Eden Health District COVID-19 Bulletin
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“The fundamental difference between Europe and America is that Europe has taken the virus seriously, and America largely has not. We didn’t build testing and tracing programs, and in parts of the country we didn’t even bring cases down. We have done things half way.”
Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute,
7/20/20
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Physician and social worker’s nonprofit provides for needs of farmworkers and their families
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During a recent day off for farmworkers and their families, Dr. Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga was busy distributing free food. Hernandez-Arriaga started serving Latino families pro bono as a clinical social worker when she discovered they needed more. In 2011, she founded Ayudando Latinos A Soñar, or ALAS. It means Helping Latinos Dream.
The nonprofit offers cultural arts, mental health, educational, and social justice programs for Latino families from Half Moon Bay to Montara. ALAS has been especially busy these past few months.
ALAS employee Cecilia Penaloza says since Covid-19, ALAS is serving 1,000 each week, three times the amount prior to the pandemic.
Volunteers have also sewn 7,000 masks to protect coastal farmworkers on the frontlines of food production. And ALAS partners with community businesses to give free lunches to farmworkers every Friday.
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At the ranches, ALAS helps meet other needs. For example, when the pandemic hit, farmer Serafin Avalos got stuck with hundreds of pounds of beans that restaurants no longer needed. ALAS bought the food to give to poor families.
“I think about the hard work our immigrant community is putting in every day in this country, and that’s what keeps me going,” Hernandez-Arriaga said.
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Alameda County:
9.237
Contra Costa County:
5,731
California:
387,322
U.S.:
3,794,355
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Alameda County:
162
Contra Costa County:
99
California:
7,716
U.S.:
140,716
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County website, July 19, 2020
Alameda’s Public Health Officer continues to maintain the restrictions on movement and public and private gatherings set forth in the earlier (May 18, 2020) Shelter in Place Order. However, the new Order allows certain additional business, recreational, social, and cultural activities to resume:
- Allows for small gatherings of individuals from different households or living units to take place in outdoor spaces, subject to certain conditions;
- Allows childcare providers to provide care to all children, not just children of essential workers, and establishes conditions under which youth extracurricular activities may resume;
- Allows educational institutions to offer career internship and pathways programs;
- Allows libraries to open for curbside pickup of books and other media;
- Replaces the Prior Order’s Social Distancing Protocol with a Site-Specific Protection Plan (Appendix A) for businesses allowed to operate under the Order; and
- Allows certain business providing services with limited person-to-person contact, including appliance repair and pet grooming services, to resume operations.
All Alameda County orders can be accessed
here
.
SF Chronicle, July 20, 2020
Bay Area county health departments ramped up the hiring of contact tracers in April and May to handle the laborious process, most of it armchair detective work by phone and email, not the high-tech surveillance some in Silicon Valley originally envisioned. But the recent surge in cases has made the task much harder, because there are more people to contact and because it takes longer to be tested and then get the results. “To do effective contact tracing, we need timely lab results for tests, adequate staffing and to partner with the community.” said Erika Jenssen, deputy director of Contra Costa Health Services.
Mercury News, July 19, 2020
More than 40 Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies and staffers have tested positive for COVID-19 since late June as the department deals with a coronavirus surge both in and out of Santa Rita Jail. The department counted its first two positive cases among employees back in March and didn’t record another until the end of June, said Sgt. Ray Kelly Saturday. But in the past month alone, about 41 sheriff’s employees, mostly sworn deputies, have come down with the virus.
Mercury News, July 19, 2020
The number of coronavirus cases in Santa Rita Jail has more than doubled in 24 hours, bringing the total number of inmates with the virus to 101 as of Saturday. There were a total of 1,844 inmates in Santa Rita Jail as of Friday. All inmates will now be required to wear masks any time they leave their cell/living area. None of the inmates have died because of the virus and generally, all inmates have had mild to moderate symptoms, according to the sheriff’s office.
SF Chronicle, July 19, 2020
Coronavirus-related hospitalizations in the Bay Area continued to mount over the weekend, and San Francisco’s two indoor malls are back in lockdown mode barely one month after being allowed by the city to reopen. The closure of Westfield San Francisco Centre and Stonestown Galleria as of midnight on Sunday night follows the state’s announcement Friday that San Francisco has been placed on California’s watch list of counties failing to keep the virus under control.
