Eden Health District COVID-19 Bulletin
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“The bottom line is this: there are people out there without symptoms who are shedding virus and spreading the disease.”
Dr. Ashish Jha, Director of Harvard Global Health Institute,
6/9/20
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Words from the Wise: Keep Hope in Your Heart
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Coping with grief at the loss of a beloved grandparent and uncle, 13-year-old Sadie Cinader of San Francisco has some tips on how to console grief-stricken youngsters.
“It’s harder for a kid to wrap his or her head around losing someone,” Sadie said. “Adults seem a lot more used to it. They’ve seen it before. A kid hasn’t.”
So Sadie, a seventh-grader at the Hamlin School, decided to get into the grief counseling trade.
“Never tell someone that time will make things better or that you understand,” she said. “Time may not make things better, and you may not understand.” The thing to tell a grieving person is that you’re here to listen, she said, and to do anything you can do.
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For the past few months, Sadie has been assembling “grief kits” for children who have lost a loved one in the pandemic.
Using funds she has saved from her allowance and lemonade and cookie sales, Sadie buys stuffed animals, journals, pens, and squeeze balls for each kit which also includes a handwritten note from Sadie herself. “Keep hope in your heart,” says the note. “Lots of people care about you.”
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Alameda County:
3,985
Contra Costa County:
1,774
California:
134,097
U.S.:
1,968,221
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Alameda County:
102
Contra Costa County:
43
California:
4,664
U.S.:
111,375
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Press Release, June 8, 2020
The Eden Health District, Alameda County and the City of San Leandro have started free Covid-19 testing at the Marina Community Center located at 15301 Wicks Boulevard, San Leandro, California. Details at end of the bulletin.
SF Chronicle, June 9, 2020
The Bay Area is rolling forward with reopening the economy even as coronavirus case counts remain comparable to, and in some places far above, the earliest days of the outbreak when the state made the unprecedented move to begin sheltering in place. Several counties in the Bay Area, which remains more conservative than the rest of the state in its pandemic response, are moving to reopen at a steady clip despite recent surges in cases. The region as a whole is reporting as many new cases each week now as in March, reversing several weeks of declining numbers.
East Bay Times, June 9, 2020
After nearly three months, Contra Costa, which has had the lowest number of COVID-19 cases in the five-county Bay Area, loosened lockdown restrictions beginning at 5 p.m. June 5 to allow outside dining at restaurants that follow health, safety and social distancing guidelines. Santa Clara County, site of the nation’s first COVID-19 death, was
the first to reopen
for outdoor dining on Friday, followed by
Contra Costa County
and San Mateo County, which lifted restrictions Saturday. Alameda County officials have yet to remove that county’s ban on outdoor dining. In San Francisco County, dining alfresco is scheduled to restart June 15.
Website, June 8, 2020
To limit unsafe overcrowding and maintain social distancing, the East Bay Park District has temporarily closed some parks and parking lots/staging areas until further notice. However, most parks and trails remain accessible for walking, hiking, biking, and horseback riding. Visit the
park tracker map
for the latest information on what's open and closed.
Website, June 8, 2020
Water is perishable, just like any food or drink. When a business or facility closes or limits operations, water becomes stagnant in pipes and plumbing systems, and the chlorine gradually dissipates. That can lead to the growth of pathogenic microorganisms, notably Legionella, which can cause serious disease. This is
fixable with proper cleaning and flushing
of the entire plumbing system when a building or facility is returned to service after any prolonged closure.
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NY Times, June 9, 2020
Tara Parker-Pope, founding editor of Well, offers some basic rules to guide us in lower the risk of infection while enjoying life as we wait for the virus to get under control:
- Check the health of your state and community
- Limit the number of your close contacts
- Manage your exposure budget (risk is cumulative)
- Keep higher risk activities as short as possible
- Keeping taking pandemic precautions
NY Times, June 9, 2020
A top expert at the World Health Organization on Tuesday walked back her earlier assertion that transmission of the coronavirus by people who do not have symptoms is “very rare.” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who made the original comment at a W.H.O. briefing on Monday, said that it was based on just two or three studies and that it was a “misunderstanding” to say asymptomatic transmission is rare globally. Scientists had sharply criticized the W.H.O. for creating confusion on the issue, given the far-ranging public policy implications.
Harvard Global Health Institute, June 9, 2020
The WHO created confusion yesterday when it reported that asymptomatic patients
r
arely spread the disease. All of the best evidence suggests that people without symptoms can and do readily spread SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In fact, some evidence suggest that people may be most infectious in the days before they become symptomatic. The implications here are considerable: because people without symptoms can and do spread the disease, we need to continue to all wear masks when around others, maintain 6 feet distance, and wash hands regularly.
