Eden Health District COVID-19 Bulletin
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“We need to continue to not just bend the curve, but flatten the curve
."
Gov. Gavin Newsom, April 16, 2020
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Alameda County:
1,164
Contra Costa County:
693
California:
31,530
U.S.:
761,991
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Alameda County:
42
Contra Costa County:
20
California:
1,178
U.S.:
40,724
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We areproud 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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SF Chronicle, April 18, 2020
Your phone rings. The caller says she’s from the Department of Public Health. You’ve been exposed to someone who has coronavirus, she says. She asks whether you’ve had any symptoms, and if you have any health problems like diabetes or heart disease that might put you at risk of serious illness. Then she says, you’ll need to quarantine yourself for 14 days. When the Bay Area finally emerges from sheltering in place, those phone calls will be part of the first line of defense against a new outbreak of the coronavirus.
Mercury News, April 20, 2020
Marc Gannon, chief operating officer of Fremont’s Tri-City Health Center, which serves about 26,000 patients in Fremont, Hayward, Union City, Newark, and San Leandro — 37 % of whom are on MediCal or uninsured and the majority of whom live below 200% of the federal poverty level — says the organization changed its business model “essentially overnight” from in-person visits to telehealth appointments. But the clinic is still suffering declines in revenue. In-patient visits have decreased by about 35% since the start of the pandemic and Gannon says they are considering reducing staffing to manage the financial hit.
East Bay Times, April 20, 2020
On the island of Alameda, the city’s food bank no longer restricts its resources solely to residents. Over the past month, the agency has seen its drive-through food distribution site grow from serving 63 cars a day to more than 500. “We’re not turning people away or asking for IDs,” Cindy Houts, executive director of the Alameda Food Bank, said. “It’s a Herculean effort and it’s a little terrifying to think that the numbers might continue to go up, but we’ll keep giving out food as long as we can.”
SF Chronicle, April 19, 2020
Aggressive social distancing works. As a result of the order, the number of confirmed coronavirus patients in intensive care units in the nine Bay Area counties dropped by 10% on Friday compared with a week earlier. The total number of hospitalized patients was 405, down 11% from a week earlier.
Berkeleyside, April 17, 2020
UC Berkeley researchers want to understand much more about asymptomatic transmission of the coronavirus in the East Bay. The researchers will come up with a 5,000-person group representative of the population in the East Bay, on the bay side, from Hercules through Oakland. Beginning in early May, they will mail those subjects home-testing kits five times each over the course of the next several months.
Mission Local, April 18, 2020
San Francisco public health officials will launch a massive campaign to test as many residents as possible in an area with some 5,700 residents who live between South Van Ness and Harrison Streets from Cesar Chavez to 23rd Street, according to fliers distributed in the testing area. The campaign, a collaboration that includes UCSF, the Latino Task Force for COVID-19 and the SF Department of Public Health, will take place over four days starting on April 23.
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Nature, April 19, 2020
Widespread antibody testing in Santa Clara County by researchers from Stanford University has revealed a much higher prevalence of coronavirus infection than official figures suggested. An
analysis of the blood of some 3,300 people living in Santa Clara county
in early April found that one in every 66 people had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. On the basis of that finding, the researchers estimate that between 48,000 and 82,000 of the county’s roughly 2 million inhabitants were infected with the virus at that time, numbers that contrast sharply with the official case count of some 1,000 people reported in early April. Some scientists have raised
concerns about the accuracy of kits
used in such studies because most have not been rigorously assessed to confirm they are reliable.
East Bay Times, April 20, 2020
Critics claim the study’s methodology is dangerously flawed and question the political motives of the Stanford-led team. In response, on Sunday, the study’s authors said they are planning to soon release a detailed appendix that addresses many of the criticisms and incorporates many of the suggestions into the paper itself.
STAT, April 20, 2020
Many serological tests aren’t like pregnancy tests, with a yes or no result. They will reveal the levels of antibodies in a person’s blood. And that’s where things can get a bit trickier. At this point, scientists can’t say for sure what level of antibodies might be required for a person to be protected from a second Covid-19 case. It’s not just whether someone is immune themselves. The next assumption is that people who have antibodies cannot spread the virus to others. Again, that hasn’t been shown yet.
