All posts by Roger Straw

Editor, owner, publisher of The Benicia Independent
Benicia CA, Coronavirus, Covid 19

City of Benicia COVID-19 Update 03.22.20 – Business Resources and Support

See March 23 update: COVID-19 in Solano County – sudden uptick in cases, now at 21

And on March 24:

And on March 25: Covid-19 in Solano – 7 more on Wed March 25

Original March 22 post: Business Resources & Support:

The City of Benicia issued the following press release on Business Resources and Support during the coronavirus emergency:

PRESS RELEASE

CITY OF BENICIA
City Hall, 250 East L Street
Benicia, California 94510
Contact: Lorie Tinfow, City Manager
ltinfow@ci.benicia.ca.us

CITY OF BENICIA UPDATE ON COVID-19
FOR MARCH 22, 2020
Business Resources and Support

Benicia, CA (March 22, 2020) — During the unprecedented and unexpected business closures and shelter-at-home orders, many Benicia business owners find themselves in dire need of help to weather the COVID-19 emergency. The City of Benicia’s Economic Development division is sharing business support information and resources.

“In the past week, our business community and their employees have grappled with changing guidelines and ever more stringent restrictions. We know that this has caused great uncertainty and anxiety,” said Economic Development Manager Mario Giuliani. “The City’s Economic Development staff are focused to assist our businesses to learn about and apply for the programs developed by our State and Federal partners to support employers and employees during this emergency.”

Rapid Response Services for Businesses
Solano Small Business Development Center is standing by to help businesses facing potential layoffs or business closures. Start by filling out the client intake form at jotform.com/build/200757157479162 or reach out to Pamela Clemmons at 707.307.3986.

Aid with Loan Applications
The Northern CA Small Business Development Center (SBDC) network produced multiple webinars last week to help small businesses weather the current storm and to specifically provide help with completing the Small Business Administration (SBA) Disaster Loan application. The webinars are available at norcalsbdc.org/coping-covid-19-webinars-northern-california-sbdcnetwork. There is a place for businesses to enter their contact information so that they will be sent invitations and links to all upcoming webinars that will occur over the next few weeks.

SBDC and SBA Assistance Links
The SBDC and the SBA are there to help businesses with no-cost advising and assist with apply for SBA Economic Injury loans:
• One-on-One (no-cost) SBDC Advising at solanosbdc.org
• Download the COVID-19 Small Business Survival Guide at norcalsbdc.org/sites/default/files/Covid-19-survivalguide_sbdc_updated32020.pdf
• SBA Disaster Loans at disasterloan.sba.gov/ela

Additional Links
• Information on State and Federal support, financing and FAQs at
norcalsbdc.org/covid-19
• Small Business Resource List attached
• State Go-Biz resources and assistance at business.ca.gov/coronavirus-2019

Essential Business Definition
A key question many have been asking is about the Governor’s stay-at-home order and what is an essential business. This link provides helpful information to determine what is deemed an essential business: covid19.ca.gov/stayhome-except-for-essential-needs

Moratorium on Disconnections/Deferral of Fees/Extended Deadlines
The City has implemented a moratorium on utility service disconnections and late fees for non-payment for water and sewer service due to the COVID-19 emergency and the current closure of City Hall offices. Details are available at ci.benicia.ca.us/utilitybilling. The deadlines for business license tax renewals and transient occupancy tax payments have also been extended to June 15, 2020. The City is developing an emergency ordinance to prevent commercial and residential evictions.

For business questions or assistance, contact Economic Development Manager Mario Giuliani at mgiuliani@ci.benicia.ca.us or call 707.746.4289.

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Attachments:

Coronavirus, Covid 19, Solano County CA, Solano County Health Department, Solano County Health Officer Bela Matyas

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.”

Coronavirus, Covid 19, National Institutes of Health, SARS-CoV-2

Novel Coronavirus Can Survive in Aerosol Form and on Hard Surfaces for Hours to Days, Study Reveals

BioSpace, by Alex Keown, Mar 18, 2020
[BenIndy editor: Note that aerosol-generating particles CAN be generated in normal coughing.  See this 2015 NIH study.  – R.S.]

CoughAs the world shifts toward a concept of social distancing as part of an attempt to protect against the novel coronavirus, new research is showing the virus that causes COVID-19 is quite stable on hard surfaces, and even in the air.

A study conducted by researchers from the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) reveals that the virus is stable for “hours to days in aerosols and on surfaces.” The results of the study were published in The New England Journal of Medicine. According to the study, in aerosol form, the droplets from a cough, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, is stable for up to three hours. Depending on environmental factors, the droplets can remain suspended in air, during some or all of this time. On hard surfaces such as copper, the virus is stable for about four hours. On cardboard, the virus is stable for a full day and on plastic and stainless steel, the virus is stable for three days, the researchers discovered. These results suggest that people “acquire the virus through the air and after touching contaminated objects.”

Because of the concerns of the virus surviving in air for some time, the World Health Organization is considering adding “airborne precautions” for medical staff addressing the virus, CNBC reported. Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, told reporters that the virus is transmitted through droplets from sneezing or coughing.

“When you do an aerosol-generating procedure like in a medical care facility, you have the possibility to what we call aerosolize these particles, which means they can stay in the air a little bit longer,” Van Kerkhove said, according to CNBC. “It’s very important that health-care workers take additional precautions when they’re working on patients and doing those procedures.”

The study wanted to mimic the ways that the virus can be transmitted from an infected person by coughing or touching objects. The scientists then investigated how long the virus remained infectious on these surfaces.

