Eden Health District COVID-19 Bulletin
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“This is one big forest fire that keeps burning and looking for wood to burn, and that happens to be humans. We have months and months to go with this virus yet.”
Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy,
6/28/20
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Two sisters wanted to lift lonely seniors’ spirits; their organization has sent 14,000 letters.
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When the pandemic hit, Shreya and Saffron Patel started FaceTiming their grandparents almost every day. Their grandmother had not left her apartment in London in nearly four months. When the Patel sisters, who live in Boston, spoke to their grandmother, they noticed her mood improve. She texted them about the cards she had received from friends and showed them to
Shreya and Saffron
during their video calls.
Inspired by their calls with their grandmother,
Shreya and Saffron
started
Letters Against Isolation
in April to send cards to seniors at care centers, where residents have lost in-person contact with family and friends because of the coronavirus.
“We wanted to share that joy [our grandmother] was feeling with other seniors,” said Saffron.
The Patel sisters reached out to a few local nursing homes, expecting maybe one to respond. Instead, several agreed and hoped to receive a combined 200 cards. The sisters reached out to others asking for help.
As the network of volunteers continued to grow, so did the ability to connect with seniors.
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The organization has sent more than 14,000 cards and has partnered with 26 care centers across the country. It has become a sophisticated and well-organized operation, with about 1,400 volunteers around the world writing letters.
Volunteers choose the center to which they would like to send letters, so they can pick one nearby or in their home states. Some have even recommended the organization partner with facilities where their family members live.
The coronavirus helped the Patels better understand the problem of senior loneliness, but they know that even after its risks have diminished, there will be residents at care centers across the country who would benefit from a cheerful letter. “I think it’s important to tell seniors that we’re thinking of them,” Saffron said, “and someone cares about them.”
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Alameda County:
5,762
Contra Costa County:
2,802
California:
215,580
U.S.:
2,562,921
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Alameda County:
133
Contra Costa County:
74
California:
5,934
U.S.:
125,927
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Statewide Hospitalizations from Covid-19 Reach New Peak
The graph below shows patients with confirmed coronavirus test results.
Hospitalizations jumping by 48%
over the two-week period ending June 26
. An additional 1,370 patients suspected of having Covid-19 are hospitalized in California according to
state data.
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Mercury News, June 29, 2020
Alameda, Santa Clara and San Francisco have fueled a rise in hospitalizations across the region to levels not seen since the end of April. There were 362 patients in Bay Area hospital beds who had tested positive for Covid-19 on Saturday, the most recent day for which data was available, a 52% spike from a week ago. Those three counties account for 65% of the region’s new hospitalizations in the past week, though in at least San Francisco, a portion of that has come from non-residents being transferred into hospitals with more capacity.
Focus on Bay Area Contact Tracing
Contact tracing is key to corralling outbreaks and limiting the spread of the coronavirus as the Bay Area reopens. Public health case investigators call people who tested positive and work to quarantine those individuals, while also trying to identify and call family, co-workers, friends and others who may have been exposed.
SF Chronicle, June 29, 2020
The Bay Area’s efforts to track coronavirus cases and prevent the spread of disease are showing early signs of success, although plans to directly contact a vast majority of people who tested positive still face daunting challenges. Many local counties are approaching their goal of contacting 90% of the region’s positive cases, while others are still scrambling to ramp up their contact-tracing operations.
“We knew early on that there were going to be challenges with effectively doing case investigation and contact tracing with this number of cases in a pandemic of this scale,” said Dr. Nick Moss, acting director of Alameda County’s Division of Communicable Disease Control and Prevention. “This is really unprecedented compared to what health departments are usually doing.”
East Bay Times, June 29, 2020
While health officials report some success in beefing up the ranks of contact sleuths, there are indications that many infected people and those they may have exposed are falling through the cracks. That has alarmed some doctors in the Bay Area, who cite recent examples of infected or exposed patients who were never interviewed about their contacts or notified of their potential exposure.
In Oakland, Dr. Noha Aboelata, chief executive officer of Roots Community Health, cited among recent examples a patient who tested positive June 12 who hadn’t heard from public health in at least a week, and another she spoke with Thursday hadn’t been contacted in 15 days. She and other doctors and community leaders wrote Alameda County supervisors and health officials demanding more information about the contact tracing effort.
Contra Costa Health Services Signals It May Delay Reopening Timeline
In a
press release
issued last Friday,
Contra Costa Health Services (CCHS) stated it is "evaluating whether the county should continue its
current reopening timeline
, due to recent data showing COVID-19 activity is increasing in the community."
