Continuing COVID-19 Coverage: Santa Clara County Updates

so the number of cases that we see every day are somewhat stable they're usually in the 50 to 100 new cases a day we are seeing the deaths increase although slowly so what this tells us is that the the big tool that we had available to us which was to issue a shelter in place and do everything we we could both through order and through encouragement and through collective action to slow things down so the the collective sacrifice and action that everyone has taken across the county has been protective however I want to emphasize that we are by no means out of the woods we're still probably at the beginning of what is going to be a very long marathon here in the county across the region and and indeed across the country so what we're what we are doing right now here in our county in the region and across the state is thinking very carefully about what what do we need to have in place in order to ease this very broad mitigation this very broad shelter in place and I know that that this is what everyone is talking about it everyone think is thinking about its enormous Lea complicated but basically what it looks like is we would not want that as as I mentioned the shelter in place is our is our major tool but as you know it's not very focused and so the question is how can we transition to more focused measures in order to do that one we need to make sure that the hospital capacity that that we have given time for hospitals to create we have to ensure that it's adequate and that's not just beds but of course that's staff and that staff that are protected and those staff need adequate quantities of personal protective equipment and they need to have a reasonable and safe supply second as we know we have not had sufficient capacity for testing now that we understand that there's a significant degree of asymptomatic case of a an infection and no symptoms at all as well as the understanding that people can become infectious up to two days before they start having symptoms all of that tells us that in order to identify people who are infected and infectious we need more widespread testing and this is something where we're endeavoring to understand what are the levers that we have locally to increase capacity and and to what extent do we need to extend on partners at the state and national level and in the private sector third we really need to not just here in our region but of course across the state and across the country we need to ensure that we have the capacity to do case investigation and contact investigation and remember at the very beginning of this epidemic that is where we had all of our resources we had huge teams we had colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control here embedded with us where we carefully followed every case in every contact we can't do it the way that we did it at the beginning of the outbreak our case numbers are too high but once we begin to settle those case numbers down then we can transition to a more focused effort as you could imagine all of this takes enormous planning and it takes time and so we're using using our time now while we have the shelter in place order to do that planning and we're doing it in collaboration as always with our colleagues around the region and around the state because we're a very interconnected society and we we obviously can't do this alone so that's where we are again our take-home messages are that the collective action here in our County and across the Bay Area has increased safety it has lengthened the doubling time it has settled things but it's not enough we're a month in and we need to keep at it for for a bit longer thank you and I'm happy to answer a few questions he's gonna make it the governor is already announcing today strategies for when restrictions are lifted in California there's a much authority that's given to the local health officer so you'll remember in March I started issuing orders first we had recommendations then we had urgent recommendations and then we had Health Officer orders so the first order as you may recall was to ban gatherings greater than a thousand and then we scoped that down to greater than a hundred and then and then ultimately issued the shelter-in-place order on March 16th so health officers in California have quite a bit of power and authority to to protect the health of the population in general and I would say the state health officer also has powers but in general the way it works is that if a county health officer decides that to protect the population that we need to be say more conservative or more restrictive than we can be so a state order might be less restrictive than then a county order its I don't think I've ever I can't think of an example where a state health officer has issued an order that supersedes the counties to make them less restrictive so these are not so much they're not specific criteria notice I didn't give you any specific metrics these are I want to make sure that I communicate to you all into the public so that you understand the different areas where we're looking very closely so that we can know and have a way to measure where we are and sort of the level of protection for our community I also just want to to acknowledge that all of these decisions there it's these are all extraordinarily difficult decisions because we're trying to understand what the impact of each decision is going to be and of course the shelter-in-place order while we do have good evidence that it slowed the infection down and and reduced harms from kovat 19 of course we also know that there are harms from the shelter-in-place there are health harms from the shelter-in-place both from social disruption from economic disruption and even more immediately for example if someone doesn't feel like they want to go in and access preventive health care so we're trying to as best we can understand the impacts and then navigate a course that to the greatest extent possible minimizes the harms and as and is the most protective but it's a very that it's a very complex set of decisions so as you know we have recommended universal face covering we have not used the word masking for a very particular reason and that is because we're sensitive to the fact that we don't have adequate personal protective equipment and unfortunately we're still needing to make decisions and communicate our priorities for personal protective equipment which includes medical grade masks however we do have some evidence that covering your mouth and nose when you're out and about and around others does add a layer of protection that in addition to social distancing and frequent hand-washing and and other hygiene measures for now it's a recommendation a strong recommendation yes yes so the due date for the surd for the survey is April 15 so we don't have all the data in but I want to link that back to a comment that I made earlier so in order to to plan we really need to understand our lab testing capacity our PPE supply as well as our staffing and resources for case and contact investigation so that health officer order is in in service to giving us good awareness about our PPE supply so that we can think about whether we're making recommendations or orders regarding PPE use and and whether we have adequate supply within our healthcare delivery system to be more broad but at this point I don't have those data I'm very anxious and eager to look at those data once we get them though we're not going to know instantly tomorrow about what things look like because it's going to take quite a bit of data cleaning and analysis to really understand what the countywide situation looks like so I'm pleased to say that we are doing everything we can to get data up on our website so that everyone can see it and we do have a laboratory testing dashboard we are able to post those data because we in collaboration with the other counties in the Bay Area have an order so that labs have to report to us not just the positives but the negatives and that enables us to see of all the testing done what's our positivity rate it also enables us to see how many tests countywide are being done every day and so we can look at those trends and that is posted on our website [Music] right so we know that San Jose represents the majority of the population in the county over 50% and San Jose represents the majority of confirmed cases of kovat 19 the answer to your question is very complicated what we are trying to understand by sifting through our data is to understand are there populations at greatest risk and are there places or communities in our County where the virus is circulating and amplifying more quickly than in other places that's really the key question and in order to answer it we have to understand a number of factors including does this represent for example increased testing is that why we're seeing more you know is that a confounding factor or do these numbers represent a local outbreak that are skewing the numbers etc etc so we're trying to understand these data and I don't have a complete answer for you unfortunately so one of the great challenges of course it's been an enormous challenge to live under the shelter in place it's been enormous ly disruptive for everyone everyone living under shelter in place I think we all recognize that we also recognize that we do not want to slip back we've made progress we've settled things down we need to settle things down more and that is why I think that if we just lifted the shelter in place and went back about our business we'd be right back where we were very very quickly and that's why we need to one make sure that we're very confident that things are continued to trend in a downward direction and two we need to make sure that we have all of the resources in place to do careful more focused strategies before we lift the broad shelter in place thank you

Channel: NBC Bay Area

Views: 2,392

Rating: 4.7894735 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: KY45Nm1yaWo

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020