El Dorado County, with public health officer’s blessing, asks Newsom to loosen restrictions
El Dorado County is urging California Gov. Gavin Newsom to loosen his statewide stay-at-home order for residents with the blessing of its public health officer, who said the county’s low rate of coronavirus cases means it’s time to start modifying restrictions.
The appeal came hours after the county announced its countywide stay-at-home directive would expire Thursday.
The request from the county’s Board of Supervisors and public health officer joins a growing call across Northern California’s suburban and rural areas to start reopening parts of the local economy, even as the pandemic rages nationally. The city of Roseville and six north state counties have also sent letters to the governor, as has Placerville, the seat of El Dorado County, but none included an official sign-off from a public health official.
In El Dorado County, 44 people have tested positive for the virus as of Tuesday afternoon, or about 23 cases per 100,000 residents. It’s a lower infection rate than many urban and suburban areas of the state, and nearby counties like Sacramento and Placer counties.
That’s given El Dorado County’s public health officer Dr. Nancy Williams the confidence to say the county has the ability to sufficiently protect residents moving forward, so long as people keep up good hygiene practices and physical distancing. No one has died from the virus in the county, according to the county public health department.
“There’s definitely a chance we’ve missed infections, we’ve definitely missed infections,” Williams told the board during a Zoom teleconference meeting Tuesday. “Yes we’ve missed some probably, but at the same time those numbers just tell me there’s not much COVID here.”
While the other counties in the region had issued stay-at-home orders, which carry the force of law, El Dorado County had been hesitant to do the same, only issuing a stay-at-home directive. Earlier Tuesday morning, Williams announced she would not be extending that public heath directive, the first county in California to do so.
But Williams said during the board meeting that letting the directive expire shouldn’t be interpreted as business as usual for the county. Rather, it reflects a belief that the statewide order’s requirements will “sufficiently protect our community,” she said.
The county did order a ban on nonessential travel to the unincorporated portion of the Lake Tahoe basin earlier this month, and that will remain in effect, however — most of the county’s cases have concentrated in South Lake Tahoe and in El Dorado Hills.
Still, as coronavirus outbreaks have devastated other ski and tourism communities like in Idaho, “we’re extremely lucky to have been spared so far,” Williams said.
Residents will remain “guided primarily by the Governor’s Order,” the county said in a news release. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order still calls for residents of all counties to stay home except for essential reasons; for businesses deemed nonessential to remain closed and for restaurants to suspend dine-in service; for people to keep 6 feet of social distance between anyone not in their immediate household; and prohibiting gatherings of any size.
Williams also said in the release that executives at the two main hospitals in El Dorado County, Marshall Medical and Barton Health, “do not believe that a careful, phased-in approach to relaxing of stay-at-home orders would put them at undue risk.”
Combined with increased testing capacity coming from the state starting May 4 in the form of two new county testing sites, Williams said she believes the county will be able to monitor and track future COVID-19 cases and avoid flareups.
As of Tuesday afternoon, 2,000 El Dorado County residents have been tested for the virus, or about 1 percent of the county’s overall population.
The four-county Sacramento region had reported a total of 65 COVID-19 fatalities and 1,400 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, as of Tuesday afternoon, which more than 1,000 cases and over 40 deaths coming from Sacramento County. In California, more than 1,800 have died from the virus.
“Over the past few weeks the residents of California have done an outstanding job in slowing the spread of COVID-19,” the letter reads. “While those actions were absolutely necessary, we believe that the actions taken by El Dorado County have put us in a position to begin reopening our economy safely.”
Several residents who spoke during the board’s public comment period Tuesday argued that the current stay-at-home order were an infringement of their civil liberties. Drew Buell, a pastor at Cool Community Church, told the board the community has been “shoved in a corner and told that our First Amendment rights have been set aside.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed the government’s right to establish quarantines during a public health emergency, though Newsom has already been sued on the legality of his statewide restrictions by several California groups.
During his Tuesday briefing, Newsom said acknowledged the pleas coming from municipalities looking to give their local businesses a lifeline. He said that there will be some “regional augmentations” to when and how different counties can reopen, but that they would be “stringent.”
“We’re not just because people think they’re ready to reopen,” Newsom said. “We’re not just going to blithely do that without community surveillance obligations that are attached to those regional efforts.”
But, if the state pulls back too quickly, “it could start a second wave that could be even more damaging than the first,” Newsom said.
That’s front of mind for Tony Windle, owner of T.W. Bonkers Toy and Candy Emporium in Placerville, who voiced a similar concern to the board Tuesday.
“If I’m dead, I’m not going to be able to read the Constitution,” Windle said.
This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 5:45 PM.