The number of Covid-19 patients in hospitals in the county increased by 42% over the past week. Further, positivity rate of coronavirus test results, the percentage of Covid-19 tests that came back positive, has also increased. The agency stated it "is closely monitoring key data indicators that show how the virus is spreading in the county and will announce a decision about the timeline Monday."
SFist, June 26, 2020
Things have changed in four days, and after announcing Monday that outdoor bars, nail salons, barbershops, and hair salons were all going to get to reopen ahead of schedule thanks to stable COVID data in San Francisco, the Mayor's Office is pulling back once again.
SF Chronicle, June 28, 2020
As recently as last month, San Quentin
prison reported zero coronavirus cases among its incarcerated population. However, that changed after 121 men were transferred in late May to San Quentin from the California Institution for Men in Chino, the site of the prison system’s deadliest outbreak. By Sunday afternoon, 871 prisoners and 89 staff members were confirmed to be infected.
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NY Times, June 27, 2020
The number of coronavirus infections in many parts of the United States is more than 10 times higher than the reported rate, according to
data released on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Covid Tracking Project, June 26, 2020
Covid-19 death data lags behind testing data in ways we mostly understand. What we only partly understand is how an infection rate that seems to be skewing younger will affect the death toll in surging regional outbreaks. New daily positive cases in the US only began to exceed the plateau of the previous two weeks around June 18-19, which means that an increase in deaths as a result of the rise in new cases would not be expected to show up until July.
Vox, June 26, 2020
What exactly does “outdoors” mean? Just how safe is it to eat and drink in the company of other people? How do we eat or drink with a mask on? Should we even be eating and drinking outside at all? Vox reporter Alex Abad-Santos asks health experts and bar owners the practical (and maybe impractical) questions we have surrounding the new rules.
Washington Post, June 29, 2020
When the first
coronavirus
cases in Chicago appeared in January, they bore the same genetic signatures as a germ that emerged in China weeks before. But as Egon Ozer, an infectious-disease specialist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, examined the genetic structure of virus samples from local patients, he noticed something different. A change in the virus was appearing again and again. This mutation, associated with outbreaks in Europe and New York, eventually took over the city.
At least four laboratory experiments suggest that the mutation makes the virus more infectious, although none of that work has been peer-reviewed. Another unpublished study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory asserts that patients with the G variant actually have more virus in their bodies, making them more likely to spread it to others.
BBC, June 29, 2020
People who were seriously ill in hospital with coronavirus need to be urgently screened for post-traumatic stress disorder, leading doctors say. The Covid Trauma Response Working Group, led by University College London and involving experts from south-east England, said those who had been in intensive care were most at risk. The experts said regular check ups should last at least a year. The working group highlighted research which showed 30% of patients who had suffered severe illnesses in infectious disease outbreaks in the past had gone on to develop PTSD, while depression and anxiety problems were also common.
NY Times, June 28, 2020
To a startling degree, many coronavirus patients are reporting nightmarish visions during hospitalization for Covid-19. Called hospital delirium, the phenomenon has previously been seen mostly in a subset of older patients, some of whom already had dementia, and in recent years, hospitals adopted measures to reduce it. “All of that has been erased by Covid,” said Dr. E. Wesley Ely, co-director of the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship Center at Vanderbilt University and the Nashville Veteran’s Administration Hospital, whose team developed
guidelines for hospitals to minimize delirium
.
Mercury News, June 27, 2020
While the majority of patients with mild or moderate symptoms recover promptly, new research confirms that others suffer from a lingering cluster of symptoms, possibly caused by a battle-weary immune system. Survivors describe the illness as a hit-and-run experience, where the virus infects, sickens and then vanishes, leaving a trail of destruction. Months after the virus has been cleared from their blood, they’re left with intermittent chest tightness, cough, fatigue, joint pain, cognitive problems and odd alterations in their senses of taste and smell. Covid-19 is not unique in the pathogen world; other viral or bacterial infections are known to cause long-lasting symptoms, noted UCSF’s Dr. Jeffrey Martin.
