08.18.2020 COVID-19 Press Briefing Live Stream Transcript

The County of Santa Clara
August 18, 2020
Live Stream - Press Briefing
12:00pm PT

David Campos: Are we ready? Okay I think technically I can say good afternoon my name is David Campos I'm the Lead Public Information Officer for the County of Santa Clara's Emergency Operations Center thank you for being here today and we are actually live on Facebook Live as well and we're here to launch the opening of a very important place in the county's response to the COVID-19 pandemic you're going to hear first from our Health Officer who will provide some context of why this large-scale testing facility is so critical to the county's efforts you're also going to hear from the Testing Officer for COVID-19 who's going to talk about where we are in terms of testing having been prioritized and then you're going to hear from Dr. Tong who has been the person in charge for putting this operation together she and her team have done an incredible job and by the time this is done this is going to be the largest testing facility anywhere in the Bay Area so let me begin by calling on our Health Officer and I want to note that because of where the the cameras are we're going to leave our facial coverings on uh to protect everyone so with that I will turn it over to our Public Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody Dr. Cody

Sara Cody: Hello everyone welcome to a very hot day here at the fairgrounds this is enormously exciting and enormously important that the the County of Santa Clara is standing up one of the largest testing operations in the area starting today and not only will we be providing uh COVID tests but we anticipate that in the future we'll also be able to provide flu shots which are going to be incredibly important for protecting all of us this fall and winter as well as our dream of having a COVID vaccine this is a place where we could do that too so why is this so important um i wanna i wanna tell you we are six months into fighting COVID we started here as really ground zero for covid in the united states and six months in we're still fighting and the reason that we are still fighting is we have not had the tools to get us out one of the most important tools to get us out is testing testing testing testing so we invite everyone who needs a test either because you have symptoms because you've been in contact with someone or because you're doing activities that you think might put you at risk come here and get tested if you test positive before you hear from anyone the minute you know you're positive you isolate yourself away from others isolate yourself away from others and and get out in front and let those people know who you've been in contact with that they also need to isolate themselves from others that is the way we are going to get out of this get tested know your status and take action spread the word to families and friends and co-workers to do the same that is how we are going to get out of this that is how we are going to get our businesses back to work and that is how we are going to get our kids back in school and learning it's testing all right so we have made it available at scale mass testing so come on over get your test and let's get our lives back thank you

DC: I want to note that uh Dr. Cody and I are wearing our census face coverings because even as we have this pandemic we're still in the middle of the census we actually have until the end of September and there are about 30 percent of the population the County of Santa Clara that has not responded to the census so we want to highlight the importance of that you know there's something about having the right person at the right time uh having Dr. Sara Cody as the Health Officer has been really critical to to the success and the ability of the county to respond and the next individual having him and the role of being a test the Testing Officer for COVID-19 for the county has been really instrumental in ramping up the testing so with that i'm going to turn it over to Dr. Marty Fenstersheib the Testing Officer for the County of Santa Clara

Marty Fenstersheib: Thank you David so I'm really I'm really excited to be here today we've come a long way in our county in increasing our testing and i'm very proud of Valley Medical Center in the county for being able to set this up at this point the county is doing about 40 percent of all the testing in the entire county at this point and with this new site we're going to again increase the amount of testing so as as was mentioned we're doing more testing at this site as a mass site than anywhere in northern California and as it's been said we want people to come down here that are unlike our other sites our pop-up sites where we basically said asymptomatic people because we have people in line walking up this site is a drive-through site for now it will be expanded but right now for the most part it's drive through and so if you have symptoms you can come to this site stay in your car and get the fast simple and free test it's just a swab they will put the swab into your each side of your nose and hold it for 10 seconds and that's all it is it doesn't hurt it's easy and it's free you don't need any medical insurance you do need to go online to our website and make an appointment for this test we also are very excited that we will have the availability for people that don't have cars to come up and walk through a gate where you don't need a car but you still have to make an appointment at this point down the road we will see how we do and hopefully we'll have just people that don't have appointments but right now you need the appointment we also have a bike lane so in order to stay green and have people on their bicycles come up and get a test also but again you have to be registered in order to do that so again if you have symptoms if you've been a contact or especially as Dr. Cody mentioned if you are a front line worker those people who we appreciate in our lives that every day are working to stock our grocery shelves to ride our buses and to work to keep people um working at restaurants and others that are front lines of the community we want you to be tested on a regular basis one time is not enough we want you to test at least once a month so again you can see the cars are already coming in and people will be tested in this site down the road we plan either in this site or across in the fairgrounds to have the availability of flu vaccine and i want to just preface because i have the opportunity now to basically say that this Fall we have got to vaccinate everybody for flu we won't we will get confused as to whether you have influenza or COVID so in order to protect everyone from flu let's get rid of flu as a disease in our community and test and and basically vaccinate everybody so six months on up get your vaccine go to your health provider to get it or when we have it here you'll be able to get it here okay thank you

