Eden Health District COVID-19 Bulletin
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"
For right now, our curve is not only flat, but it’s actually decreasing in terms of number of hospitalizations.”
Dr. Grant Colfax, Director, San Francisco Department of Public Health,
5/20/20
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Alameda County:
2,560
Contra Costa County:
1,209
California:
86,227
U.S.:
1,562,714
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Alameda County:
88
Contra Costa County:
33
California:
3,501
U.S.:
93,863
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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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City Website, May 20, 2020
The San Leandro Police Department announced that vehicle access
to Marina Park and Chabot Park will be restricted Memorial Holiday weekend from Friday at dusk until Tuesday morning. The use of all barbecues, picnic tables, play structures, and other park amenities associated with group activities will be closed to the public.
City Press Release, May 19, 2020
The City of Hayward is altering parking regulations and traffic patterns in commercial districts as required and offering workplace-safety resources to support resumption of local retail, manufacturing, and warehouse and logistics business activity. To facilitate curbside retail as well as ongoing restaurant takeout service, the City will be piloting the designation of diagonal parking spaces on B Street for limited-time use only for pick-up of food and other items.
Oakland Diocese Website, May 20, 2020
"I will reopen the churches for Mass in our diocese when it is safe to do so. I understand the deep and holy desire to come together to worship the Lord in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and to receive His Body and Blood in the Blessed Sacrament. But I do not want to put people at risk of sickness and even death by unnecessarily exposing them to the coronavirus."
East Bay Citizen, May 20, 2020
Billionaire A’s owner John Fisher, whose family owns The Gap, notified the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority on Mar. 31 that the team would not be paying its $1.2 million rent for use of the stadium. The letter from the A’s general counsel to the stadium authority is unclear about whether the A’s will not pay rent because of Covid-19, whether they intend to defer payment, or will negotiate a deal if and when baseball returns to the Coliseum this season.
SF Chronicle, May 20, 2020
San Francisco supervisors passed an emergency ordinance Tuesday aimed at protecting residents of single-room occupancy hotels from further spread of the potentially deadly coronavirus as cases spike in the hotels’ close quarters. As of Monday, there were at least 179 cases among residents and staff at 60 residential hotels, according to an SRO report provided to The Chronicle. The city’s overall case count increased by 306% during that same time period.
Mercury News, May 19, 2020
As the Bay Area continues to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, a mystery remains: When did the virus arrive here? A new study suggests it was not here before 2020. Stanford University scientists announced on Tuesday that there’s no trace of the deadly virus in 1,700 throat swabs taken from sick people visiting Bay Area-wide clinics of Stanford Health Care in November and December, when the outbreak was exploding in China.
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USA Today, May 20, 2020
The CDC has always warned that "it may be possible" to become infected with coronavirus by touching contaminated surfaces or objects. It just "does not spread easily" in that manner, the agency now says, nor by animal-to-human contact, or vice versa.
“Many people were concerned that by simply touching an object they may get coronavirus and that’s simply not the case. Even when a virus may stay on a surface, it doesn’t mean that it’s actually infectious,” stated Dr. John Whyte, chief medical officer for WebMD.
- When people are in close contact (within about 6 feet).
- Through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks.
- These droplet can land in the mouths or noses of nearby persons or possibly inhaled into the lungs.
- The virus may be spread even by people who are not showing any symptoms.
USA Today, May 20, 2020
The CDC has issued
new recommendations for the use of public pools, hot tubs and water playgrounds
. There is no evidence that the virus that causes COVID-19 can be spread through the water itself. In fact, the use of chlorine and bromine at these facilities should inactivate the virus in the water. The greatest risk of transmission from infected persons spreading the virus to other persons at these facilities.
Mercury News, May 21, 2020
A Stanford statistician says COVID-19 isn’t as deadly as we thought — but his calculations in a new study are already under attack from critics who say it overlooks the actual body count. In an
analysis
, Dr. John Ioannidis places the fatality rate between 0.02%-0.4%, much closer to the 0.1% death rate of the flu. “COVID death totals will be much much greater than the flu,” said
Andrew Noymer
,
an associate professor of public health at UC Irvine and an expert in flu pandemics. In three months, more than 93,500 Americans have died of COVID-19 and the number keeps climbing. During the typical six-month flu season, between 24,000 to 62,000 people die. Because there is an annual vaccine, “not everyone is susceptible to the flu. Everyone is susceptible to COVID-19,” Noymer said. “These flu comparisons are missing the forest for the trees.”