Oaklandside, July 17, 2020
A new extension of Alameda County’s
eviction moratorium
makes it illegal for landlords to kick tenants out of their homes for almost any reason until October. The county Board of Supervisors’ Tuesday vote doesn’t just take evictions off the table until the fall. It also prevents landlords from ever evicting a tenant who didn’t pay rent between March 24 and September 30, to account for income loss during the pandemic. Tenants have a year to pay back that rent from the time it was due. If that doesn’t happen, the property owner can take them to court to collect the money. But the debt can never be used as a reason for eviction.
Berkeleyside, July 17, 2020
Seven employees reached out to Berkeleyside after a July 9 story
that detailed how multiple employees at
both Berkeley Bowl grocery stores tested positive for COVID-19
.
Management did not tell its staff immediately about the outbreak and did not follow its own social distancing protocols and guidelines, was not clear about sick leave policies or testing options, according to a number of employees. Berkeley Bowl maintains that all employees have been encouraged, but not required, to get free testing.
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Vaccine and Post-Infection Immunity News
James Gallagher, health and science correspondent. BBC, July 20, 2020
Trials involving 1,077 people of a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by Oxford University and the drug giant AstraZeneca showed the injection led to them making antibodies and T-cells that can fight coronavirus.
The findings
reported in the UK medical journal The Lancet are hugely promising, but it is still too soon to know if this is enough to offer protection and larger trials are under way. The UK has already ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has moved most rapidly into larger-scale studies of any major contender — and AstraZeneca has said that billions of doses could be manufactured. The new data shows a relatively safe vaccine, though side effects were greater than for a meningitis vaccine, to which it was compared, that engages the immune system to fight the virus.
Derek Thompson, staff writer, The Atlantic, July 20, 2020
A new study from King’s College London inspired a raft of headlines suggesting that immunity might vanish in months. The truth is a lot more complicated, and, thankfully, less dire.
“To look at just one part of the immune response is woefully incomplete, especially if many COVID patients rely more on T cells,” said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and the founder and director of the Scripps Research facility. “There is a chance that if a similar longitudinal study looked at T-cell response, the outcome would be far more optimistic,” he said.
Virologist Shane Crotty told me that while the decline in antibodies was troubling, it was hardly catastrophic. “It’s not unusual to have fading antibody response after several months,” he said. “The drop-off isn’t that surprising. When you look at something like the smallpox vaccine, you see the antibody response is down about 75 percent after six months. But that’s a vaccine that works for decades."
Coronavirus and Children
NY Times, July 18, 2020
In the heated debate over reopening schools, one burning question has been whether and how efficiently children can spread the virus to others. A
large new study
from South Korea offers an answer: Children younger than 10 transmit to others much less often than adults do, but the risk is not zero. And those between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do. The findings suggest that as schools reopen, communities will see clusters of infection take root that include children of all ages, several experts cautioned.
Bloomberg, July 18, 2020
Scientists behind a Nordic study have found that keeping primary schools open during the coronavirus pandemic may not have had much bearing on contagion rates. There was no measurable difference in the number of coronavirus cases among children in Sweden, where schools were left open, compared with neighboring Finland, where schools were shut, according to the findings. The two countries, however, share similar societal models, including access to universal health care.
But some countries have had dangerous outcomes when reopening schools, albeit for older children. In Israel, bringing students back to the classroom accelerated the spread of Covid-19 among middle and high-school students.
WABE Public Radio, July 18, 2020
Amid all the Covid-19 figures released by Florida’s Department of Health, one number might come as a head-scratcher: A whopping 31.1% coronavirus positivity rate among those under 18 who are tested for the virus, according to the state’s most recent
pediatric report
. Meanwhile, Florida’s overall positivity rate is
currently 18.1%
.
While that high number might be surprising, there are a few likely explanations.
One is that children have so far not been a big focus of testing. Two, kids who do get tested are often those who show symptoms of the disease.