DC: As you can imagine there are many challenges that come with uh you know putting together the operation to run a facility on this scale we are grateful to the valley medical center for making that possible and the individual who has actually seen that very complicated operation and who has demonstrated an ability to just make things happen uh is Dr. Jennifer Tong so Dr. Tong

Jennifer Tong: Yes hi it's Dr. Jennifer Tong I'm the Associate Chief Medical Officer for Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and since the springtime Valley Medical Center has been increasing the amount of testing that they've made available for our community we continue to have multiple pop-up sites throughout the county as well as mobile teams that go to places in most need and we will continue having those one of the reasons we decided to open the drive-through site was to have better options for people who are having symptoms for those with symptoms the most important thing is to call your physician who should be able to test you and evaluate for any other causes of symptoms however if you don't have a physician or if your physician is unable to test you we remain available in addition this site is well designed for people who are at higher risk and might feel more comfortable being tested from their car and we design the site to be convenient for those who work so that they can make an appointment and have a scheduled time the total period from the time they drive into the time they drive out really should be less than 15 minutes if they're there at their appointed time this is this has been a collaboration from multiple parts of the county all of our testing has been a collaboration of multiple parts of the county we already been testing about two to three thousand people per day and this site will give us a capacity for at least one thousand more it was designed to be able to scale uh beyond that three to five times we've had people here from our parks department who are helping with traffic control we've had people here from our facilities department helping with the portable temporary buildings we've had people here from our technical services department helping with the I.T. setup we've had roads and airports helping not only with the surfacing but also with traffic engineering and our entire clinical team is provided by Valley Medical Center so this is the best example i can think of of your local government working effectively for you to keep you safe

DC: Thank you Dr. Tong and again thank you to your incredible team for making this possible you know from the beginning of the pandemic our Board of Supervisors has made it clear that testing has to be a top priority for the county that that's critical to the response to so to represent our Board of Supervisors is our President of the Board of Supervisors President Cindy Chavez

Cindy Chavez: Well good afternoon everyone and i want to start by saying a big thank you to the Fairgrounds Management Corporation and in particular to our leaders over there and avondrati this was had to be done fast and they did it now why are we moving at breakneck speed here's here are the numbers we are getting cases on average a day we are close to we're hospitalizing on average 175 human beings our fellow members of our community a day we had four new deaths just today with a total of 213,000 deaths in total this is a lot of anguish and a lot of grief and all of it preventable how is it preventable if you need a test you can go to sccfreetest.org and find a place to get a test if you are positive isolate if you are uh i'm sorry quarantine if you're not sure isolate until you get the test and the information that you need this is particularly important in communities of color our Latinx community is seeing skyrocketing cases while we're seeing some studying in different parts of our county in the east side we're seeing a continual increase young people if you're 18 to 40 you are not immune and and this is important because an 18 year old or any any young adult that's going back to visit their family you could be visiting your family and visiting upon them illness and maybe death what this requires is us as a community to work together and to do it in the most foolish fashion we can and the reason is that the solution to this crisis is in our hands there's no calvary it's us we're the people we've been waiting for wear your masks don't touch touch your face wash your hands and socially distance and we can beat this back if we don't act we could see a whole nother year of children not in school we could see a whole nother year of mental health issues we could see a whole another year of economic devastation i cannot emphasize enough how important it is that the county continue to play a leadership role that our fellow health care providers play a leadership role and that each of you play a leadership role in getting our communities back thank you

