Solano placed on state’s Covid watch list as hospitalizations rise
Fairfield Daily Republic, by Todd R. Hansen, June 30, 2020
Dr. Bela Matyas, Solano County Health Officer
FAIRFIELD — A local man in his 90s became the 24th person to die in Solano County because of Covid-19, the Public Health Division reported on Monday.
He contracted the disease from his family, Dr. Bela Matyas, the county public health officer, said in a phone interview.
“It’s not linked to any of the outbreaks in the county,”said Matyas, adding the man had been in the hospital for nearly a month.
Solano also became the 16th county to be placed on the state’s watch list because of a jump in hospitalizations, which if prolonged, could mean the forced closure of bars.
The county reported a jump of 13 hospitalizations since Friday afternoon’s report, bringing the total to 38.
The number of new cases, however, only went up by eight to 1,116, despite testing numbers going up by 2,504 to 29,620, the county reported. The number of active cases also saw a significant decrease from 250 to 70.
“Most of those cases are from the past and we finally caught up to them,” said Matyas, explaining that many are from the 80 or so farm laborers who work in the Sonoma and Napa vineyards, but spread the disease primarily because of their close living conditions in Fairfield and Dixon.
Graduation parties and Memorial Day weekend activities were also primary causes to why the active case numbers climbed, and now that those infectious periods are over and the county reporting has caught up, the numbers fell.
Matyas remains concerned about another spike because of the Fourth of July weekend.
And that could have a significant impact on Solano bars.
While Matyas said there is a “disconnect” between bar patronage and the actual cause of Covid-19 cases in Solano – again, due mostly to family gatherings – he understands why Gov. Gavin Newsom has to send some kind of message to county residents to ease their social practices.
Matyas said if the numbers continue to linger at the higher level, or go up over a three-day period, then the state will issue a recommendation that the bars be closed.
If the trend continues for 14 days, the state will order the bars closed, Matyas said.
Of the eight new cases reported, three were in Fairfield, bringing the city’s count to 363. Vallejo added two more to take its total to 462, and Vacaville also had two more cases for a tally of 152. The final new case was reported in Dixon, which now has 39 confirmed cases.
Suisun City (70), Benicia (25) and the combination of Rio Vista and the unincorporated area of the county (15) stayed the same.
A recent increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations has landed Solano County on the state of California’s list for “targeted engagement,” to slow further spread of the coronavirus, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Monday.
While cases of the coronavirus and hospitalizations are on the rise throughout California, the state is zeroing in on counties experiencing the most acute spikes.
“Being on the county monitoring list brings with it additional attention and focus, additional assistance, some additional resources at the state level,” said Mark Ghaly, secretary of California’s Health and Human Services Agency.
Ghaly hopes the designation “really galvanizes the response at the county level in order to … make sure that spread does not increase so rapidly.”
Nineteen counties have been placed under increased monitoring by the state, covering nearly three quarters of California’s population. On Monday, Glenn, Merced and Orange counties were added along with Solano.
In Solano County, hospitals have seen a 23% increase in their three-day average of COVID-19 patients. The spike has been attributed in part to a jump in infections among dozens of North Bay farmworkers, many of whom work in Napa and Sonoma, but reside in Solano County.
State and county health officials have identified a list of steps to improve virus mitigation, including working with vineyard management companies to implement physical distancing measures and enlisting Spanish interpreters to educate workers on public health guidelines.
First below is an excerpt from the CA Dept. of Public Health’s Watch List, detailing recent increasing hospitalizations in Solano County and “key action steps” that Solano is taking in coordination with the State.
Below that is a detail from the State’s County Data Chart, showing Solano County among those counties with increasing hospitalization rate of >10%. On June 29, Solano shows a 23% increase in 3-day avg COVID+ hospitalized patients.
Solano County (has variance) is increasing hospitalization. Drivers include a large outbreak among farm workers in the vineyards in Sonoma and Napa who are residing in Solano, as well as an ongoing surge in cases related to family gatherings and other social gatherings on the weekends. The farm worker cases total many dozens over the past one to two weeks, and the close-contact cases appear to have begun with weekend activities in early May and are continuing to the present. The large number of such cases overall is resulting in an increase in hospitalized cases. These cases are not at present resulting in a strain on the hospitals or in ICU admissions but the county is monitoring this closely. County reports that hospitals in their jurisdiction have multiple levels of surge capacity for hospitalizations and for ICU admissions, if these become necessary. Key action steps include: working with the neighboring counties and with the vineyard management companies to implement social distancing measures; 2) educating the workers themselves (using Spanish interpreters) on social distancing measures; 3) providing appropriate cautionary messages through social media and the press about the risks of gatherings, not social distancing and not using personal protection measures.
