Number of infected Windsor Vallejo residents increases by 16; infected healthcare workers now at 11
Windsor Vallejo Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, Vallejo CA
On April 20, we reported that the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) released a “snapshot” listing of all known skilled nursing facilities reporting COVID-19 among staff or residents. At that time, the list did not include any facilities in Solano County at that time.
On April 24, the State’s report showed one of nine nursing homes in Solano County that was dealing with the infection: the Windsor Vallejo Nursing and Rehabilitation Center where 18 residents and less than 11 staff tested positive.
As of April 29, the State’s “snapshot” shows 34 residents and 11 staff have tested positive for COVID-19. [CORRECTION: the number of stafftesting positive was later corrected on the State’s snapshot to show <11. The Vallejo Times-Herald reported that as of April 24, four health care workers were infected. – R.S.]
Windsor Vallejo’s website does an excellent job of sharing extensive information about coronavirus, and includes an easy way for families to schedule Virtual Visits, but does not disclose numbers of positive or active cases. It leaves unanswered whether any of Solano County’s reported deaths took anyone at their facility.
Statewide nursing home numbers soar over last 5 days
The State’s “24-hour snapshot” on April 29 showed confirmed active cases in 828 skilled health care workers (an increase of 166 over the last 5 days). The April 29 snapshot showed active cases in 2,299 nursing care residents (an increase of 400 over the last 5 days).
The cumulative total of cases in the State as of April 29 were 2,697 nursing home health care workers (plus 368 in 5 days) and 4,711 nursing home residents (plus 1,270 in 5 days).
Cumulative deaths in the State as of April 29 include 11 skilled health care workers (no change) and 663 nursing home residents (an increase of 118 in 5 days).
[Editor: Surely there are essential workers beyond Vallejo and Fairfield – in Benicia and throughout Solano County – in need of childcare. The County’s First 5 statement (below) includes the following caveat: “If the current care settings listed above do not meet your needs, please still complete the intake form and we will explore alternatives to connect you to childcare.” ANOTHER GOOD RESOURCE is Solano Family & Children’s Services, a private, non-profit Child Care Resource & Referral Agency, (707) 863-3950, Ext. 709. – R.S.]
First 5 Solano – Emergency Pop-Up Childcare
The Solano County Emergency PopUp Childcare Program is currently open and supporting healthcare workers , first responders, disaster services workers, and essential employees working in Vallejo. This program is not open to the general public. Drop-in childcare is not being offered.
All childcare centers will follow social distancing, sanitation, and hygiene practices described in the March 18, 2020 COVID-19 for childcare providers, Solano County Public Health.
We currently have space available for infants through school age children in Vallejo and school age children in Fairfield. If you fall into one of the categories above and need care, please complete the intake form.
If the current care settings listed above do not meet your needs, please still complete the intake form and we will explore alternatives to connect you to childcare.
[Editor – I am impressed and heartened to read in today’s Vallejo Times-Herald that the City of Vallejo, Touro University and other local agencies are teaming up with Solano County Behavioral Health department to test and house the city’s homeless. I have been raising alarms about the poor number of COVID-19 tests being reported daily by the Solano County Public Health department. Why is our Public Health department missing from this report? Surely the spread of coronavirus among the homeless isn’t simply a mental health problem. Was Behavioral Health working with Public Health to supply and administer tests on this project? – R.S.]
Vallejo, Touro University, others partnering to help homeless get tested for coronavirus
La Clinica administering the tests, while Avellino Labs processing results
Vallejo Times Herald, by Thomas Gase, April 30, 2020 at 11:29 a.m.
A homeless man pulls his carts in front of the Walmart Neighborhood Market on Sereno Drive. The new Project Room Key will focus on testing and recovery for homeless who possibly have COVID-19 in Vallejo. (Chris Riley—Times-Herald)
Vallejo is doing its best to make sure anyone who needs testing for COVID-19 gets it, and that includes the homeless population.
The City of Vallejo has combined with Touro University, Solano County Behavioral Health, Solano Resource Connect, Meals on Wheels and Fighting Back Partnership to help the homeless get tested as part of Project Roomkey.
Project Roomkey is a first-in-the-nation initiative to secure hotel and motel rooms to protect homeless individuals from COVID-19. The initiative has secured Federal Emergency Management Agency approval for 75 percent federal cost-share for this mission. Its initial goal is to secure up to 15,000 rooms for this purpose — with county partners moving 869 homeless individuals most vulnerable to COVID-19 off the street, out of shelters, and into isolation.
