Sacramento, Yolo counties pushing Newsom to reopen local businesses. But there’s a roadblock
Sacramento and Yolo county officials are pushing the state health department to allow them to join the first wave of counties that can reopen restaurants, stores and shopping malls. But a sticking point has emerged in the negotiations that both counties say is unfair.
The state Department of Public Health is only allowing counties to open that have had no COVID-19 deaths in the last two weeks. That’s cleared the way for smaller, more rural counties – including El Dorado, Placer and Amador – to reopen many businesses this week.
But urban Sacramento has had 10 deaths in the last two weeks, the most recent one noted on the county website on Wednesday, May 13. Yolo has had a wave of deaths at an assisted care facility in Woodland.
While Sacramento has one of lowest rates of coronavirus cases per capita among large counties in the nation, and while its number of COVID-19 hospital patients is relatively small, the county doesn’t technically qualify for entering California’s Stage 2 of reopening from coronavirus-related shutdowns.
Sacramento County health chief Dr. Peter Beilenson said Sacramento representatives have been on the phone this week with state health officials describing the county’s coronavirus efforts and making a case that the county warrants an allowance to reopen despite the deaths.
“We’re ready to open a little wider,” Beilenson said. “It’s important to remember this is a trade off between mental health benefits, economic benefits, versus more (COVID-19) cases.”
Counties who have been given the green light are all in Northern California and are home to a combined 1.1 million people. Three of the counties border Sacramento.
Beilenson said he is arguing that a county of 1.6 million residents and numerous assisted care living facilities and hospitals should not be held to the same zero-death standard as counties with one-tenth the population.
Placer County, the largest county so far to be allowed to reopen, has nearly 400,000 residents. The approval that it won on Tuesday should allow The Galleria at Roseville to reopen. Arden Fair mall, 20 miles away in Sacramento County, must remain closed, except for curbside pickups.
Restaurants in Folsom remain closed for in-house dining. But one freeway stop away, restaurants at El Dorado Hills Town Center in El Dorado County can open their doors Wednesday, with restrictions.
Beilenson said Sacramento likely will submit its formal “attestation” document to the state early next week and ask the state to grant it approval. It will show that the number of people in Sacramento hospitals has dropped to 11 in intensive care and 18 overall, and that the county has increased its virus testing capabilities in the last week.
He noted that many of the county’s recent deaths have been in congregate care facilities, which are typically self-contained and placed under quarantine when coronavirus outbreaks occur there.
“That is not exactly community-based spread,” he said. “That is tragic but it is contained.”
He said “there is going to be no way a large county” can meet that standard unless the state agrees to offer some leeway.
California’s cautious reopening plan
Gov. Gavin Newsom pointed out this week that congregate care facilities are not isolated from the rest of the community. Employees there – a number of whom have gotten the virus and some of whom have died – live in the broader community and move back and forth between infected care facilities and their homes.
Newsom said his administration is willing to be flexible in its discussions with counties about their readiness to move more quickly to reopen some businesses. The administration’s criteria, though, appears designed to make it harder for larger and more dense urban areas to reopen in the first wave.
That cautious approach by the administration is supported by recent infection data, a Sacramento Bee analysis this week shows: Not only do the state’s larger and denser counties have more cases, they have higher cases and deaths per capita.
In Los Angeles County, which has become the epicenter of virus infections in the state, health officials this week said their strict “stay at home” order likely will last another three months.
A cluster of Bay Area counties also has held themselves to more conservative standards for reopening businesses. Although the governor last Friday gave the go-ahead for all counties to allow curbside retail business, San Francisco and several bay counties declared they would hold off a week or so before allowing those transactions in their areas.
For the moment, Sacramento also fails to qualify on one other notable criteria: The state has said in order to reopen on-site dining in restaurants and in-store shopping at retail outlets, as well as shopping centers, a county must show that for every 100,000 residents it has 15 health officials trained to do contract tracing.
Contact tracers will serve the critical role of tracking down people who have come into contact with someone who has recently tested positive for coronavirus.
The idea is that as more of the economy opens and more people mingle, the number of infections will swing upward again. If a county can quickly test and identify infected people, it can then trace who those people were in contact with just before testing positive. Contact tracers would call and warn those people to get tested to determine if they contracted the virus.
The state’s standard will require Sacramento County to have more than 200 contact tracers. It currently has about 30. But county officials said they expect the state to provide a contingent of newly trained tracers in the next two weeks.
Yolo County officials are also arguing they should be given flexibility in getting approval to reopen some businesses.
Yolo coronavirus numbers overall are low, but the county was hit with a massive outbreak with deaths at a Woodland assisted care facility. There have been five deaths in Yolo County in the last two weeks, all stemming from a skilled nursing facility in Woodland — the most lethal outbreak in the Sacramento area.
Yolo officials said this week they too are hoping to persuade the state to be flexible in reviewing its case for reopening.
“Using the new caseloads and cases and zero community deaths is much more accurate of where we are now,” county public health director Brian Vaughn told the board during a teleconference meeting. “We believe it meets the spirit of what they’re getting to.”
This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 10:48 AM.