- Asymptomatic refers to a person who carries the virus but never experiences any symptoms. Study results vary a but on average about 20 percent of people infected with COVID-19 never develop symptoms.
- Pre-symptomatic refers to a person who carries the virus and will eventually get sick but does not yet experience any symptoms.
- Several studies show that both asymptomatic and presymptomatic people can spread the virus. One important question is just how infectious they are, do they infect a lot of people, or just a few? Some modeling studies suggest that 40-60 percent of spread is from people before they had any symptoms.
Mission Local, June 9, 2020
For those confused by changing guidelines, Dr. Arthur Reingold, department head of epidemiology and biostatistics at UC Berkeley, had one message: “For a completely new infectious agent, like the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the reality is that there’s an incredibly fast evolution of knowledge. Virtually every day, new information becomes available that might change our understanding of things."
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LA Times, June 9, 2020
No single source of infection appears to have played a larger role in seeding the region’s coronavirus outbreak than the
Grand Princess cruise ship
, which sailed from San Francisco to Mexico and Hawaii twice in February and March. The new study suggests that at least one passenger on the first of those two sailings, a person whose infection
originated in Washington state
, left behind enough virus to seed the infections of most of the dozens of people who became sick during the second sailing. Those passengers, in turn, carried the virus into San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, Solano and San Joaquin counties, among other places elsewhere in the state and country, including Minnesota.
NY Times, June 9, 2020
On May 18, Gov. Newsom
announced
that state health officials would relax their criteria for counties that want to reopen their economies faster, provided that they
meet
public health guidelines.
Going forward
, officials said they were
no longer requiring
counties to have zero Covid-19 deaths for two weeks. The New York Times provides a guide to the reopening of the California economy.
LA Times, June 9, 2020
Social distancing is challenging, if not impossible, for many other farmworkers in Salinas, the city where John Steinbeck was born. As of Monday afternoon, Covid-19 had infected a reported 751 people in Monterey County, and many of the cases are concentrated on the east side of Salinas. It is an area that suffers from a lack of affordable housing, with families crammed into homes and renting out whatever space they can, sharing bathrooms, living rooms and kitchens.
LA Times, June 9, 2020
Orange County’s chief health officer resigned Monday after several intense weeks defending her countywide mask order in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The
mask order
, which required that people wear cloth face coverings while in public,
quickly stirred controversy
in the county after Dr. Nichole Quick mandated it in late May. The order has faced scrutiny from residents and elected officials who have questioned the need for the widespread use of face coverings as businesses in the region reopen. That ire at times was directly aimed at Quick.
KQED, June 8, 2020
Yosemite National Park is officially
reopening to the public
at 7 a.m. on Thursday, June 11, after almost three months of closure due to the coronavirus pandemic. As a temporary measure to manage numbers inside the park, anyone wishing to visit just for the day must
purchase a pass online first
, or be turned away upon arrival. Day use vehicle reservations will go on sale through
recreation.gov
on June 9.
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Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2020
Near the end of a decadelong economic expansion, African-Americans were finally finding some financial stability. Unemployment had reached record lows, and their wages had begun rising modestly. The coronavirus pandemic and shutdown brought all of that, one of the most promising economies in recent memory for African-American, to a crushing end. The black unemployment rate, which at 5.8% in February was near the lowest since records began in 1972, tripled to 16.8% in May, according to the Labor Department.
Bloomberg, June 9, 2020
At least 60 food-processing facilities outside the meatpacking industry have seen outbreaks, with more than 1,000 workers diagnosed with the virus, according to a new
study
from Environmental Working Group. These are the first national numbers of their kind. The advocacy group compiled its figures using local media reports because there are no federal agencies reporting the data. The true total is almost certainly higher. Fruit and vegetable packers, bakers and dairy workers are risking infection as the virus spreads through processing plants where employees deemed essential have mostly remained on the job during the pandemic, sometimes laboring in close quarters.
NPR, June 8, 2020
Texas reported a record-breaking number of COVID-19 hospitalizations Monday as the governor plans to
reopen more businesses and double capacity
.
Texas
figures show
1,935
people were admitted as hospital patients for coronavirus-related treatment. That is up from a previous record of 1,888 on May 5. Gov. Greg Abbott led most of the nation's governors in allowing Texas to lift statewide stay-at-home orders and urging businesses to reopen at limited capacity on May 1. But even in states where officials left stringent restrictions in place, the number of newly diagnosed cases are rising.