LA Times, June 24, 2020
Of the seven coronaviruses known to make humans sick, at least four have found a way to circumvent herd immunity and sustain themselves for the long haul. These viruses, all which cause variations on the common cold, leave most of their victims with immunity that wanes in little more than a year. The pool of people who are susceptible to becoming hosts is continuously renewed as infected people’s immune defenses “forget” the virus that has made them ill before. No one knows if the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 shares that trait. But a welter of studies suggests that, in many who were infected,
immunity is either weak or transient
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SF Chronicle, June 29, 2020
California reported record new daily coronavirus case counts this week and a surge in hospitalizations, as the state continues to reopen businesses and allows for more outdoor and indoor activities. Across the state, increases in case counts can be partially attributed to more widespread testing, but other factors appear to be at work.
Kaiser Health News, June 29, 2020
California prisons have emerged as raging Covid-19 hot spots, even as the state annually spends more on inmate health care than other big states spend on their entire prison systems. Yet, despite the extraordinary dedication of resources, California prison officials are struggling to contain Covid outbreaks, let alone prevent them.
Mercury News, June 28, 2020
Governor Gavin Newsom’s order Sunday to close bars in seven counties and recommend closures in eight others added to an unmistakable message: California, with over 200,000 confirmed cases and a surge of new cases in recent days, is far from finished with the novel coronavirus.
Sunday’s escalation provided the most urgent call yet to the state’s residents, a warning that scenes of bars and nightclubs packed with young people belied the strength of the virus and its danger to public health.
Orange County Register, June 29, 2020
As Orange County health officials have collected more and better data on coronavirus cases, they’ve noticed a concerning trend: a handful of zip codes in Anaheim and Santa Ana appear to be hot spots where hundreds of people have been infected, and most of the cases aren’t due to nursing home outbreaks. Residents in those areas are more likely to live in denser neighborhoods and in multi-generational or multi-family households, and many of them hold “essential” jobs in stores and restaurants, so they don’t have the luxury of working from home, they said.
Cal Matters, June 29, 2020
Approximately 16 million Californians, or 53% of all adults, have lost income since mid March. An estimated 3.5 million residents report their family lacked enough food to eat, up from 2.7 million before the pandemic. And 3.3 million have slight or no confidence that they’ll be able to pay July’s rent.
Whether California’s safety net response represents the best the state could do to keep its residents afloat or a one-two punch of overpromising and underdelivering may lie in the eyes of the beholder. For some of California’s biggest pandemic safety net programs, Cal Matters reviews how the state’s promises square with reality.
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The Hill, June 29, 2020
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said Sunday that he's "cautiously optimistic" that a coronavirus vaccine will be available by the start of 2021, but warned that the U.S. would likely not reach herd immunity if a substantial portion of the population refuses to take it.
Associated Press, June 29, 2020
Health departments around the U.S. that are using contact tracers to contain coronavirus outbreaks are scrambling to bolster their ranks amid a surge of cases and resistance to cooperation from those infected or exposed. With too few trained contact tracers to handle soaring caseloads, one hard-hit Arizona county is relying on National Guard members to pitch in. Many tracers are finding it hard to break through suspicion and apathy to convince people that compliance is crucial.
The Guardian, June 29, 2020
Demand and prices for personal protective equipment is soaring again across the U.S. as coronavirus cases continue to rise in more than half of states. As the urgency of high-profile Covid-19 outbreaks in the northeast of the country faded in late spring, so did attention to the acute PPE shortage for frontline health workers. Now one of the nation’s largest organizations donating personal protective equipment (PPE) said they have received a surge in requests from Covid-19 hotspots, especially in Texas.
BBC, June 29, 2020
The spread of coronavirus infections has taken a "swift and very dangerous turn" in the Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott warned on Sunday. "Over just the past few weeks, the daily number of cases have gone from an average of about 2,000, to more than 5,000."
NY Times, June 29, 2020
Broadway will remain closed for at least the rest of this year, and many shows are signaling that they do not expect a return to the stage until late winter or early spring. The Broadway League said Monday that theater owners and producers will refund or exchange tickets previously purchased for shows through Jan. 3. Given the unpredictability of the coronavirus pandemic, the League said it was not yet ready to specify exactly when shows will reopen.
USA Today, June 28, 2020
With cities across the nation canceling public displays this Independence Day, sales of fireworks are booming as more families opt to put on their own shows. “Fireworks sales have been unprecedented and stronger than ever in the history of my being in this industry and I’ve been in it for 50 years,” said Bruce Zoldan, CEO of Ohio-based Phantom Fireworks, which supplies thousands of retailers nationwide.