La Clinica will administer the testing, while Avellino Labs out of Menlo Park will process the results. On Tuesday the Vallejo City Council approved 3,334 tests that cost $250,000. Vallejo expects to get a reimbursement eventually from FEMA for the tests.
Housing and Community Development Division Manager Judy Shepard-Hall will be leading the cause in the city. She has had plenty of help from Homeless Services Coordinator Racheal Frederick-Vijay.
“Not long after the state announced the shelter-in-place, efforts were made to find out what we were doing with the homeless,” Vallejo assistant city manager Anne Cardwell said. “Judy and Rachael have been very busy with this and have hit the ground running. You have to give them a lot of credit for what they’ve done.”
Cardwell said that when La Clinica administers the tests they will be looking for one of three priorities.
“The first is people that test positive,” Cardwell said. “The second is people who believe that have been exposed and have symptoms and last but not least the third priority will be the vulnerable, such as people over the age of 65 with underlying health conditions.”
As early as March 16, Shepard-Hall said homeless were contacted through a database that had their last cell phone numbers. Shepard-Hall said between 700 and 800 people have replied to the calls and were in the stage of being vulnerable.
“Yes, it’s a little surprising how many homeless people still have a cell phone,” Shepard-Hall said. “But it’s more than just phone outreach. Eventually we well have to go out into the field and try to find some of the individuals, wherever they were known to be sleeping last.”
Early testing was done by La Clinica on Saturday to essential employees at the Cal Maritime Anchor Center on Georgia Street. Touro University is scheduled to begin outreach and wellness checks on Monday to those who responded by cellphone.
“The outreach teams will be deciding soon what areas to hit and as quickly as possible,” Cardwell said. “Whether the tests are administered on the site of the homeless camps or somewhere else still hasn’t been decided.”
Cardwell and Vallejo Public Information Officer Christina Lee said if a homeless person agreed to be tested, they would then be sheltered at Vallejo’s Hampton Inn and Rodeway Inn. Many homeless people, however, won’t leave without their belongings — something the many groups have taken into consideration.
“Occupants are allowed to bring their pets, which we’re guessing will mostly be dogs,” Cardwell said. “We have crates for them as well as food. The occupants can keep some personal belongings with them in the room, but not a huge amount. The rest of their items will be stored on site at the hotels.”
Cardwell and Lee said the testing results, done by Avellino Labs, could take five to six hours, but will likely be a once-a-day routine due to the labs being located in Menlo Park.
While occupants are at the hotel, Touro University would then get involved. Volunteer students would contribute by giving wellness checks and helping with food distribution.
“When COVID-19 started we had a lot of requests to partner with our student volunteers,” said Lisa Norton, Touro’s Dean of College of Education & Health Sciences. “Michele Bunker-Alberts, an assistant professor at Touro, is leading this team. She does a lot of street medicine projects and runs One Love, a nonprofit in Oakland.”
A meeting was then held with an oversight committee last Friday. Norton said there are approximately 200 student volunteers, but all may not want to help.
“We just posted it on campus and we’ve targeted 30, but have 12 volunteers so far,” Norton said on Monday. “The results, once we posted them, were mixed. Some of our 200 volunteers we have for a variety of issues said they preferred to work from home and in safer conditions. Some in the college of medicine are just chomping at the bit to get out there and help people. Of course, we’re also accessing for risk. If these volunteers are living with someone that is elderly and have any kind of health care concerns, we’re asking for them to stay at home.”
Norton said that the students are being promised the best Personal Protective Equipment, but most of the wellness checks would be non-touch. She said that she’s gotten a lot of community requests to help out, but this project is strictly for the nursing students.
Still, she’s proud Touro is involved.
“I’m part of Vallejo Together, and I think a lot of people who live here, want to help out,” Norton said. “Touro is all about play space and social justice and really helping out the community you’ve been placed in. A lot of people come to Touro because of their huge passion in that area and it’s incredible to see here. It really shows off our mission and what we as a faculty and staff are involved in. Personally, I think it’s the right thing to do to help out the unhoused and make sure they are doing OK.”
Shepard-Hall said the most difficult part of the process has been funding, but there are also rewarding parts of the project.
“Funding is always an issue, because we’re not San Francisco County or Los Angeles County,” Shepard-Hall said. “So we’ve had to pull together with all our resources and I think we’ve done a good job at that. The most rewarding thing is the possibility, although it hasn’t happened yet, of having the homeless go back to wherever they were living and removing fear for them and getting them healthy.”
A view of the US from Ireland – Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again
Irish Times, by Fintan O’Toole, April 25, 2020
Donald Trump: his presidency has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode?
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted … like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses.
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. . .
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
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