General Health News
USA Today, July 18, 2020
Recent reopenings and hasty reclosings of bars in several states including California raise the question of whether bars are hot spots for Covid-19. C
oncentrations of the coronavirus can build up indoors within hours. Here is why bars pose risks:
- Social distancing for Covid-19 is often forgotten at bars
- In a poorly ventilated bar, the Covid-19 virus can accumulate
- Leaning in to hear increases Covid-19 risk
- Laughing, singing, and loud voices expels more Covid droplets
- It’s impossible to drink something while wearing a mask
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California Confirmed Cases by Age
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Kaiser Health News, July 20, 2020
Younger people are less likely to be hospitalized or die of Covid-19 than their elders, but they circulate more freely while carrying the disease, and their cases are harder to trace. Together, these facts terrify hospital officials. People under 50 make up 73% of those testing positive for the disease in the state since the beginning of June, compared with 52% before April 30.
That shift isn’t comforting to Dr. Alan Williamson, chief medical officer of Eisenhower Health in Riverside County’s Coachella Valley. “It honestly worries me more because it means that this is now established in the community,” he said.
LA Times, July 20, 2020
Los Angeles County public health officials on Sunday reported 2,848 newly confirmed cases of the coronavirus, with the majority of those infected under the age of 41, as related hospitalizations reached a new high.
As the dangerous surge in infections continues, Mayor Garcetti delivered a fresh warning Sunday during an appearance on CNN that the city was “on the brink” of imposing new restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus. But he did not elaborate.
Associated Press, July 19, 2020
The origins of the outbreak at the Otay Mesa detention center are uncertain, but accounts of workers and detainees reveal shortcomings in how the private company that manages the center handled the disease: There was an early absence of facial coverings, and a lack of cleaning supplies. Symptomatic detainees were mixed with others. Like prisons, living conditions are cramped, except people held in immigration detention centers aren’t accused of any crimes. They wait to appear before an immigration judge to argue they should be allowed to remain in the country.
Orange County Register, July 19, 2020
A wave of discrimination tied to the coronavirus pandemic has reshaped reality for many Asian Americans in Orange County. Now there’s a sense that acceptance of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders is as fragile as it is for Latinx, Black and other minority communities. That realization is fueling a surge of political activism.
LA Times, July 19, 2020
Active-duty U.S. Air Force doctors, nurses and other medical providers are being sent to work in California hospitals to assist with a steep rise in coronavirus cases that has strained some healthcare systems across the state. The move comes as some officials have described hospital staffing, not bed capacity, as the chief stumbling block when it comes to scaling up operations to accommodate more patients.
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NPR, July 20, 2020
Several U.S. states reported new record-breaking coronavirus case counts over the weekend as the nationwide death toll from Covid-19 surpassed 140,000 and President Trump insisted again that the virus would "disappear." States such as Florida, California and Kentucky were reporting record or near-record numbers of new cases, and in Texas a hospital official told NPR that funeral homes and morgues were overflowing from the bodies of Covid-19 victims. There is no indication that the disease will disappear anytime soon based on a snapshot of some of the nation's hot spots.
Bloomberg, July 19, 2020
President Donald Trump played down rising coronavirus cases in the U.S., saying many people experience nothing more than “sniffles,” that positive tests are only up because of wider testing, and that the U.S. response is the “envy of the world.” Trump also said that Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease expert, is a “little bit of an alarmist” but that the two men have a “great relationship.” Trump made the comments in a lengthy interview on “Fox News Sunday” that was recorded Friday.
NPR, July 20, 2020
Tens of millions of Americans who lost their jobs because of the pandemic are now in danger of having their incomes slashed for a second time. The supplemental unemployment benefits of $600 per week that Congress approved four months ago are set to expire in less than two weeks, threatening to hurt strapped households and the U.S. economy, as billions of dollars' worth in spending suddenly comes to a halt.
Politico, July 20, 2020
Coronavirus surges across the U.S. have gotten so intense that they’re threatening to thwart the Trump administration’s latest strategy to ease the national testing crunch. The approach, called pooled testing, combines samples from multiple people and then screens the individual samples only if the batch comes back positive for the virus. It worked in the U.S. during the HIV crisis. And it’s worked during the current pandemic for China, Germany, Israel and South Africa. But the U.S. outbreak is now so out of control that health experts and testing labs say it won’t work here. In areas where the virus is widespread, many pools would test positive, requiring additional tests of each person in those pools.
Reuters, July 20, 2020
U.S. companies are raising new questions about how they can make workplaces safe after the world’s top public health agency acknowledged the risk that tiny airborne droplets of the novel coronavirus may contribute to its spread, industry healthcare consultants said.