Washington Post, April 19, 2020
The Food and Drug Administration, criticized for slowness in
authorizing tests
to detect coronavirus infections, has taken a strikingly different approach to antibody tests, allowing more than 90 on the market without prior review, including some marketed fraudulently and of dubious quality, according to testing experts and the agency itself.
Associated Press, April 20, 2020
A flood of new research suggests that far more people have had the coronavirus without any symptoms, fueling hope that it will turn out to be much less lethal than originally feared. While that’s clearly good news, it also means it’s impossible to know who around you may be contagious. The head of the CDC
says
25% of infected people might not have symptoms.
The Guardian, April 18, 2020
Humanity will have to live with the threat of coronavirus “for the foreseeable future” and adapt accordingly because there is no guarantee that a vaccine can be successfully developed, one of the world’s leading experts on the disease has warned. The stark message was delivered by David Nabarro, professor of global health at Imperial College, London.
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Shopping for Food During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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"We want to reassure consumers that there is currently no evidence of human or animal food or food packaging being associated with transmission of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This particular coronavirus causes respiratory illness and is spread from person-to-person, unlike food borne gastrointestinal or GI viruses, such as norovirus and hepatitis A that often make people ill through contaminated food."
However, b
efore eating, rinse fresh fruits and vegetables under running tap water, including those with skins and rinds that are not eaten. Scrub firm produce with a clean produce brush. For canned goods, remember to clean lids before opening.
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Cal Matters, April 20, 2020
For the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began,
California released the number of COVID-19 cases in nursing homes
, showing that roughly 10% of the state’s 31,527 confirmed cases are found among the staff and patients at care centers for the elderly. Still, the data have some glaring holes,
The Los Angeles Times reported
.
The data only include information from 86% of California’s 1,224 skilled nursing facilities; it doesn’t reveal how many residents have died from COVID-19; and data from smaller facilities are incomplete.
Mercury News, April 17, 2020
UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Kaiser Permanente researchers analyzed more than 1,000 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in California and Washington within the Kaiser system. The study found that long COVID-19 patient hospital stays, especially for those that don’t ultimately survive, could burden the health system during a spike in cases, particularly if jurisdictions loosen shelter-in-place orders.
LA Times, April 19, 2020
The second surge of influenza infections in 1918 hit both Los Angeles and San Francisco and killed more people than the first wave. “The really important lesson of 1918 is to keep interventions in place as long as possible,” said Alex Navarro, assistant director of the Center for the History of Medicine. “Because once the controls are removed, it’s very difficult to reinstate them.”
Cal Matters, April 17, 2020
California aims to help businesses shuttered by the coronavirus pandemic by assisting them with inventory problems and credit card debt they’ve amassed. Those are among the ideas to be considered by a new,
80-member task force
that Gov. Gavin Newsom created today to guide the state’s economic reopening and recovery. nd from airlines to utilities.
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Bloomberg, April 20, 2020
Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the White House coronavirus task force, pushed back against protesters demonstrating against stay-at-home orders, saying the U.S. economy won’t recover until the virus is “under control.” His comments on ABC’s “Good Morning America” contrasted with remarks made by President Donald Trump, who has encouraged the protests.
Reuters, April 20, 2020
Protests flared in U.S. states on Sunday over stay-at-home orders while governors disputed President Donald Trump’s claims they have enough tests for the novel coronavirus and should quickly reopen their economies. “These people love our country,” Trump, who has touted a thriving economy as the best case for his re-election in November, told a briefing in Washington on Sunday. “They want to get back to work.”
Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2020
Amid efforts to expand coronavirus testing, laboratory operators and state health officials are navigating a thicket of supply shortages, widespread test backlogs, unexpected snafus and unreliable results, prolonging the national crisis. The private sector hasn’t so far been able to deliver nearly enough tests to meet the huge demand in the U.S., more than six weeks after the FDA allowed private companies to manufacture test kits and put them to use without having to be approved.
