One of California’s broadest COVID-19 testing programs is ‘winding down’ operations
An ambitious public health collaboration between the city of Davis, other Yolo County cities and UC Davis plans to shut down testing operations this summer.
When it does, it will conclude a nearly two-year project that has been lauded for giving the region one of California’s most robust programs for monitoring COVID-19 spread and limiting outbreaks.
Healthy Davis Together launched in September 2020 at the UC Davis campus level, and began widespread community testing for the city of Davis in November 2020.
It then expanded in July 2021 to include a sister program called Healthy Yolo Together, adding more testing sites in Yolo County.
Since then, the health projects have conducted more than 1.7 million saliva-based coronavirus tests for Yolo residents, which is the county’s population nearly eight times over. About 99% came in asymptomatic residents, according to its website.
Yolo has consistently ranked among the lowest test positivity and case rates out of all 58 California counties during most of the pandemic, state data has shown. Health officials say that’s largely due to mass asymptomatic screening via Healthy Davis Together.
Thousands of positive results from those samples have been genotyped to test for more contagious variants of the virus. The projects have also assisted in vaccination efforts and educational campaigns.
UC Davis in a Sept. 24 blog post called Healthy Davis Together the “campus-city collaboration” that has “shielded the community from COVID-19.” The subheadline asked: “Could This Be the Future of Public Health in America?”
But the city, in a news release last Friday, confirmed it will soon begin a “wind-down strategy for the HDT testing program, which will end on June 30.”
“Originally expected to end in 2021, Healthy Davis Together was able to meet community testing needs during the Omicron surge and extend testing through June with funding support from Yolo County and the cities of Davis, West Sacramento and Woodland,” the city news release continued.
Healthy Davis Together already adjusted clinic schedules at the start of April and plans to close its Research Park location in south Davis after a final day of testing this Thursday, according to its website.
A separate Healthy Davis Together project that monitors COVID-19 levels in city wastewater will continue through the end of 2022.
The Davis City Council voted unanimously last November to extend the program beyond 2021 and through June 2022, using $750,000 in funding from the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan Act to aid the six-month extension.
The following week, Yolo County supervisors authorized an additional $1 million toward Healthy Yolo Together.
During a presentation Tuesday at the university campus, Davis City Manager Mike Webb said the new June end date was chosen in part so that the testing network could stay intact through the end of the academic year at UC Davis, where the spring quarter ends June 9.
A report accompanying the county’s November approval also noted that extending through June would cover testing needs for the rest of the K-12 school year.
“To put on Healthy Davis Together was no small feat financially,” Webb said. “When the question came up of could we help out to extend the testing platform to the end of this school year, the city of Davis reached into our (American Rescue Plan Act) fund coffers and said ‘This is crucial.’”
Health leaders, HDT director praise program
UC Davis this week is hosting a pandemic preparedness workshop, held in person and online via Zoom, focused on “academic integration” in pandemic response planning.
At the outset of the three-day event Tuesday morning, Webb spoke along with other campus, city and county health leaders at length about the success of Healthy Davis Together. They spoke proudly of it, though often in the past tense.
“Everybody worked together,” said Davis Mayor Gloria Partida, a former UC Davis neurobiology professor. “They spent countless hours working out logistics, strategizing, and weaving science and sensibilities to get to success.”
Dr. Aimee Sisson, who joined Yolo County as health officer during the early weeks of the collaboration after resigning from the same role in Placer County, said she was “delighted” to partner with Healthy Davis Together.
“Having HDT as a partner was the equivalent of doubling or tripling the county’s public health workforce, overnight, for free,” Sisson said.
“The free part did eventually end … but overall the county gained so much more than we contributed through this partnership.”
Seeking the $1 million approval for the Healthy Yolo Together extension in November, interim county administrator Chad Rinde noted that Yolo will “need to evaluate its testing approach” for the 2022-23 fiscal year, which starts in July, because “HYT presently has no plans to continue to operate after June 2022.”
The county is currently crafting its 2022-23 recommended budget, which will be submitted to the Board of Supervisors in mid-June.
Sisson mentioned during Tuesday’s workshop that the county will likely expand mobile testing operations after Healthy Davis Together and Healthy Yolo Together end. She noted that mobile COVID-19 testing has the benefit of improving access for vulnerable, hard-to-reach populations.
‘It probably saved money’ – and lives
The director of Healthy Davis Together, Brad Pollock, after Sisson’s remarks shared several charts showing preliminary data and mathematical projections on the project’s outcomes.
He said the numbers showed Healthy Davis Together to be not just a public health success but a cost-effective investment.
Pollock said the initiative cost $35 million total, but that his team’s projections showed it probably saved the community around $45 million, mostly by preventing hospital costs.
“The program, net, didn’t cost money. It probably saved money.”
Pollock said data modeling estimates suggest Healthy Davis Together helped avert about 2,300 infections, 172 hospitalizations “and probably about five deaths.”
Other data models shared by the director showed test positivity rates in Davis fared about 70% better than comparable California communities without similar testing programs during the winter 2020 surge and last winter’s omicron surge.
“During the surges is really where you see some major differences,” Pollock said.
‘Natural decline’ of COVID-19 not here yet
The city approved the six-month extension of Healthy Davis Together during the plateau in cases between last summer’s delta variant surge and the omicron surge.
In a November news release, city officials wrote that the community testing program “will continue testing in Davis through June 2022 but slowly reduce testing capacity in anticipation of a natural decline of COVID-19 as vaccination rates increase, especially among children.”
Yolo County has improved from 71% of its overall population at least partially vaccinated against COVID-19 in mid-November to 79% as of the start of this week, California Department of Public Health data show.
But vaccination rates lag far behind among children. Just 61% of Yolo County adolescents 12 to 17, and only 44% of kids 5 to 11, have had at least one dose, according to CDPH.
Health leaders spoke at UC Davis Tuesday amid another point of significant uncertainty in the pandemic.
California’s virus numbers improved to some of their lowest levels ever during March, but have started to climb again in April. Test positivity has jumped from 1.4% to 2.7% since the start of April in California, and from 0.6% to 1.5% in Yolo County.
Even more contagious variants and subvariants of COVID-19 have also emerged since the end of winter’s omicron surge, called BA.2 and BA.2.12.1.
In other words, it is virtually impossible to forecast at this point what Yolo or California’s virus situation will look like by late June or beyond.
Federal dollars lacking, White House says
Health experts continue to caution that the pandemic is far from over, but federal funding to combat COVID-19 — like the American Rescue Plan Act dollars that allowed the city to fund Healthy Davis Together for an extra six months — has nonetheless started to dry up.
The White House, in a March 15 statement asking Congress for an additional $22.5 billion in pandemic funding, said previous efforts to bolster U.S. testing capacity “will be squandered” absent new aid.
If new funding isn’t approved, the White House wrote last month, “the Administration will be unable to help keep domestic manufacturers (of testing materials) online starting in June.”
“That means, heading into the second half of the year, there will be significantly diminished domestic testing capacity and we may be unprepared for surges.”
This story was originally published April 26, 2022 at 12:56 PM.