DC: Thank you President Chavez and we do want to note that the number of deaths is 213 we're gonna take any questions that you have for our speakers and after the questions uh we're going to have a bit of a demonstration of how the the the drive-through works for bicycles so how it works if you're on your bicycle but uh any questions for any of our speakers yes Chris? okay

Reporter: For Dr. Fenstersheib Marty can you tell us at this location when people get tested how long will it be before they get their test results?

MF: So the question was what about the turnaround time for tests everything is going to a lab that has been able to turn around tests very quickly so we're looking at three days on average three days so that's fast it could be shorter it could be a little longer but that's pretty much it and that's that's that's a good amount of time for turnarounds that's a good acceptable amount of fun

DC: Chris?

Reporter: Marty the question for you as well is to follow up to Marianne's question how many um how many tests are you processing per day and in terms of overall lab capacity for the county where we have right now we can also account for you know plans in addition to the ones that the county is working with to process tests

MF: So there are a lot of labs around that do uh processing of these tests and Valley Medical Center up until now has basically used their own lab and we've also used the public health laboratory and we've been able to do within the county um as i mentioned 40 of all the tests and we're averaging about 6 000 tests a day we have now contracted with another lab in southern California to help us so that we can get this site which is now probably at 500 today a thousand by the end of the week and 5,000 um down the road a little bit so we will be able to use a number of labs with good turnaround times in order to process our our uh

Reporter: Marty can you talk a little bit more about the potential for how bad it could get with the flu season that's coming in why that's so important for the people to do

MF: Yeah how bad could it get with the flu and um i can only talk from from my my knowledge and doing this for a long time also but but typically you know in the fall we see a lot of influenza along with other respiratory illnesses and COVID symptoms include fever and shortness of breath and cough and so those symptoms as you know are very similar to flu and other respiratory illnesses so we want to be able to differentiate between those illnesses and one way of doing that is eliminating the possibility of flu by doing the vaccination so it's just going to get more difficult as fall comes in and um so we want to try to give it be one one step ahead basically a diagnostic capability

Reporter: We talked about the digital divide but some families don't have access to computers and it's difficult for them to make an appointment online also in language barriers can you address why they have to have an appointment online and can you mention that that might change

MF: Yeah and not all our pop-up as Dr. Tong would tell you um our pop-up sites don't require any um online reservations so those are still available still go on our website and find one of those sites if you don't have access we are we will eventually as soon as we can get this running smoothly look at the possibilities again of having walk-ups without this allows us to do a lot more testing faster because we don't have to wait and do all the registration so we can bring in 5,000 people into something where you have all the paperwork done ahead of time but there are the availability of those tests for people that don't have access and also people don't forget you have your own providers that are required to do testing for you if you fit in those categories

DC: Any other questions?

Reporter: What is the cost of this entire operation and what are the numbers as far as staffing also will it be staffed seven days a week

JT: So currently our staffing is for five days a week um Tuesday through Saturday we have selected later hours so that we are open and have appointments available for those who need to come after work on Saturdays will be open uh during the daytime hours we have um approximately 15 clinical staff here today to start and we'll be adjusting that as time goes on to increase our throughput and capacity we also have approximately 10 disaster service workers from other parts of the county county employees who have been asked to come and do this work instead of their normal work and we are still we are still factoring how much the total cost is it will depend on um the the number of tests that we scale up to do

DC: If you uh if you would like to uh tape the the bike through uh testing uh there's young lady in blue over there uh who uh you know will will allow you uh will guide you on where to place the cameras thank you oh will you be speaking in Spanish later i'm happy to okay can we do that