NY Times, April 17, 2020
New estimates by researchers at Harvard University suggest that the United States cannot safely reopen unless it conducts more than three times the number of coronavirus tests it is currently administering over the next month. That level of testing is necessary to identify the majority of people who are infected and isolate them from people who are healthy, according to the researchers. About 20 percent of those tested so far were positive for the virus, a rate that the researchers say is too high.
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NY Times, April 20, 2020
The spread suggests that it is unrealistic for the United States, Europe and the rest of the world to return to the way they were anytime soon, even if viral curves appear to flatten.
Euronews, April 19, 2020
Today Europe's COVID-19 death toll has passed 100,000. As of Sunday, the continent has had more than 1 million confirmed cases of coronavirus. Italy, Spain, France and the United Kingdom are by far the countries that have reported most deaths. However, signs of relative improvement came from Italy and Spain today, after they both recorded the lowest daily death toll in about a month.
Reuters, April 20, 2020
New Zealand’s hard and fast lockdown approach, shutting its borders and announcing a state of national emergency before it recorded a coronavirus death. Just nine new cases of COVID-19 were recorded on Monday and no new deaths, taking the total to 1,440 cases with 12 fatalities.
Washington Post, April 19, 2020
It is in
the world’s poorer nations
, which can’t afford subsidies for those who lose jobs, that are most vulnerable to heightened unrest, said Cátia Batista, professor of economics at Lisbon’s Nova University. More than 2 billion people worldwide depend on daywork to survive, and for many of them, not working often means not eating.
Politico, April 20, 2020
In the country of 11 million people, the coronavirus has so far
caused more than 5,000 deaths,
the highest per capita deaths in Europe.
While most countries are only counting confirmed deaths in hospitals, Belgium is including all potential deaths in nursing homes, even if COVID-19 has not been confirmed as the cause of death.
The Guardian, April 19, 2020
As the warnings grew louder, Boris Johnson’s government was distracted by Brexit. On testing, contact tracing and equipment supply, there was a failure to prepare.
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Bloomberg, April 19, 2020
As Covid-19 started spreading across the U.S., health officials made grim projections of hundreds of thousands of deaths if residents didn’t shelter in place. The worst didn’t come to pass. Hospitals, governments and companies from Seattle to New York MacGyvered their way out of the chaos. Cafeterias were transformed into medical wards, breathing tubes were recycled, ventilators were split between patients, and specialists like orthopedic surgeons and oncologists were sent straight to the emergency room.
Donald McNeil, science and health reporter, NY Times, April 18, 2020
It is not clear to anyone where this crisis is leading us. The consensus view of nearly two dozen experts is that there will be no quick return to our previous lives. But there is hope for managing the scourge now and in the long term.
LA Times, April 19, 2020
From the first international reports of the virus’ appearance in China in late December until Trump
declared a nationwide emergency
in mid-March, his administration
delayed or bungled
basic but crucial steps to contain the spread of infections and prepare the country for a pandemic, according to a Times review of internal government records and interviews with administration officials and outside experts. In that key early period, many of the Trump presidency’s most deeply ingrained characteristics, its distrust of the federal bureaucracy, internal personality conflicts, lack of a formal policymaking process and Trump’s own insistence on controlling the public message,
severely hampered the federal response,
according to current and former White House officials and public health experts.
Rawstory, April 19, 2020
Another wave of the virus came in Dec. 1918 and the health officials told people to start wearing masks again, but people refused. Businesses were worried about their Christmas sales, so they opposed the efforts, as did the Culinary Workers Union. Residents were over it, and they’d already been dealing with it for months. Police began fining or arresting people for not wearing masks, which sparked lawsuits from people claiming it was their Constitutional right to risk their own lives.
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On the lighter side: the joy of music
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Donate PPE To Area Hospitals
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Hospitals throughout the East Bay are experiencing
a shortage of medical supplies. They are seeking donations of new Protective Personal Equipment (masks, gowns and other products). For more information visit:
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Your feedback is welcome. Please share the Bulletin.
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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.
Please share our bulletin with your contacts. If you would like to submit feedback or stories on the local response to the pandemic,
please contact bulletin editor Stephen Cassidy at
stephen.cassidy@ethd.org
. And if you are operating a local food bank and would like your organization profiled in our nonprofit spotlight, please contact us.
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.
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