statements he made that were no longer true … and I couldn’t stand the music.”

Davis added that the video “understandably, wasn’t tracking well with the public.” It drew a string of comments on YouTube and the county Facebook page, some of which “were not supportive,” he noted.

Thomson said that after talking to the county administrator Tuesday, he emailed Hannigan requesting a special meeting to plan for the pandemic. He said Hannigan did not respond. When he complained to Assistant County Administrator Nancy Huston, she told him the county would not hold a special meeting. Its next regular meeting is scheduled for March 24.

“What kind of message does that send to our residents?” Thomson asked.

Hannigan said later that she did reply to Thomson, but that there was no need for the board to meet. Top county officials were already “having a conversation” behind the scenes “about an order we would put out,” she said. “We wanted to make sure the nomenclature was correct.”

In the meantime, constituents were flooding Thomson with emails that showed an overwhelming sense of confusion and a lack of confidence in the county government.

“I am shocked at the utter lack of proactive response that is being taken by our county health officer Bela Matyas,” Vacaville resident Heather Smolen wrote in an email shared with The Chronicle. “In the video he recently posted online he stated that a shelter in place would cause people to ‘overreact.’ I beg to differ, I feel that a shelter in place for Solano County would cause people to finally take the risk of coronavirus seriously.”

Thomson began forwarding the emails — probably 70 of them, he said — to Huston. Other supervisors said they were also getting slammed.

“I received a lot of calls from people asking why we weren’t adopting a shelter-in-place (order),” Supervisor Jim Spering said. “I passed that on to the county administrator.”

Matyas was not available for comment Friday. Davis said all the supervisors were feeling pressure from their constituents to issue orders, and that Corsello and Matyas were trying to act as quickly as possible.

Yet many residents sensed there was no urgency to act in their county. Some were baffled by Matyas’ reluctance to enact strict interventions, in part because Solano County was the first county in the nation to report a case of coronavirus that couldn’t be traced to overseas travel or contact with an infected person. It also houses Travis Air Force Base, a quarantine center for Americans repatriated from trips abroad, and for passengers of the Grand Princess cruise ship.

So far 14 Solano County residents have tested positive for the virus, though none have died.

The notion that Solano County was still open for business troubled Vallejo Mayor Bob Sampayan. He said many Vallejo residents worried that people from other counties would flock in, causing the virus to spread more quickly. Residents were also mystified by the stark disconnect between Matyas’ video and the advisories that Vallejo was posting on its own social media channels, telling people to stay inside.

“I received concerned correspondences from constituents,” Sampayan said. “Folks were saying, ‘Look, the governor and the CDC are telling us one thing, and then we’re getting this’” other message.

He surmised that the public outcry caused Matyas to “rethink his stance.”

Spering defended Matyas. He was wary of the shelter-in-place edicts, since they force people to miss work and disrupt the economy. Although some people called him to demand more aggressive measures, others were distraught about losing their jobs.

“I’ve been getting calls from moms who have two kids, work in two restaurants, and 40% of their income is tips,” Spering said. “We have a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck.”

Still, as a longstanding politician, Spering knew he’d feel pressure to eventually deliver a shelter-at-home order.

Thomson remains frustrated. He never bothered to watch Matyas’ video.

“Once the first six counties announced that order, it seemed like we should follow suit really quickly,” he said. “But then it took us (three) days to figure it out.

“I’ve been vindicated,” he added. “But that’s not really my purpose.”