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CalMatters, July 20, 2020
It’s official: At least 90% of California students will begin the school year with online learning. The
order
, which Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday,
marks an unprecedented level of state intervention
into the operations of more than 1,000 local districts, and applies to private schools.
When schools are allowed to reopen, staff and students in third grade and above are required to wear face masks. Staff must keep six feet apart from students and each other and will be tested regularly. If more than 5% of staff and students test positive, the school must close. If more than 25% of schools in a district close, the district must close.
Faced with another Zoom-only semester, an increasing number of California parents are moving to
formally homeschool
their children or form
“learning pods,”
small groups of children taught by a private tutor, options largely unavailable to low-income, working-class families that could further widen the
achievement gap
.
SF Chronicle, July 20, 2020
In the Bay Area, all counties except San Mateo are on the state’s coronavirus watch list, which means most school districts won’t be allowed to reopen campuses for in-person instruction.
Counties must be off the state watch list for 14 days before schools may reopen. For Bay Area counties, elevated disease transmission and an increase in hospitalizations have been the primary reasons for landing on the watch list. Read more about the state watch list
here
.
If a county is taken off the list after 14 days, that doesn’t mean schools can reopen right away. Local health officers and schools districts will ultimately make that call. And many counties have gone on and off the watch list, adding to the complications of reopening.
SF Chronicle, July 18, 2020
It could be months before in-person school happens in the Bay Area, which means virtually every Bay Area private and public school student will do distance learning for the foreseeable future. How do we make virtual instruction better? Answering that will be critical in the coming months, given that once schools reopen, many districts will adopt a hybrid plan that combines in-person instruction with distance learning.
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Bloomberg, July 20, 2020
Summer camps in parts of the U.S. are closing as children and counselors test positive for Covid-19, a troubling sign as the country debates whether schools should start in-person instruction as soon as next month.
From storied sleep-away camps in Missouri and Arkansas to city-run day programs in small-town Texas, a staple of the American summer is finding it’s not immune to the pandemic. At least seven have canceled sessions in the past four weeks, with 191 children and staffers testing positive.
CNN, July 20, 2020
Ellen Willson Hoover drove her high school daughter nearly 2 hours across state lines this weekend so that she could take the ACT college admissions test. But when they arrived at the testing center on Saturday, they found a note posted on the door informing them, like other shocked families across the United States, that the test was canceled. Hoover said they didn't receive a phone call, email or text message informing them of the cancellation, and the
list of canceled or rescheduled tests
on ACT's website wasn't updated until later that day.
Rebecca Martinson, public school teacher, NY Times, July 18, 2020
Every day when I walk into work as a public-school teacher, I am prepared to take a bullet to save a child. In the age of school shootings, that’s what the job requires. But asking me to return to the classroom amid a pandemic and expose myself and my family to Covid-19 is like asking me to take that bullet home to my own family. I won’t do it, and you shouldn’t want me to.
Washington Post, July 20, 2020
Of all the educational unknowns in an extraordinary year of disease and disruption, one of the most vexing for colleges and universities is this: How much viral testing is enough? There is no national consensus on testing.
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 17, 2020
For first-generation students, the experiences gained from studying on campus can be among the key forces keeping educational dreams alive. But as the coronavirus whittles away all signs of normalcy on campuses nationwide, first-generation students and their advocates say their education may be endangered.
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Covid-19 survivor encourages other survivors to donate plasma
Patients fortunate enough to survive the virus are now being asked to donate their plasma. The process is identical to a regular blood donation.
Dr. Alvaro Carreras (in photos) is an educator and a coronavirus survivor thanks to the staff at Baptist Health Hospital in Coral Gables, Florida, and another survivor who decided to give back.
“I met my donor, and he’s an amazing man, very spiritual,” Carreras said. “I was crying, telling him how thankful I was. He told me giving is more satisfactory than receiving, and as thankful as you are that you received my plasma, I’m even more thankful that I was able to save you.”
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"When you donate convalescent plasma, you are giving a piece of the antibodies that you’ve developed to help you fight off the disease to somebody who is in need of those antibodies to fight off their disease,” said Dr. Samer Fahmy of Baptist Health Hospital. “You are giving a piece of yourself to save someone else’s life.”
“One donor can benefit two or three patients sometimes, and we really need to promote that message,” Fahmy said.
