Officials in Santa Clara County announce tighter rules for high-risk indoor activities as cases rise

good afternoon my name is james williams i'm the county council for the county of santa clara joining me this afternoon we have dr sarah cody our health officer and director of the public health department and supervisor cindy chavez president of the board of supervisors we're here with some announcements based on the significant uptick in cases i know we spoke with you last just earlier this week on monday about what we were seeing and what was happening and that concerning trend has continued and because of that continued trend along with some other local bay area jurisdictions dr cody's taking actions to help try to rein in the surge that we're seeing here in santa clara county and what we're also seeing in the bay area across the state and in fact across the united states so i'm going to first turn it over to dr cody to talk about that and i will come back and speak a little bit about uh in more detail about what some of these actions will mean thank you all again for being here for the second time this week today i am here unfortunately to announce some more sobering news and the actions that we will be taking as a result first sort of to explain to you all why we're taking the actions we will be taking i want to show you again what's happened to our epidemic curve even since we were here today monday before i go over these details i want to say that these trends that we are seeing here in our county are also being seen across the san francisco bay area region as well as in many parts of our state and our nation and as we are here today in the middle of november looking forward to thanksgiving holiday and other holidays it is absolutely imperative that we take action now each and every one of us in order to get through this so a little bit about what we're seeing um here i want to draw your attention again uh to the far left side this is our local epidemic curve what it looks like here in our county and if you see that orange line it's the seven day rolling average of cases reported each day and what i want you to note is how steep that curve is it goes straight up so after a slow drift up in the month of october around november 3rd or 4th it started to head straight up it's the steepness of that curve that concerns all of us and that requires that we act swiftly as of today uh we had an additional 362 new cases reported just today our hospitals have a hundred and ten covet patients being cared for that's an increase from an average of 80 patients that we were seeing uh just as you know just in october so hospital hospitalizations are rising as well so today i am announcing along with colleagues in most of the large bay area counties that's similar to san francisco we will be closing indoor dining we anticipate that as of tuesday the state will be assigning us to the red tier we will be making those red tier closures effective on tuesday unfortunately i think our trends are not headed in a favorable direction for us and similar to in march when we had a rapid increase in cases we may be needing to take additional restrictions quickly we are watching our data extraordinarily carefully we are working closely with our colleagues across the bay area and to the greatest extent we can we are acting together for the benefit of the public i i want to close by saying that we do not take these actions lightly not at all these are extraordinarily difficult decisions to make however our first priority is always to protect the public's health and the way that we do that is by preventing spread of this virus we've done a extraordinarily good job so far we need everyone to stay patient to hang in there with us and to do everything they can every single action that people takes is gonna help get uh keep people out of the hospital it's going to keep us from needing to order up morgue space and it's going to enable our businesses to get back more quickly so it's really important that we all take action now thank you let me just take a minute or two to elaborate on what specifically will be occurring effective tuesday as dr cody mentioned in santa clara county indoor dining will be closed effective tuesday in addition we'll be moving into the red tier restrictions the state allows 72 hours for those to take effect but we're moving up the implementation of those so that the red tier implementation will also occur on tuesday what does that mean uh some of the changes between where we're at right now in the orange tier and the red tier under the state framework mean that for example fitness centers will be at a capacity limit of 10 percent that wineries can be outdoors only outdoor bars will be closed bowling alleys and indoor family entertainment centers closed card rooms can be outdoors only capacity limitations for general retail and for critical infrastructure sectors at 50 percent that's again all the state's criteria for the red tier and those will be going into effect here in santa clara county on tuesday there's some other more nuanced items but again it's all the red tier items that you can find on the state's covid19 website um we will be updating the various directives and guidance documents today and through the weekend to provide that information and those will all be available on the counties covid19 website one of the reasons that we are acting um swiftly is because one of the lessons that we have learned and it was demonstrated to be true here locally in in march as well as in july and has demonstrated to be true across the country is that actually acting quickly helps bring things under control faster and that's generally true of something where you have exponential growth curve like we see with this virus and so we are moving a little bit faster to implement restrictions that would otherwise on the state's timeline take a little longer to come into effect but that would be coming to effect anyway and by moving those extra days faster we will be able to prevent some significant a number of serious illnesses some deaths but also try to help rein in the rate of spread in a way that helps us contain things sooner so that we can be at a more stable level we'll continue to watch what's happening as dr cody mentioned and we'll of course provide continued updates as we see things progress but that rate of growth is something that's concerning all of us tremendously here locally and across the region i'm going to now turn it over to supervisor cindy chavez president of our board of supervisors thank you um and i want to thank everyone very much for being here and apologize for all of the noise let me just make a couple of observations one is that i think as a community we tried really hard to fight this back and i know the leaders in our eoc and the doctors across this county and so many many of you have really been following every rule you can and this so this is really bad news and it's very hard to hear but here's what we need we're going to need everybody's help these numbers are going in the wrong direction and when i say numbers i'm talking about people we have more people in our community getting sick we have more people in our community getting in the hospital and we have more people more members of our community dying what that means is that we've all got to dig in and you know really double down and let me just say what i'm i'm most concerned about and i i'm saying this to all of you because we really need your help if we keep going in this direction we have a lot of schools that are planning to open in january or in the spring and we know every one of our children every newborn that's not being able to see faces because they're seeing masks and we have lots of littles who aren't learning how to work with other littles we have an obligation i think as the leaders of this community and by that i mean the adults in really fighting back this virus so that we can get our kids back to school we can get our businesses back open we can get our lives back as normal as we can get them so today really is it's bad news but it is a call to action it's our