Sonoma County health officer to start easing COVID-19-related public restrictions this week


Sonoma County health officer to start easing COVID-19-related public restrictions this week

Sonoma County’s health officer on Monday confirmed her intention to begin loosening coronavirus-related public health emergency restrictions this week, beginning with a “soft opening” of local parks and later giving a green light to more construction work and jobs performed outdoors like landscaping and gardening.

“These are lower-risk activities, and that’s why it makes sense from a planning basis to look at those first,” Dr. Sundari Mase said during her daily press briefing.

Mase’s comments about relaxing her March 18 countywide stay-home order that halted most business and industry came the same day six Bay Area counties that are home to 7 million people announced they would extend respective shelter-in-place directives through May, while easing some undisclosed restrictions. Asked if she plans something similar, Mase said she is considering “what’s best for our county.”

“There’s an imminent announcement,” she said. “But we’re still looking at what will be the best way in terms of an end date or not, and when that would be, if we’re going to have an end date.”

Mase also said Monday new computer projections for local COVID-19 infections, prepared for the county by Imperial College London, could be released on Tuesday. The fresh modeling, she said, will show the county’s stay-at-home order and other public health measures have greatly reduced the ability of the virus to spread through Sonoma County.

Mase on Monday revealed a key positive finding contained in the new modeling, one that sharply differs from initial Imperial College projections that predicted up to 1,500 local residents would be hospitalized at one time when coronavirus cases reach an apex in the county by late May or early June. She said local public health measures thus far — social distancing rules, requirements most people stay home and businesses other than essential operations remain closed — have greatly crippled the ability of the virus to spread through the community. In epidemiological terms, that’s translated into allowing COVID-19 to only have a local “reproduction rate” of less than one. That means infected people are minimally transmitting the highly contagious respiratory disease.

“We think that with shelter in place, it’s less than one,” Mase said of the reproduction rate. “Meaning that for every case, we’re not even getting one secondary case.”

That represents a significant improvement from the earlier batch of Imperial College’s computer projections of the county’s COVID-19 outbreak showing an expected virus reproduction rate of 2½ — each infected person potentially infecting 2½ other people.

Mase said the virus suppression that’s revealed in the fresh modeling projections was “reassuring,” providing more evidence the county’s aggressive restrictions on public movements and social distancing requirements have dramatically halted the spread of the virus.

“That’s why we’re not seeing community transmission,” she said, noting the bulk of the people contracting the coronavirus locally are getting it through close contacts with infected residents.

As of Monday night, Sonoma County reported 222 confirmed COVID-19 cases out of 5,482 people tested, since the first local case was announced March 2. There are 117 active cases, while 103 people stricken have recovered and two people died. Across the state, 44,897 people have been infected and 1,344 have died, as of Monday night.

Over the weekend, the county expanded coronavirus testing and for three weeks has been conducting daily tests of close contacts of infected people. Mase said the results of the weekend testing should be released in the next few days.




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