Agence France-Presse, May 21, 2020
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A Remarkable Survivor Story
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Ronald Jay Temko and his wife Linda Temko in the foreground pump their fists as Ronald is cheered by family, friends and medical personnel. Ronald was discharged yesterday from UCSF Mount Zion Hospital, after being hospitalized for over 61 days with COVID-19, including on 34 days on a ventilator and 21 days in a coma.
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While Ronald was in the coma, his family never left his virtual side. They sat with him on Zoom calls for hours, hoping that he would hear them, feel them, somehow.
They played Ronald's favorite music: Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, the Black Keys. They danced and read messages from everyone in the community who had written to them. And every day, through the pixels of the screen, they reminded him to visualize himself healthy and strong, walking out of there.
Despite all the odds, Ronald is now up and walking, as mentally sharp as ever, and beyond grateful to be alive.
“I’m onto my second life,” Ronald stated.
He will now get to walk his daughter down the aisle, hold his new baby granddaughter, and teach his grandson how to play golf.
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Mercury News, May 21, 2020
Half of California’s days with 2,000 or more new cases of COVID-19 have come in the past eight days, but so has significantly ramped-up testing for the deadly new disease. Labs around the state have conducted nearly 25% more tests over the past seven days (314,528) than the week prior (256,556). And the percentage to come back positive is lower, down from 4.8% to 4.1%. Deaths have plateaued since their mid-April peak, down to about 75 new fatalities per day.
LA Times, May 21, 2020
Most of California’s 58 counties have applied to move further into the second phase of Gov. Newsom’s reopening plan, which allows retail shopping and restaurants to serve in-person patrons. Yet as customers are returning, business are hindered by the constraints of operating at reduced capacity to meet social distancing requirements and question whether the model is sustainable. Napa on Wednesday became
the first county in the Bay Area
to reopen restaurants for in-house dining. But customer traffic was light, and some restaurateurs worried that customers might still be too afraid to come back.
Sacramento Bee, May 20, 2020
Buoyed by a letter from the U.S. Justice Department to Gov. Gavin Newsom that emphasizes the right to worship, Robert Tyler, a lawyer for
a church suing
over California’s coronavirus ban on in-person services, says he expects thousands of congregations to
return to their churches a week from Sunday. “We expect more than 3,000 individual churches to open May 31, with or without permission,” Tyler stated.
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Associated Press, May 21, 2020
Another 2.4 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week. Roughly 39 million people have now filed for jobless aid since the coronavirus triggered widespread business shutdowns two months ago and sent the economy into a deep recession,
the
Labor Department said Thursday
.
Washington Post, May 21, 2020
If social distancing had been in place on March 15 in the US had been imposed seven days earlier,
Columbia University epidemiologists
found that the US could have prevented 36,000 deaths through early May, about 40 percent of fatalities
reported to date
. “If you don’t take steps to fight the growth rate aggressively, you get much worse consequences,” stated Jeffrey Shaman, an environmental health sciences professor who led the study. With businesses up and running and Americans leaving their houses more regularly, the country must remain vigilant and swing into action quickly when new outbreaks flare up, Shaman added.
Washington Post, May 20, 2020
Dallas, Houston, Southeast Florida’s Gold Coast, the entire state of Alabama and several other places in the South that have been rapidly reopening their economies are in danger of a second wave of coronavirus infections over the next four weeks
if residents are not careful to maintain social distancing and use face masks
, according to
research from PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
. Most other communities in the US should be able to avoid a second spike in the next month with proper social distancing. However, the model also foresees a heightened risk of a resurgence in the virus "
for the fall, when colder, drier temperatures return."
CBO Website, May 19, 2020
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that real gross domestic product will contract by 11 percent in the second quarter of this year, which is equivalent to a decline of 38 percent at an annual rate, and that the number of people employed will be almost 26 million lower than the number in the fourth quarter of 2019.
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Associated Press, May 21, 2020
The California schools superintendent said Wednesday he expects school for the state’s 6 million students to resume as usual in late August or September but with classes that look radically different to maintain social distancing standards. Superintendent Tony Thurmond said he expects a mix of in-person and distance learning with fewer children in classes, hallways and other common areas as campuses try to halt the spread of the coronavirus. Students will likely wear masks, as will teachers and staff.
Mercury News, May 21, 2020
University of California president Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that “every campus will be open and offering instruction” this fall despite the coronavirus outbreak that has shuttered most campus activity across the state. “The question will be how much of that instruction is in-person versus how much is done remotely,” Napolitano added during remarks to the UC Board of Regents.
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Politico, May 20, 2020
California has a major goal to meet before schools can reopen: acquiring masks for teachers and more than 6 million students.
Local school districts will decide when they will welcome students back to physical classrooms and
the state is not mandating a common opening date
,
state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said Wednesday. But he made one thing clear: Personal protective equipment is a must.