time to act and i know a lot of people feel like they've done everything they can we're asking those of you who've done everything you can do a little more and those of you have been slacking we need your help we need you to wear your masks wash your hands we need you to do we need people as thanksgivings coming up it is so hard not to see your family i know a number of you who are watching this haven't seen parents and your parents who are aging we have got to protect them and the way to protect them is to wear your masks wash your hands stay socially distanced and let's work together as a community so that we can put our own community back on track we're off track now working together we're going to get it back thank you okay everybody we're gonna head into q and a now so to make sure that everyone's questions are asked and answered i'll be calling on you um devin first question are how this is are we sure that closing these restaurants is being spread by people having gatherings in their homes the question was around are the measures that we're taking are we sure that they are going to have the effect that we want what we know about indoor dining is it definitely is an increased risk for this virus spreading and that's because it's an indoor environment where you can't wear a face covering because you're eating and there have been a number of studies that have demonstrated that indoor dining is an increased risk we also know that as the uh the prevalence or the amount of virus in the community that's circulating as it goes up the chances that you would have transmission and indoor dining and other settings where you have to take your face mask off and you're in a group also go up and so by closing indoor dining we're preventing having that be an additional area where the virus really accelerates our dining rules are very clear about what constitutes outdoor dining and they're designed to ensure that it truly is outdoors meaning that you're getting the the natural air exchange and air flow i want to remind everyone that each of these measures by itself is not a hundred percent a percent to prevent spread we have to layer them all together um the analogy that we like to say is it's like layers of swiss cheese if you just have one piece of swiss cheese a lot of the virus is going to get through but if you have many layers each one adds another layer of protection and so outdoors safer than indoors wearing a face mask much safer than not wearing one more distance much safer than less distance and less time and contact much safer than more time in contact thank you the reason why we are here today making this announcement and have made this decision is precisely because that curve is so steep it is going straight up we know that even if we take dramatic action it will take time to turn around it always takes time to turn around but different than in july you can see there it was almost as steep but that was in the summer time when it was a bit easier for people to take advantage of outdoors so we're taking these action now because we know that thanksgiving is approaching winter holidays are approaching and that's when people want to gather my strongest strongest recommendation is that to the greatest extent possible gatherings still occur outdoors that it's with very few households the state has a limit of three and that even being outdoors that people are still distanced and wearing their mask that is the safest way to see family during the holidays and to keep it short thank you we as you know have scaled contact tracing here in santa clara county uh to a very large workforce contact tracing is one of those layers of swiss cheese that i mentioned before it is one method of prevention contact tracing is most effective looking forward so preventing contacts to a known case from continuing a chain of transmission contact tracing is not well designed for looking backwards to understand where transmission is occurring so we have other methods to help us with that information and to guide our decisions the the settings and the behaviors that put people at greatest risk are ones that are indoors particularly where people cannot or do not wear face coverings i want to remind everyone that just because you're with family and friends doesn't mean that they can't be infected they may feel familiar but they may be just as likely to be able to spread the virus as anyone else and that's why in any setting staying outdoors and wearing a face covering is the safest sure uh today we had an additional 362 new cases reported they are fairly recent so these are cases that where the specimen was probably collected within the last week in addition we had four new deaths reported so our county now has a total of 444 deaths the point that i was making earlier is that in october our case rates the seven day rolling average of new cases each day was rising but it was rising slowly what's very worrisome is that right now the rate of rise is very fast we were fairly steady over the entire month of october and in early november around the third or fourth the rate of rise took a dramatic steep uh increase i'm looking at the chart and i see a big rise we don't know for certain in that we haven't traced back to halloween gatherings but the pattern that we have noticed is that after major holidays such as memorial day 4th of july and halloween we do tend to see an uptick in cases and that is why we need everyone's help before thanksgiving and the winter holidays and doing everything that they can to curb the spread of this at the federal virus the blind administration said we're taking a look at a complete lockdown your take on that is that something that's possible here would that work what i can tell you is that here in the bay area when we asked everyone to shelter in place in march we prevented many many many deaths we know that it works we also know that we're now many months into this pandemic and the um you know the situation is very different so uh i i don't the honest truth is i don't know the best thing that we can do here locally is continue with our risk reduction and try to adapt with living with the virus but that means that every single person has to think really carefully about what they do and whether they are risking getting the virus or spreading the virus so it means every single person has to really dig deep uh and maintain their patients for a little bit longer back to you devin have you the question is about what do we know about who's getting sick the trends that we're seeing here now with this deep uptick are actually fairly similar to the trends that we've been seeing for quite some time it's just that they're getting more pronounced and that is that the steepest case rises are in young adults 18 to 34 years the communities with the highest rates are still mostly in east san jose and gilroy however we are also starting to see increasing rates in other communities in the county sort of around those communities and in other places as well a lot of businesses yeah the first thing i would say is that we all as a community have an opportunity to to stem this and i i say that because we as a community we want every business to be open we want our schools to be open and we really have to work together to get there as it relates to aid packages i i have to say one of the reasons i'm most excited about the recent elections is my hope is what that means is more resources from the federal government more resources from the state that would can really help not just our businesses but also with unemployment insurance and other high needs the county as you probably know is looking at a number of different ways that we also can participate and cities across the county have done everything from small business loans to making grants we're going to have to take a look at all of that again now we're going to now have a press statement made in spanish vietnamese and chinese and then provide q and a in multilingual efforts go ahead a you

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Length: 26min 25sec (1585 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020