Health officer who resigned in protest of Placer County COVID decision joins Yolo office
Dr. Aimee Sisson, who resigned two weeks ago from her role as Placer County’s public health officer in protest of local leaders’ decision to no longer recognize COVID-19 as an emergency, has been named to the same position in nearby Yolo County.
Yolo announced the selection of Sisson on Wednesday. She’ll be officially appointed next week during a supervisors meeting and begin her role as health officer in late October, the county said in a news release. The change comes following the retirement of Dr. Ron Chapman in June.
“I am honored to be given this opportunity to protect and promote the health of all people living in Yolo County,” Sisson said in a prepared statement provided by the county. “Being a local health officer is challenging during a pandemic, but this is what I have trained for. I look forward to using my skills to keep the community healthy, whether the threat is COVID-19, obesity, mental illness, wildfire smoke, or poverty.”
Sisson in early September submitted her resignation as Placer’s public health officer, immediately after the county’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to rescind its emergency declaration that had been issued in response to the ongoing pandemic.
“Today’s action by the Placer County Board of Supervisors made it clear that I can no longer effectively serve in my role as Placer County Health Officer and Public Health Director,” she wrote in her resignation letter.
A Yolo County spokesperson said Sisson, who doesn’t officially leave the Placer County position until this Friday, will not be answering media questions until she starts her new position.
Placer County board chairwoman Bonnie Gore said at the time that the board “had a direction that (Sisson) didn’t believe she could support,” and that though she respected Sisson’s stance, Gore maintained that Placer’s COVID-19 cases were “so low, it doesn’t warrant a shutdown.”
Placer County has reported more than 3,500 lab-confirmed coronavirus cases during the pandemic and 43 total deaths, according to its COVID-19 data dashboard, last updated Wednesday morning.
Yolo County in a statement said it “welcomes Dr. Sisson’s passion and expertise to the team to navigate COVID-19 and all public health issues in our communities,” and notes that she has “multiple connections and personal ties to Yolo County.” Sisson is a graduate of UC Davis.
Prior to joining Placer County’s health office, Sisson served as a public health medical officer at the California Department of Public Health for more than a decade, the Yolo County announcement notes.
Placer County named its new public health officer, county health department veteran Dr. Robert Oldham, on Tuesday. He’ll assume the role Saturday after Sisson officially departs.
Latest on Placer County’s COVID-19 situation
Placer’s restrictions on businesses and gatherings loosened on the same day as the county ended its emergency declaration, as it was moved from the state health department’s most restrictive purple tier down to the red tier. The state improves a county’s tier if its rates of new infections and percentage of diagnostic tests returning positive each decline below certain thresholds.
In California’s new economic reopening framework, the promotion gave Placer County permission to let places of worship, businesses including indoor restaurant dining and movie theaters, and other activities reopen or resume with fewer restrictions. And, after reaching two weeks in the red tier this week, schools could reopen for on-campus learning. That sent thousands of Rocklin Unified School District students back to school Monday in that district’s new “hybrid learning” model.
Placer remains bound by state-issued COVID-19 guidelines, but the end of its local emergency declaration signals that the county doesn’t intend to enforce those rules itself, Gore said earlier this month.
Gore wasn’t the only Placer County supervisor who clashed with Sisson about local handling of the pandemic.
Kirk Uhler, who represents Granite Bay and north Roseville in District 4, has been an outspoken critic of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order for months.
With the Sept. 8 lifting of the countywide state of emergency, Uhler defended the decision by saying the “emergency never materialized.” He referred to the health crisis, at least locally, as being “in the rear view mirror.”
Nearly 300 more Placer County residents have tested positive and seven more have reportedly died of the virus since Uhler made those comments, county health data show.
In July, Uhler contended in a video rant on Facebook that California and counties’ health departments were overcounting the number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals, claiming that the figures didn’t distinguish between patients hospitalized “because of COVID as opposed to with COVID.”
Uhler aired this concern to Sisson during a supervisors meeting, and she acknowledged that the county would benefit from this information being clarified. In response, the Placer County health office said in its next weekly update that local hospitals would begin sharing more detailed breakdowns about the share of patients hospitalized with lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 that were actually being treated specifically for the virus.
Placer health officials began reporting and maintaining that breakdown on a daily basis in a new section of its online COVID-19 data dashboard starting in late July, along with the same breakdown for patients in intensive care units.
The data has shown continuously since then that a vast majority of Placer’s hospitalized COVID-19 cases — on almost any given day, more than 90% of the dozens who’ve been in hospital beds, and on some occasions all of those patients — were in the hospital or ICU specifically because of the virus, effectively debunking Uhler’s claim that the figures were inflated.
What about Yolo County?
Compared with Placer and other Sacramento-area neighbors, Yolo County has consistently taken more aggressive measures in the battle against COVID-19.
Yolo issued a shelter-in-place order on March 18, a day before Newsom issued his stay-at-home order encompassing California. And the county made the wearing of face coverings mandatory in most public settings beginning in late April, nearly eight weeks before the statewide mask order went into place on June 18.
Yolo County, at around 225,000 residents, has a bit more than half the population of Placer’s roughly 400,000. But Yolo has suffered a higher total of resident deaths, at 54, with half of those linked to outbreaks at senior living facilities.
Yolo has also reported more cases per capita than Placer, with over 2,750 infections reported as of a Tuesday update from the county’s health office.
As of this week’s update, Yolo County remains in the purple tier, but could be promoted to the red tier next week if its recent trends of declining COVID-19 activity continue.
This story was originally published September 23, 2020 at 9:47 AM.