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EdSource, June 29, 2020
School districts across California are creating plans to reopen. Some of the ideas set out by the
California Department of Education
include students attending school in person two days a week or every other week and doing distance learning the other days. In some cases, districts are planning to allow families to decide whether to send their children to school or continue with distance learning from home. As schools plan to reopen, California parents are asking themselves if it is better to send their children back to school and risk them getting the coronavirus or keeping them at home to do distance learning.
LA Times, June 29, 2020
The new state budget goes beyond providing $70.5 billion in funding for K-12 schools, it sets fundamental accountability rules for a new era of distance learning in California by requiring teachers to take online attendance and document student learning. The budget bill, which Gov. Newsom is expected to sign, anticipates that schools will continue to rely heavily on online instruction when campuses reopen in the fall. It also implicitly acknowledges the deep learning losses of the last semester, especially among students from low-income families, when school systems struggled to get all students online.
SF Chronicle, June 28, 2020
Charter schools in the Bay Area received tens of millions of dollars from a federal coronavirus relief program intended for small businesses, money they say is necessary to stay afloat amid the pandemic. Some of the Bay Area charters that got federal bailout money are also backed by Silicon Valley billionaires, and the board chairman of one school conceded that taking the aid could be an “optics issue."
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USA Today, June 29, 2020
Like it or not, remote instruction and virtual learning are likely to continue for millions of children this fall. That's because most districts can't observe physical distancing with all students attending class together in-person. In the event of a spike in infections, a real possibility, as mounting cases in states such as
Texas and Florida
indicate, distance learning in affected regions likely will become universal again.
Vox, June 26, 2020
Many institutions, particularly smaller schools that are
dependent on tuition
to survive, are wary of the possibility of low enrollment numbers and declining revenue if online classes continue into the fall. While some undergraduates have expressed reservations about paying full tuition for remote learning, many students (undergraduate and graduate alike), staff, and faculty are unconvinced that reopening for the fall will be the best course of action.
NY Times, June 28, 2020
Efforts to stem the pandemic have squeezed local economies across the nation, but the threat is starting to look existential in college towns. Reliant on institutions that once seemed impervious to recession, “town and gown” communities that have evolved around rural campuses, Cornell, Amherst College, Penn State, are confronting not only Covid-19 but also major losses in population, revenue and jobs.
The Guardian, June 26, 2020
Fully reopening schools without substantial improvements in the performance of the test-and-trace system could risk a new surge in cases of Covid-19, according to calculations by UK scientific advisers. The government has been at loggerheads for weeks with teaching unions, who claim plans to reopen schools while maintaining physical distancing are fanciful.
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A warning to younger adults
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Lauren Tomaszewski took the virus seriously when it emerged. The 29-year old physical therapist and daily runner moved out of her South Philadelphia apartment to her mother’s home, where there was space for her to socially distance.
Even with these precautions, Tomaszewski believes she
may have caught the virus from one of her physical therapy patients. She experienced exhaustion, coughing, fever, body aches — as one passed, another took its place.
Chest pains became so acute she couldn’t draw a deep breath followed, Tomaszewski said, “which added to the cycle of feeling like you couldn’t get oxygen in.”
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Because she was so careful to isolate, she believes she did not transmit the virus to anyone. She consulted with doctors remotely, but never had to go to a hospital.
After the virus had cleared her system, it took weeks for
Tomaszewski
to regain her strength. “I’m young and healthy, and it knocked me on my butt. I don’t wish it on anyone,” she said. “The emotional toll it took getting healthy and rehabbing I also don’t wish on anyone.”
“Your natural reaction is to want to reach out to people and be near them and be with them, and you have to kind of fight that urge,” Tomaszewsk said. “It’s just so lonely.”
Seeing people ignore the seriousness of the virus is personal to Tomaszewski. “I have to say it’s like a little bit of a slap in the face.” she said. “There’s all these signs it’s very serious, and I’m standing right in front of you, so take me seriously. Listen to what I’m saying.”
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The Guardian, June 29, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic has killed half a million people in just over six months, with the toll passing the somber milestone of 500,000 known deaths on Sunday night. The true death toll and number of cases is believed to be higher, due to differing testing rates and cause of death definitions, delays in reporting and suspected underreporting. But cases are rising by about a million a week, the WHO warned last week, with the rate of contagion doubling since May 21.
Associated Press, June 29, 2020
The European Union is edging toward finalizing a list of countries whose citizens will be allowed to enter Europe again in coming days, with Americans almost certain to be excluded in the short term due to the number of US coronavirus cases. EU diplomats confirmed that the list would be made public on Tuesday.