Seattle Times, May 21, 2020
Washington education officials are weighing at least seven scenarios for reopening schools next fall and say the status quo, a patchwork of distance learning models crafted by individual school districts, is “not a viable approach.” The examples of how school could return range from resuming in-person learning as usual, to developing a new model of remote instruction. The “as usual” model is unlikely, state education department
documents suggest
, without the creation and mass distribution of a vaccine or a drastic change in virus transmission rates.
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The Guardian, May 21, 2020
Just 7.3% of Stockholm’s inhabitants had developed Covid-19 antibodies by the end of April,
according to a study
, raising concerns that the country’s light-touch approach to the coronavirus may not be building up broad immunity. The research by Sweden’s public health agency comes as neighboring Finland warned that it would be risky to welcome tourists from Sweden after figures suggested the country’s death rate per capita was the highest in
Europe
over the seven days to 19 May.
Politico, May 20, 2020
“The economic consequences of the pandemic will be considerable,” Sweden’s central bank said in a
recent report
as it forecast an economic contraction for Sweden of between 7 and 10 percentage points for this year and unemployment of between 9 and 10 percent. Last year the jobless figure was 6.8 percent. The European Commission's current forecast for the eurozone for 2020 is for an
economic contraction of 7.75 percent
.
Reuters, May 20, 2020
Global coronavirus cases surpassed 5 million on Wednesday, with Latin America overtaking the United States and Europe in the past week to report the largest portion of new daily cases globally. It represents a new phase in the virus’ spread, which initially peaked in China in February, before large-scale outbreaks followed in Europe and the United States. Latin America accounted for around a third of the 91,000 cases reported earlier this week. Europe and the United States each accounted for just over 20%. A large number of those new cases came from Brazil, which recently surpassed Germany, France and the United Kingdom to become the third-largest outbreak in the world, behind the United States and Russia. Cases in Brazil are now rising at a daily pace second only to the United States.
New York Daily News, May 21, 2020
The hunting and eating of wild animals has been banned in the Chinese city of Wuhan as part of the nation’s latest efforts to curb the transmission of zoonotic diseases amid the coronavirus pandemic. In a government press release issued Wednesday, initially shared on the city website and then widely across Chinese social media outlet Weibo, officials detailed strict new prohibitions set to take effect immediately and last for the next five years.
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Beth Shwarecki, senior health editor, Life Hacker, May 20, 2020
The component pseudo-facts of conspiracy theories are floating around Facebook in abundance, and it’s super frustrating to see them rebroadcast by people you know and love. You may be tempted to unfriend them or ignore their posts, both valid options, should you choose to take them, but when it comes to pushing back against misinformation, you have more power than you think.
NY Times, May 20, 2020
In labs around the world, there is now cautious optimism that a coronavirus vaccine, and perhaps more than one, will be ready sometime next year. Scientists are exploring not just one approach to creating the vaccine, but at least four. So great is the urgency that they are combining trial phases and shortening a process that usually takes years, sometimes more than a decade.
The Atlantic, May 20, 2020
Even in areas where public pools do open this summer, swimmers may have a very different pool experience than they’re used to. For the time being, a pool day might feel less like a mini-vacation and more like a weird exercise class, complete with masks.
The Atlantic, May 21, 2020
The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other states are doing the same.
Lois Beckett, senior reporter, The Guardian, May 21, 2020
Blaming black Americans for dying from a novel virus because they had diabetes or high blood pressure was what US health secretary Alex Azar did during an interview on CNN. Systemic racism created the health disparities that made black and brown Americans more vulnerable to dying from coronavirus, public health experts say; and now the same racism is also shaping, and undermining, the country’s political response to the pandemic.
Rachel Fairbank, science writer, Life Hacker, May 20, 2020
Reopening restaurants during a pandemic is a new situation, and as with all things COVID-19, we are learning as we go. Before you make your dinner reservations, here are some risk factors and precautionary measures you need to consider.
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Tracking California Reopening
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The Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle have produced informative charts and graphics on the pandemic in California, including on the status of each county reopening.
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California is currently in the second phase of Gov. Newsom's
four-phase plan
to gradually reopen the state. There is no official date for when the third and fourth phases will begin. Most of California's 58 counties have moved into Phase 2.
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State officials released a
checklist of criteria
counties need to meet in order to reopen, but officials for six Bay Area counties previously established
their own set of indicators
to decide when to remove shelter-in-place orders. All counties are doing well in terms of new cases and, hospitalization rates. Testing, however, remains a challenge.
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We have gathered 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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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
[email protected]
. 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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