About
20 states
, including California and Arizona, have also reported a rise in COVID-19 cases in recent weeks, according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, state leaders have come under increasing pressure to restart the economy.
NY Times, June 8, 2020
Casinos along the Strip last week reopened their doors to a flood of visitors, masked and unmasked but equally eager to test their luck after a 78-day hiatus. An over-the-top water show set to Elvis’s “Viva Las Vegas” at the Bellagio Hotel marked the occasion, and a marquee sign at the Aria Resort & Casino summed up Sin City’s new social distancing ethos: “Think dirty thoughts, but keep your hands clean.” Reopening regulations require casinos to notify health authorities if they learn of a coronavirus case at their property. But they are under no obligation to follow up with guests after they leave, and different resorts have adopted different policies.
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A Longer-than-Expected Convalescence
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When he entered Stollwood Convalescent Hospital in early March to recover from hip replacement surgery, 73-year-old Jim Carr expected to be there a month or so before heading home to Davis. But within a few weeks, he was the first patient in Stollwood diagnosed with Covid-19, which eventually hit 32 patients and 34 staff in the small hospital. He finally went home last week to his wife of 46 years, walking out to the delighted cheers of the staff. The next day, the hospital had another reason to celebrate: not one case of Covid remained in the facility.
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The Guardian, June 9, 2020
Coronavirus may have been present and spreading in Wuhan as early as August last year, according to a study that analyzed satellite imagery of car parks outside major hospitals and search engine data. The
study
, by researchers from Harvard medical school, Boston University of Public Health and Boston children’s hospital, looked at images captured between January 2018 and April 2020 and found a “steep increase” in vehicle counts starting in August 2019 and peaking in December 2019. Between September and October, five of the six hospitals observed had their highest daily volume of cars in the period analyzed.
The Atlantic, June 9, 2020
Vilnius isn’t the same city it was before the coronavirus. The Lithuanian capital has transformed into an
open-air café
, where hundreds of restaurants and bars can set up shop in its plazas, squares, and streets and serve customers from a safe distance. It also briefly operated a
drive-in movie theater
at the city’s idle airport, where people could gather in their cars to watch films projected against a giant screen. And next month, it will
ban most cars
from its Old Town to allocate more space to pedestrians.
El Pais, June 9, 2020
A
new study
published in the journal
Nature
has calculated how many lives were saved in 11 European countries thanks to confinement policies during the Covid-19 pandemic. Researchers estimate that the measures imposed first in Italy, then in Spain and later in the other countries under analysis may have saved over three million lives, including around 450,000 in Spain. This kind of model, however, is controversial because it does not faithfully reproduce the complexity of an evolving pandemic in individual countries, with the differences inherent to each one.
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STAT, June 9, 2020
The demonstrations sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have prompted a reckoning over racism and police brutality. But, among those in the medical communities, there have also been calls for urgent action to address the role that systemic racism plays in health disparities among Black people. “People of color right now are more likely to be infected, and we’re more likely to die. What we’re seeing here is the direct result of racism,” said Camara Phyllis Jones, an epidemiologist who recently served as president of the American Public Health Association.
Associated Press, June 8, 2020
Once again, racial inequality underlies rage and despair, especially because the unrest coincides with an economic and health calamity, one that’s falling hardest, yet again, on African Americans. “We’ve got a perfect storm,” said Cecelia Rouse, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. “Covid is wreaking economic havoc” for African Americans. Black Americans are far more likely than whites to die of Covid-19. They work disproportionately in low-paying service jobs, the ones that were slashed when restaurants and movie theaters closed as a health precaution and customers stayed away from hotels and airports.
Dr. Louise Aronson, Professor of Medicine at UCSF, June 8, 2020
While older people can go out, most aren’t. Many are terrified by the risk of death from Covid-19 for those of advanced age. Others are dutifully following local and national guidance to stay inside. The problem with this approach to Covid-19 is that it assumes that the coronavirus is the only threat to health and well-being. Every day the fallacy of this assumption becomes more apparent.
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Alameda County Data and Resources
: 1,071 n
ew cases have been recorded over the last two weeks. The number of confirmed infections is currently doubling every 34.3 days.
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Contra Costa County Data and Resources
: 370 new cases have been recorded over last 2 weeks. The number of confirmed infections is currently doubling every 31.1 days.
