Tag Archives: Coronavirus COVID 19

Climate emergency, Coronavirus, Covid 19, Keeping Watch on Earth News

Here’s what a coronavirus-like response to the climate crisis would look like

Los Angeles Times, by Sammy Roth, March 30, 2020


Both the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are global crises with the power to derail economies and kill millions of people. Society has moved far more aggressively to address the coronavirus than it has the climate crisis. But some experts wonder if the unprecedented global mobilization to slow the pandemic might help pave the way for more dramatic climate action.

Leah Stokes, a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara, pointed out that aggressive steps to reduce planet warming emissions — such as investing in solar and wind power, switching to electric cars and requiring more efficient buildings — wouldn’t be nearly as disruptive to everyday life as the stay-at-home orders that have defined the novel coronavirus response.  [continued – view article in PDF format…]

Benicia CA, California, Coronavirus, Covid 19, Solano County CA, Stay-at-home

False reports that Gov. Newsom extended stay-at-home order through May 15

By Roger Straw, April 12, 2020

A number of news outlets are reporting that California Governor Gavin Newsom extended the coronavirus stay-at-home order through May 15.

But as of today, nothing on the Governor’s coronavirus page confirms the extension.  Nor do any reliable news sources confirm the extension.

The story seems to have arisen in connection with actions taken by several southern California jurisdictions which extended the order through May 15, including Los Angeles County and the City of Santa Clarita.

California’s statewide stay-at-home order, issued on March 19, remains in effect “until further notice.”

Here in Benicia, we are also under Solano County orders to stay at home.  Solano County’s current extension order was issued on March 30, and continues through April 30.  The City of Benicia declared an emergency on March 15, and has repeatedly issued guidelines supporting the County’s order.

Contra Costa County, Coronavirus, Covid 19, San Francisco Bay Area, Senior care, Solano County CA

Coronavirus: New Death At Orinda Nursing Home; Outbreak Worsens At Pleasant Hill Senior Center

[BenIndy Editor: I can find no reports of coronavirus infections in Solano County senior facilities.  Hope and pray for our elders in this pandemic!  – R.S.]

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KPIX5 CBS SF Bay Area, April 10, 2020

PLEASANT HILL (CBS SF) — Contra Costa health officials reported Friday another resident death amid a growing outbreak of coronavirus at two senior care facilities.

The county reported 21 people have been infected at Carlton Senior Living at 175 Cleaveland Road in downtown Pleasant Hill. Eight of those confirmed positive are residents and 13 are staff members, according to Contra Costa Health Services.

In addition, CCHS said a second person has died at Orinda Care Center, where earlier this week 50 people had tested positive for COVID-19.

CCHS said it was working closely with management of the senior living facilities to contain the spread of the virus.  The county said both CCHS and John Muir Health have provided infection control guidance as well as PPE supplies for residents and staff, and was working to offer COVID-19 testing.

As of Friday morning, county health officials reported 511 total cases of coronavirus in Contra Costa, including people who have recovered. There have been nine deaths in the county because of the illness.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday the state has identified seven sites with hundreds beds to take care of senior care residents who are forced from their current facilities, including the USNS Mercy hospital ship.

There are 1,224 major senior care facilities statewide; of those, 191 were being monitored by state health officials where there have been 1,266 individuals and staff members who have contracted the virus, Newsom said.

There are also 7,464 smaller care facilities statewide, Newsom said, where 94 are being monitored with outbreaks that have 370 residents and staffers ill with the coronavirus.

“You may consider those numbers and say that sounds relatively modest,” said Newsom of the numbers of infections in senior care facilities. “That doesn’t show the entire picture. There have been some appropriate headlines about certain areas of the state of  California and specific facilities that have become hot spots, where we have seen a disproportionate number of people contracting the disease and number of people tragically passing away. What we have done is … put in new guidelines that have been backed up by staff, what I would refer to as SWAT Teams, of infectious disease control professionals, working with the CDC and others, to saturate those areas of concern and focus.”

Newsom added the additional staff focusing on senior centers was working to “quickly identify those individuals, isolate, quarantine, and ultimately trace and track the pattern of the infection.”

“We are making calls in an unprecedented way,” said Newsom. “It’s not an exaggeration, 1,500 field offices every single day, calling every single nursing facility in the state.”

The governor also said “SWAT teams” of infectious disease specialists will be dispatched to the most serious outbreaks and deals had been made to temporary staffing agencies to fill in when a facilities caregivers are sidelined by positive coronavirus results.

California, Coronavirus, Covid 19, Public Health, Testing

Testing chaos undermines California coronavirus response

San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board, April 7, 2020
A health care worker speaks with a driver at a drive-thru coronavirus testing site in a parking lot of the old California Pacific Medical Center on California Street in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, April 2, 2020. The appointment only tests were provided for employees and staff of CPMC and Brown and Toland physicians.
A health care worker speaks with a driver at a drive-thru coronavirus testing site in a parking lot of the old California Pacific Medical Center on California Street in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, April 2, 2020. The appointment only tests were provided for employees and staff of CPMC and Brown and Toland physicians. Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

California has so far escaped an exponential coronavirus outbreak on the order of New York’s thanks to nation-leading social-distancing measures, particularly in the Bay Area. But the state has lagged in testing for the virus, undermining a relatively encouraging trajectory and threatening its ability to combat the contagion over the long term.

While federal failures have plagued coronavirus testing across the country, California’s capacity to identify the disease it’s fighting has been particularly poor. About 126,000 Californians had been tested for the novel coronavirus as of Saturday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, or 0.3% of the population. That’s only about half the per capita rate nationwide in a country that has been a global underachiever in tracking the pandemic, ranking 42nd among the states according to one analysis. New York, with about half the population, has tested more than 300,000.

Extraordinary delays in processing those tests that have been conducted exacerbated California’s shortfall. At one point last week, results were still pending for more than 60% of tests. Some patients reported waiting well over a week to find out whether they tested positive, defeating any attempt to quickly identify and contain infections.

To Newsom’s credit, he took responsibility for the problem Saturday and vowed to increase testing “exponentially” by forming a testing task force and several diagnostic “hubs,” coordinating the distribution of supplies, and working with UC Davis and UC San Diego. The governor also reported significant progress on the testing backlog, which had fallen from nearly 60,000 awaiting results to around 13,000 as of last weekend.

Federal miscues early on put the entire country at a disadvantage in detecting the pandemic. Although the World Health Organization had distributed hundreds of thousands of working coronavirus tests by early February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own test only to discover flaws that made it largely unusable. The government nevertheless took weeks to relax regulations that prevented labs around the country from employing alternatives, finally doing so in late February.

Those difficulties were compounded in California thanks to shortages of testing supplies, a lack of coordination among dozens of public and private labs, and a huge backlog at one of them. Testing capacity has also been reduced by closures of about a quarter of the state’s public health labs over the past two decades.

If California’s relative success in slowing the spread of of the contagion continues, one likely consequence is that more of the population will remain unexposed and therefore vulnerable until a vaccine is developed, a process expected to take more than a year. A coherent testing regime will be that much more crucial to detecting and controlling any resurgence of the pandemic and beginning to restore a semblance of normalcy.