By Jondi Gumz
A second wave of COVID-19 is pulsing in Santa Cruz County ━ more than 200 active cases ━ which Dr. Gail Newel, the county health officer, attributes to families and friends, mostly Latinos in South County, gathering to eat and celebrate together.
“I am against family reunions, family gatherings,” Newel said, sharing the advice she gave to her administrative assistant who wanted to fly to a family event in Dallas.
Although Newel’s shelter-in-place order expired July 7, allowing playgrounds to reopen countywide, she pointed to the governor’s guidance: Gatherings of any size are not allowed.
Yet people have been gathering locally ━ for Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, graduations, Father’s Day, memorials and protests. Four gatherings in May led to 60 cases, Newel said.
So far, the tracking process indicates family events ━ not newly reopened workplaces ━ have spread COVID-19, pushing the overall case count past 500 with a third of those affected being millennials age 18-34.
Singing, dancing, laughing, potlucks and sharing utensils used to be entirely acceptable but now “those are high-risk activities” for spreading COVID-19, Newel said.
Face coverings keep the wearer from spreading COVID-19 to others, but that protection disappears once you take off your mask to eat.
At one point in June, there were no COVID-19 cases at Dominican Hospital but now 16 patients fill 40 percent of the beds earmarked at Dominican and Watsonville Community Hospital, and three of them are in intensive care.
If the current trends continue, Newel expects “a pretty big surge” in hospital cases at the end of July that previously unneeded alternate care sites at Simpkins Family Swim Center in Live Oak and 1440 Multiversity in Scotts Valley may be pressed into service for the first time.
As of Wednesday, of the 503 cases, 50 percent were Latinos and 259 were in Watsonville. There were 19,961 negative test results and three deaths, the latest a man in his mid-90s in hospice in mid-June.
Newel spoke Tuesday during county Supervisor Zach Friend’s telephone town hall, assessing the current COVID-19 situation and answering questions from his constituents.
What makes this new wave of cases challenging is that even though the county has 40 staff to call people with a confirmed diagnosis and find out who they might have exposed so they can be tested, labs locally and statewide are woefully short of a chemical that is essential to run the COVID-19 test.
The OptumServe testing site at Ramsay Park in Watsonville, which had been allowing anyone to make an appointment for a test, has had to ration tests.
“We don’t have enough for known cases,” Newel said.
Her workaround is to strike a deal with UC Santa Cruz, which has developed a testing process that does not require the chemical used in the OptumServe lab.
Another challenge is getting the “contact tracers” trained on the new state CalCONNECT system, which launched May 22 – six weeks ago.
“Hopefully we can get that going pretty quickly,” Newel said.
Early in the pandemic, Santa Cruz County had some of the lowest case rates in the state but now the case rate has risen to 69 per 100,000, worrisome for Newel.
“Our successes are quite precarious,” Friend said.
Asked why communities of color are harder hit by COVID-19, Newel cited social factors such as crowded housing, poverty and working essential jobs where there is more contact with the public.
Teachers asked Newel about reopening schools, noting worries about COVID-19 spreading.
Newel said she is not open to approving 100 percent remote learning. She favored a mix of classroom and remote learning, citing a recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics and contending transmission is not likely if children in elementary school are in a group of 10 to 15 with the same teacher.
She said middle school and high school students could be allowed to change classrooms.
“Our children deserve some normal childhood development,” she said, noting her view assumes no major COVID development. “I hope districts will work with me to develop a hybrid model.”
Santa Cruz County has 13 school districts, each one determining their own calendar, traditions and programs, plus the county Office of Education, which operates many alternative schools and provides education to children with special needs.
Newel said her only sway is that she can approve or disapprove medically fragile children from classroom learning.
Responding to a question, Newel said if someone at a school is diagnosed as positive, the school must be able to isolate that individual and then quarantine others that may have been exposed.
Friend noted that neither Finland and Denmark had cluster outbreaks after reopening schools.
Asked if it would be OK for a group of 60 seniors to meet for lunch, Newel said a seniors’ lunch would not be safe “until we have a vaccine.”
Asked when a vaccine might be available, Newel said it may be as early as a year but not sooner. She said three vaccines are in Phase 3 clinical trials to assess their effectiveness on human volunteers.