Much of the data from this study was made public prior to publication in the journal due to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infection Disease, a division of the National Institutes of Health, sought to compare SARS-CoV-2 to SARS-CoV-1, the virus that causes SARS. SARS-CoV-1 is the human coronavirus most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. The scientists wanted to understand how the environment impacted both strains. SARS-CoV-1 was eradicated by intensive contact tracing and case isolation measures and no cases have been detected since 2004, the NIH noted. However, the scientists quickly pointed out that “in the stability study the two viruses behaved similarly, which unfortunately fails to explain why COVID-19 has become a much larger outbreak.” When SARS-CoV-1 emerged, it infected more than 8,000 people in 2002 and 2003, NIH said. COVID-19 has now infected more than 200,000 people, according to the Johns Hopkins virus tracking map. Of the 201,634 people infected, the majority are in China, Italy and Iran. There are 6,496 cases in the United States. The number of deaths from the disease has now topped 8,000.

Some of the observations from the study have potentially shed light on why COVID-19 is spreading faster than SARS did. The first observation is that infected individuals are likely to spread COVID-19 while being asymptomatic. This makes disease control measures that were effective against SARS-CoV-1 less effective against its successor, the NIH said. That reinforces the idea of social distancing and self-isolation.

While many cases in the United States and abroad have been associated with long-term care facilities and healthcare settings, the researchers said most secondary cases of virus transmission of SARS-CoV-2 appear to be occurring in community settings, as opposed to healthcare facilities.

The findings affirm the guidance from public health professionals to use precautions similar to those for influenza and other respiratory viruses to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2, NIH said.

California, Coronavirus, Covid 19

8 Military field hospitals coming to California to meet projected need for hospital beds

Fairfield Daily Republic, by Glen Faison, March 22, 2020 at 12:45 am
Gov. Gavin Newsom provides an update on the state’s response to the new coronavirus during a press conference in Sacramento, Saturday, March 21, 2020 (Screen grab from video)

FAIRFIELD — Eight U.S. Army medical field units are on their way to California and will be prepositioned to meet an anticipated need for more hospital beds across the state as the new coronavirus sickens more and more people, the governor said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom thanked both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for their role in bringing the medical field units to the state.

“That’s going to provide 2,000-bed capacity for the state of California,” Newsom said.

The announcement came Saturday as Newsom provided an update that touched heavily on the strategic challenges of addressing the spread of the new coronavirus, but also on the human challenges faced by those whose lives have been disrupted.

“This has been a very challenging time,” he said. “At the same time it is a remarkable moment.”

Newsom said a cache of medical supplies has arrived in the state from the federal government and is being distributed – masks, gowns, gloves and the like. Three more similar shipments are expected in the near future. That’s in addition to distributions from the state’s reserve of medical supplies, he said.

Newsom outlined recent actions to enhance the number of hospital beds available throughout the state. And he touched on ways to radically expand the amount of space that can be converted to accommodate additional hospital beds. He gave as examples the conversion of hotel rooms and University of California and California State University dormitories to serve as hospital rooms. He mentioned use of convention centers and county fairgrounds for such purposes.

“I can’t tell you how many sporting leagues, not just owners of teams, in this state have said, you know what? You want our arena? You can have our arena,” the governor said.

The process of testing for exposure to the virus, a process that continues to expand, should be targeted to meet identified objectives, he said.

“The bottom line for us is, we want to know what the spread is. We want to know if we’re bending the curve. We want to know if our stay-at-home orders are effective. That’s fundamentally the point of testing in terms of the broader sample,” Newsom said. “The more specific need for testing is self-evident: to change medical protocols; to address the deep anxieties our seniors have, the people with compromised immune systems. All of them should be prioritized – people that are in the hospitals that have symptoms and most significantly, our caregivers, to make sure they remain healthy throughout this process.”

Newsom advised others, particularly the young, to assume that they have been exposed to the virus and are contagious, even if they do not have symptoms.

“Just use common sense. Be a good neighbor. Be a good citizen,” he said.

Newsom had strong words for young people who are flouting the stay-at-home order and social distancing requirements that are currently in place to help arrest the spread of the virus that causes Covid-19.

“Those young people still out there on the beaches thinking this is a party: Time to grow up. You know, time to wake up,” he said. “Time to recognize it’s not just about ‘the old folks,’ it’s about your impact on their lives. Don’t be selfish. Recognize that you have a responsibility to meet this moment as well.”

The state remains focused on meeting the needs of those who are most vulnerable to the disease, to include seniors and the unsheltered homeless. Part of that is securing motel rooms – up to 51,000 – to house the homeless, and negotiating to secure additional assisted-living beds.

Newsom said the addition of the medical field units as well as agreements to identify and secure almost 1,000 additional hospital beds at specific locations supports the goal to add thousands of beds of capacity to the state’s inventory to meet the projected need.

He said the state has 416 hospitals with a staffed bed capacity of 78,000. Newsom said the state needs 19,500 more beds to meet the state’s midway projections. The hospital system has a surge capacity of a bit more than 10,000 beds, he said.

Newsom said the state will soon turn its focus to the prison system. Solano County is home to California State Prison-Solano and the California Medical Facility, both in Vacaville.

Visitation has already been suspended within the state prison system to help stop the spread of the virus.

“We are working very aggressively to make sure that the folks within that system are getting appropriate support, that those with flu-like symptoms are getting isolated,” he said.

Newsom praised the overall response thus far but said there’s more to do.

“We need more support from the federal government, and I’m very, very encouraged by the conversations we’re having on the USS Mercy, on the conversations we’ve had direct with the president and the vice president on the strategic stockpile and the work that we’re doing not just with HHS but DoD on getting these mobile field hospitals out in the state of California as well.”