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Top 8 Locations of Cases in Alameda County
, data as of 6/9/20
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Oakland:
1,549
Hayward:
731
Eden MAC:
247
Fremont: 202
San Leandro:
176
Union City:
142
Castro Valley:
128
Newark:
120
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Top 8 Locations of Cases in Contra Costa County
, data as of 6/9/20
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Richmond: 402
Concord: 206
Antioch:
147
San Pablo:
142
Pittsburgh:
124
Bay Point:
96
Pleasant Hill:
71
Brentwood:
68
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We have posted information on food pantries and food services in the cities of Hayward and San Leandro and unincorporated Alameda County including Castro Valley and San Lorenzo. You can access the information
here on our website
.
Alameda County has also released an
interactive map
listing food distributions and other social services.
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We are proud to partner with the
East Bay Community Foundation
in publishing this bulletin. Through donations to its
COVID-19 Response Fund,
the EBCF provides grants to East Bay nonprofit organizations delivering essential services to those most impacted by the economic fallout from the pandemic.
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Press Release: Alameda County Partners with City of San Leandro and Eden Health District to Bring FREE COVID-19 Testing to San Leandro
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June 8, 2020 - The Eden Health District, Alameda County and the City of San Leandro announced today that free COVID-19 testing will start on Tuesday, June 9, at the Marina Community Center located at 15301 Wicks Boulevard, San Leandro, California.
The testing is available to all frontline and essential workers, seniors, persons with diabetes, hypertension and other health conditions making them vulnerable to COVID-19,
even if they do not have any COVID-19 symptoms
.
The testing is also available to all persons with COVID-19 symptoms. These symptoms include, separately or in combination, cough, fever, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat or a new loss of taste or smell.
Testing is free and no insurance is required. People will not be asked their immigration status. Testing is open to all Alameda County residents regardless of where they live.
“This site adds testing capacity to an area with limited testing options and is adjacent to communities that are being greatly impacted by COVID-19,” said Alameda County District 3 Supervisor Wilma Chan. “Partnering with the City of San Leandro and the Eden Health District on this site deepens our connections to residents who need to hear about this new testing opportunity.”
For the first week of testing at the Marina Community Center, the dates and hours of operation are as follows: Tuesday, June 9 through Saturday, June 13 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Starting on Monday, June 15, the testing center will be open Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Testing at the Marina Community Center is expected to continue through August 2020.
Testing is by appointment only and can be made by visiting the website
https://lhi.care/covidtesting
or calling toll free 1-888-634-1123. Both the website and phone line provide information in English and Spanish.
“Safeguarding the health and wellness of our residents as we navigate the challenges posed by the pandemic is one of San Leandro’s highest priorities.” stated Mayor of San Leandro Pauline Cutter. “We are grateful to partner with Alameda County and the Eden Health District in establishing free Covid-19 testing in San Leandro. Anyone with a reason to be tested is welcome.”
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“The Eden Health District continues to seize opportunities to leverage public resources to help slow the spread of the coronavirus in the community while maximizing service to all parts of our district.” stated
Eden Health District
Director Charles Gilcrest. “We were honored to assist the City of Hayward in continuing its COVID-19 testing program and are pleased to join with Alameda County and the City of San Leandro in bringing a testing center to San Leandro.”
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To determine where to locate new testing sites, the State evaluated underserved areas for known disparities and median income. The County then overlaid its own data and leveraged partnerships with community-based organizations and clinics to ensure appropriate follow-up care and other resources.
Increased access to testing is a cornerstone of Alameda County’s COVID-19 response strategy, which includes contact tracing to identify cases early, and health and social supports for people who need to isolate or quarantine.
The County is also serving as a resource to provide much needed testing supplies to clinics, hospitals and other entities, like Skilled Nursing Facilities, that serve vulnerable populations in order to equip more sites to test effectively and support increased access.
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Your feedback is welcome. Please share the Bulletin.
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The
Eden Health District Board of Directors
are Gordon Galvan, Chair, Mariellen Faria, Vice Chair, Charles Gilcrest, Secretary, Roxann Lewis and Pam Russo. The Chief Executive Officer is Mark Friedman.
The Eden Health District is committed to ensuring that policy makers and community members receive accurate and timely information to help make the best policy and personal choices to meet and overcome the challenges posed
by
the Covid-19 pandemic.
Each bulletin includes a summary of the top health, Bay Area, California, national and international news on the pandemic plus links to a diverse range of commentary and analysis. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday the bulletin includes an education section.
We welcome your feedback on our bulletin. Please contact editor
Stephen Cassidy
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