Associated Press, June 29, 2020
Governments are stepping up testing and reimposing restrictions as newly confirmed coronavirus infections surge in many countries. India reported 20,000 on Monday, while the caseload in the U.S. is growing by about 40,000 a day. Experts say the actual numbers, both in the US. and globally, are probably far higher, in part because of testing limitations and the large number of people without symptoms.
Bloomberg, June 29, 2020
China put 400,000 residents of a northern county under lockdown over the weekend after at least a dozen coronavirus cases associated with the Beijing outbreak were reported there.
In a sign that the resurgence of cases in the capital is proving difficult to stamp out even as officials say they’ve been largely contained, Hebei province’s Anxin county has been sealed off and each household can assign only one person to go out for necessities daily. Vehicles cannot enter the county and only those with special passes can leave.
Associated Press, June 29, 2020
For months, experts have warned of a potential nightmare scenario: After overwhelming health systems in some of the world’s wealthiest regions, the coronavirus gains a foothold in poor or war-torn countries ill-equipped to contain it and sweeps through the population. Now some of those fears are being realized.
Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2020
Governments around the world are using the Covid-19 crisis to promote protectionist policies and repatriate production lines to shield strategic industries. The Brexit talks represent a twist on this theme, with Britain breaking the bonds of its most important trading relationship in part to gain freedom to strike deals with other nations, including the US.
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Reuters, June 29, 2020
A week into New York’s second phase of post-lockdown re-opening, dozens of the companies with office space in one of the world’s most famous buildings are trying to figure out when, how, even whether, to come back. Even among those who plan to maintain a presence when the time comes, few expect to ever return to a workplace like the one they knew before coronavirus.
Dan Walters, CalMatters, June 29, 2020
Californians are rightfully confused by the rapid, even erratic, changes of course that Gov. Newsom has steered in recent weeks after drawing praise for his early and straightforward actions in the first days of the public health crisis. Newsom has shifted in recent days to admonishing Californians for not being diligent enough in wearing the masks he mandated and avoiding large, virus-spreading congregations. He has hinted that he might have to clamp down on the economy once again and threatened counties that ignore state guidelines with a loss of state aid. Managing a pandemic is difficult, but it’s made more so when the manager’s messaging is erratic
NPR, June 27, 2020
About one in six doctors in D.C. is African American, like Dr. Strudwick, according to the city's Department of Health. That's three times the
national average
, although still a small portion compared to the population that's 46% Black. These doctors see in their wards some of the African American patients who make up the vast majority of the city's Covid-19 fatalities. For such doctors, working amid the pandemic, inspires a sense of duty, and sometimes despair.
Wired, June 29, 2020
While we have all been locked inside, creatures have been reclaiming the empty streets. Earlier this month, animal control officers captured a mountain lion
in downtown San Francisco
. In Italy and Spain, the wild boar have moved in. OG fliers like geese are
staking claim to airports
.
A group of researchers last week termed the Covid lockdown as “anthropause,” a name they coined “to refer specifically to a considerable global slowing of modern human activities, notably travel.”
LA Times, June 28, 2020
Tom Sheridan. the former national director of public policy for the powerful AIDS Action Council, said we are witnessing an eerie repeat of events: the current administration blatantly ignoring early warning signs, the president dismissing the disease as the “Chinese plague” and death rates soaring, with no end in sight. He fears, the fight against Covid-19 will be as rigorous as the battle against AIDS. But with a virus that is so much more easily transmitted, the damage will be worse. “AIDS was a slow burn,” he said. “Coronavirus is like a wildfire.”
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Alameda County Data
: 1,350 n
ew cases have been recorded over the last 14 days. The number of confirmed infections is currently doubling every 30 days.
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Contra Costa County Data
: 843 new cases have been recorded over last 14 days. The number of confirmed infections is currently doubling every 26.1 days.
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Top 8 Locations of Cases in Alameda County
, data as of 6/28/20
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Oakland:
2,252
Hayward:
963
Eden MAC:
364
Fremont:
276
San Leandro:
276
Union City:
189
Castro Valley:
181
Newark:
159
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Top 8 Locations of Cases in Contra Costa County
, data as of 6/28/20
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Richmond:
667
Concord:
352
Antioch:
278
San Pablo:
259
Pittsburgh:
189
Bay Point:
135
Walnut Creek: 116
Brentwood: 94
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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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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. We publish the Bulletin on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On Mondays and Fridays the Bulletin includes an education section.
We welcome your feedback on our bulletin. Please contact editor
Stephen Cassidy
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