It’s been a long six weeks.
Forty-two days ago, there were no confirmed coronavirus cases in Sonoma County. As of Saturday night, 145 county residents had tested positive for COVID-19, including two people who have died, 82 still dealing with the virus and 61 people who have recovered. The confirmed caseload jumped by 17 on Wednesday, the highest single-day increase yet, and preliminary modeling conducted for the county puts the virus’s estimated peak between May 28 and June 2.
However, those numbers need to be taken with at least a couple of grains of salt: the local impacts of a nationwide failure to test and the prevalence of patients without symptoms has led to an undercount of the global pandemic’s true spread. The official numbers reflect more than 1.7 million confirmed cases and more than 108,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 worldwide.
And all of the county’s roughly 500,000 residents have adapted to a dramatically different way of living since March 17, when Sonoma County’s public health officer, Dr. Sundari Mase, imposed the first of two shelter-in-place orders that have cooped up residents and shut businesses in a bid to prevent hospitals from overflowing with virus patients. Not that Sonoma County’s alone — most Bay Area counties have been hit even harder, and the entire state is grappling with stay-home orders, school closures and lack of work, with much of the world either living with or bracing for more of the same.
Mase, interviewed in a news conference via Zoom on Friday, expressed optimism about the measures Sonoma County has taken over the past six weeks to limit spread and community transmission, which has amounted to the source for 1 of every 6 cases here. The county hasn’t experienced the larger bursts of viral spread as elsewhere in more urban parts of the Bay Area, in part because it doesn’t have the international airports of San Francisco, Oakland or San Jose, or a large university like UC Berkeley.
“We’re fortunate in that we don’t have those kind of factors that would much increase movement of people,” Mase said. “So that’s one reason why we’re seeing less infections and less transmission.”
She also noted that Sonoma County went under a shelter-in-place order despite not having widespread community transmission of the coronavirus, saying “we may have been a little bit ahead of the game” on that front.
Shelter-in-place rules are likely to remain in effect until the county starts to see cases decreasing, Mase said. Though the number of cases has continued to increase, growth in active cases has decreased recently. After roughly doubling between March 27 and April 2, when cases rose from 40 to 79, the number of active cases has risen and occasionally fallen, sitting at 82 as of Saturday.
Closing parks and schools and tracing contacts of people who’ve contracted coronavirus are among the steps the county has taken to flatten the curve. The county’s approach under Mase has been informed by her experience at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization battling tuberculosis.
Sonoma County also is working with Sonoma State University to add 580 patient beds as part of an effort to increase hospital capacity in case hospitals become overwhelmed once the virus peaks.
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April 12, 2020 at 10:22AM
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Six weeks since first case, Sonoma County wary of coronavirus surge - Santa Rosa Press Democrat
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