By Jondi Gumz
Dr. Gail Newel, Santa Cruz County’s health officer, on Thursday reported the county’s fourth fatality connected with the contagious coronavirus COVID-19.
A man in his 70s hospitalized for a heart issue was tested before being admitted and found to be COVID-positive, Newel said.
It was “not hospital-acquired,” she added. “Other household members tested positive.”
Newel said the county has 848 cases, including 511 cases in the past two weeks.
“Our staff is overwhelmed,” she said.
The number of cases in Capitola is growing. For data, see santacruzhealth.org/coronavirus.
Newel said there’s a backlog in inputting cases into the state database because data must be entered manually from faxes or emails with test results. “And the system was down yesterday,” she added.
Mimi Hall, director of the county’s Health Services Agency, said she expects “well over” 1,000 cases by July 27.
She noted the “exponential growth in our case rate,” and test result turnaround taking 7 to 10 days, “which makes it very difficult to contact trace.”
At the outset of the pandemic in March, the county’s strategy was to expand the number of staff to investigate newly confirmed positive cases, have them isolate, find out who they might have exposed, and then call those individuals so they could get tested.
With the test result lag caused by a worldwide shortage of a chemical used in the lab test and a huge increase in cases, the initial approach is no longer working.
“You cannot contract trace or test your way out of it — it’s not containable,” Hall said.
She said the county has “under a dozen” clusters, which means three or more cases connected to an industry.
Employers Can Help
The new strategy is to ask employers to identify contacts of the affected worker.
“Once someone’s positive, they know before we do,” Hall said. “We need to get everybody’s help.”
For a sample employee notification letter and a contact tracing form, see http://santacruzhealth.org/HSAHome/HSADivisions/PublicHealth/CommunicableDiseaseControl/CoronavirusHome/PublicInformation/Employers.aspx
The virus spreads at workplaces when employees take breaks together and eat together without masks, according to Hall, who said she had not seen the virus passed between employees and the public.
Asked if attendance at protests or memorials had spread the virus, Newel said she had not seen evidence of that.
“It’s gatherings, family celebrations in backyards,” she said.
Don’t Kill Grandma
More than half the new cases are millennials, young people age 18 to 34, prompting concern from the Santa Cruz County Business Council, which will host a webinar, “Don’t Kill Grandma,” from 6-7:30 p.m. Wednesday July 29 on EventBrite.
The session will cover how to have fun with friends safely, with time for questions. Those who RSVP on EventBrite.com will be entered to win a mask; 120 are available.
Though the latest case numbers look daunting and have drawn state scrutiny with Newel expecting Santa Cruz County to land on the watch list in 10 days – which would force hair salons, barbershops gyms and churches to halt indoor services and offer outdoor services – Newel offered a way out.
“At any point, we could again flatten the curve,” she said, adding that if people wore face coverings, stayed six feet away from people outside their household and stopped gathering, “we’d be done in 4-6 weeks.”
Hall elaborated on the county’s decision to allocate close to $1 million in federal CARES Act for lab equipment for UC Santa Cruz and for county labs to boost testing capacity. Then specimens from clinics could be sent to UCSC or processing.
But it won’t happen overnight.
“We haven’t purchased the equipment yet,” Hall said.
New Hires
She also explained the long onboarding process for 23 people newly hired as contract tracers boosting that workforce to 69.
“It’s not like you hire them and they start tomorrow,” she said.
Employees must undergo a security clearance, complete a 20-hour training, which can take a week, and then participate in additional training to learn the CalConnect system for tracking cases.
Hall said another issue is the county furloughs, which affects the Health Services Agency and creation of teams with new hires working together with experienced investigators.
After COVID-free months at the jail, skilled nursing homes, and shelters for the homeless, cases are popping up in those places: A positive test for an inmate entering the jail, cases that nursing homes where elderly residents are more likely to have a severe case, and eight staff and overnight guests tested positive at the Salvation Army shelter in Watsonville.
Newel said she was not aware of any outbreaks in the Mixteco community in South County and she applauded the efforts of Salud Para La Gente around Watsonville, keeping cases among farm workers “relatively scarce.”