Holiday blues: 19 counties now on watch list for more COVID-19 restrictions
CalMatters, by Lauren Hepler, June 29, 2020
Frederique Van Niekerk, from left, and her mother Bernadette Van Niekerk wear masks while waiting in line to enter the clothing store Forever 21 while shopping in Walnut Creek on June 18, 2020. Photo by Jose Carlos Fajardo, Bay Area News Group
With the July 4 holiday weekend only days away, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Monday that 19 counties home to 72% of the state’s population are now on a “watch list” for additional COVID-19 restrictions.
Four new counties — Solano, Merced, Glenn and Orange — were added Monday to the list of hard-hit locales where state health officials are monitoring infection data, providing technical assistance and weighing new measures to slow the spread of the virus.
Bars were already ordered to shut down in Los Angeles and six other counties on Sunday as businesses hit hard by the virus looked to the busy summer holiday to recoup some losses. Even after the closures, local health officials warned on Monday of “alarming” increases in the number of new COVID-19 cases in L.A., and County Supervisor Janice Hahn announced on Twitter that officials plan to close beaches for the holiday from July 3-6.
The question now is if and when the governor may ask other counties on the list to “toggle back” reopening plans, though exactly what that might entail remains unclear.
“We are considering a number of other things to advance,” Newsom said, “and we will be making those public as conditions change.”
In the most severe case in Imperial County, Newsom said the state is prepared to intervene should county supervisors refuse to revert to a strict stay-at-home order. As of late last week, the county had the state’s highest COVID-19 hospitalization rate.
“The state of California will assert itself and make sure that happens,” Newsom said. “We believe they need to move back into that stay-at-home posture.”
The growing watch list and the governor’s repeated emphasis on the importance of a “dimmer switch” to scale back reopening plans if necessary highlights ongoing tension over state and local control that has already boiled over in some parts of the state. In Orange County, health officer Nichole Quick was one of at least five such officials in California to retire or resign this spring, in her case amid threats and personal information leaks.
Besides Los Angeles, the other counties already ordered to shut down bars were Fresno, Imperial, Kern, Kings, San Joaquin and Tulare. Those on the watch list that have not yet been ordered to take additional precautions are Contra Costa, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Stanislaus and Ventura.
On Monday, Newsom and California Health & Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly stressed that the state is basing decisions about where to intervene on specific health data. Of particular concern are local “positivity rates,” or the percentage of COVID-19 tests coming back positive. That number climbed to 5.9% statewide in the last week, Newsom said, compared to 4.4% in early June when the state began to allow gradual reopenings.
Statewide testing capacity has increased in the meantime, he said, to a record of nearly 106,000 tests on Sunday. But in areas like Imperial County, where the positivity rate hit 23%, the increased caseload can lead to frantic conditions on the ground.
“We had to move 500 patients out of their hospital system into surrounding county systems,” Newsom said of “extraordinary rates” in the 190,000-person county along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The scramble in Imperial County highlights the uneven fallout from the virus. Hospitalization rates are climbing fastest in rural Imperial, Kings and Stanislaus counties. Some more affluent and urbanized regions, including San Francisco and Marin counties where infection and hospitalization rates have so far remained lower, have delayed components of reopening plans.
When it comes to the economic toll of the virus, California has already shed twice as many jobs during the first two months of the COVID-19 crisis — about 2.6 million — as it did during 31 months of the Great Recession a decade ago, according to an analysis released last week by the California Budget & Policy Center. Job losses are most concentrated in low-paying service fields, and Black women, Latina women and Asian men saw the sharpest employment declines from February to May this year, by 23%, 22% and 18%, respectively, the report found.
This week’s bar closures are likely to add pressure to existing questions about whether state or federal lawmakers will extend enhanced unemployment benefits, small business loans or other safety-net programs strained by the pandemic. It’s a dynamic that has already upended the state’s annual budget cycle, with legislators so far favoring cuts likely to most impact a dwindling number of middle-class families to address a sudden $54 billion deficit.
“The question for state policymakers as the COVID-19 recession drags on is, how will they find the money needed to avoid cuts to programs and services that Californians will continue to need in the months and years to come?” Alissa Anderson, senior policy analyst with the California Budget & Policy Center, wrote in the recent report.
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