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Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2020
When Western European countries began phasing out their lockdowns this spring, a surge of coronavirus cases was widely expected to follow. Months on, even as Europeans mingle in bars, restaurants and crowded beaches, that still hasn’t happened.
As a surge in cases forces a number of U.S. states to reimpose restrictions, Europe’s reopening is for the most part going according to plan. That is largely because of marked changes in social behavior across much of Europe, following widespread efforts by policy makers to drill the public to follow a simple, three-pronged approach: Keep a distance when possible, enhance hygiene and wear a mask when necessary. Older people, who are more vulnerable, are especially careful.
Washington Post, July 20, 2020
As countries around the world reopen their economies amid ongoing novel coronavirus outbreaks, governments are increasingly embracing what remains in some places a divisive public health measure: mandatory masks.
Health researchers say more evidence is emerging to support what some policymakers and experts have maintained all along: Masks work. Although it is difficult to isolate mask use as the key factor in a country’s success so far, or draw a direct line between mask mandates and outcomes, many countries where masks were in wide, early use have fared better than those that resisted the broad adoption of face coverings.
Associated Press, July 19, 2020
A world where people can “go to work normally, travel on the buses and trains, go on holiday without restrictions, meet friends, shake hands, hug each other and so on, that’s a long way off, unfortunately,” without a vaccine, said epidemiologist John Edmunds, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.
Bloomberg, July 19, 2020
Half the Covid-19 patients who go to the hospital in Mexico’s border state of Baja California die, an alarming rate that experts attribute to people waiting too long to seek admission because they fear the poor conditions of hospitals.
Government data show that out of the 4,760 patients that have been hospitalized with the virus in the state, 2,337 have died, a 49% death rate, the highest in Mexico. The state of Guerrero isn’t far behind at 47%. Countrywide, the average is 36%.
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NY Times, Updated July 20, 2020
Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster.
Seated around Mr. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more personal protective equipment. Provide more testing.
But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.
Not until early June did White House officials even begin to recognize that their assumptions about the course of the pandemic had proved wrong. Even now there are internal divisions over how far to go in having officials publicly acknowledge the reality of the situation
.
Washington Post, July 19, 2020
The US has failed spectacularly to contain the coronavirus. The country’s ineffective response has shocked observers around the planet. Many countries have rigorously driven infection rates nearly to zero. In the United States, coronavirus transmission is out of control. The national response is fragmented, shot through with
political rancor and culture-war divisiveness
. Testing shortcomings that revealed themselves in March
have become acute in July, with week-long waits for results
leaving the country blind to real-time virus spread and rendering contact tracing nearly irrelevant.
Axios, July 20, 2020
America spent the spring building a bridge to August, spending trillions and shutting down major parts of society. The expanse was to be a bent coronavirus curve, and the other side some semblance of normal, where kids would go to school and their parents to work. The bottom line: We blew it, building a pier instead.
Why more young people are getting sick in the latest Covid-19 outbreaks
Vox, July 18, 2020
Younger people, on average, are less likely to become severely ill and
die of Covid-19
— although many do. They can also spread it to older people who are much more vulnerable to severe infection and death.
So how did the coronavirus suddenly start spreading to so many young people? We’ve known that bars and other crowded indoor spaces are hubs of
spread
in the new hot spots. But there are likely many other factors at play. Some of these factors include mixed public health messaging and premature reopenings, young people skipping precautions because they perceive a lower risk of getting very sick, people returning to jobs, and more testing of people without symptoms.
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Alameda County Data
: 2,382 n
ew cases have been recorded over the last 14 days. The number of confirmed infections is currently doubling every 29 days.
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Contra Costa County Data
: 1,944 new cases have been recorded over last 14 days. The number of confirmed infections is currently doubling every 29 days.
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Top 8 Locations of Cases in Alameda County
, cases as of 7/19/20
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Oakland:
3,637
Hayward:
1,362
Eden MAC: 542
Fremont: 473
San Leandro: 463
Livermore:
363
Union City: 276
Castro Valley:
263
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Top 8 Locations of Cases in Contra Costa County
, cases as of 7/18/20
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Richmond: 1,251
Antioch: 689
Concord: 653
San Pablo: 515
Pittsburgh:
510
Bay Point: 259
Walnut Creek: 256
Brentwood: 221
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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-Treasurer, 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.
We welcome your feedback on our bulletin. Please contact editor
Stephen Cassidy
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