07.29.20 COVID-19 Briefing Live Stream Transcript

The County of Santa Clara
July 29, 2020
Live Stream - Briefing Live stream
10:00am PT

Maribel Martinez: Good morning everyone and welcome to live with the county of Santa Clara i'm Maribel Martinez the public information officer here at the emergency operations center this morning we're joined with by Dr Marty Fenstersheib our county's county of Santa Clara COVID and in just a few moments we'll be discussing the growing number of COVID cases and who is impacted the most. Also we'll provide information about resources and focus on the solutions to how to stop and slow the spread of COVID-19 we're going to take a look at our dashboards but i'll i'll share today that we are keeping our masks on today we really want to bring home the message that we need to be wearing masks that cover our nose and our mouth every day any time we are outside of our home so we thank you for your patience we might hear a little bit of a muffled sound because we're keeping these on but we again want to make sure that everyone knows how important it is to wear masks every day. The numbers as we have them as of yesterday we have 9,359 confirmed cases 158 new cases new death as of yesterday. And when I share these numbers I want us to remember that every case is a person every person is part of that family and those families are part of our community now Dr. Marty we see these numbers we hear these numbers we might even know people uh in our network but there's still some folks in our community that don't believe this is real don't believe the pandemic is real what do you tell them what do you say to them?

Dr. Marty Fenstersheib: Well sometimes in our own neighborhoods excuse me um we don't see evidence of COVID-19. but i assure everyone that this is very real and for a lot of people who have experienced the illness and for a lot of people who have been hospitalized um it's very real. So COVID is in our community it's in the state it's in the country but it is here in california it is real and it's with us every day and i hope things will get better over time.

MM: So, let's look a little bit deeper into the data and let's show some of these dashboards and for the public some of these dashboards some of these all of these numbers are on our dashboards they may look a little bit different on our website posting but let's let's look at what what the data is telling us

DMF: okay so this is a a bar graph showing cases by race and ethnicity so it's the break down by by who you are in your in your community so it's asian latinos whites african-americans and others the first thing you want to look at is the light blue bars and that tells us the percentage of all of us as part of the whole population. So, for instance Asian make up 36 percent of our population whites make up 32 and i would note that there is not one group that makes up a majority in our community we are a community of minorities if you want to say um one other thing where do we get this data we get this data from the census and um that's coming up again so a little second message here please fill out your census it's very important for us to have this data the other important part again is the cases where are the cases and who are the cases and you can see in the blue bars number one that blue bars are in every group so COVID-19 affects all of us every one of us in some way however we're going to point out today the latino bar there the latino population is one in four of the people that live in this community are latinos however of all the cases that we've identified the 9,000 in some cases that Maribel no mentioned. half almost half of them almost half of them one in two are latinos. so again one in four latinos in the population but one out of every two cases are latino.

MM: So that means that when somebody tests positive in our county one out of those two cases one of those is latino that is correct and when we say when we use the word latino we mean latino Latina latinx latine folks of that ethnic background race of all genders. This is really significant and especially in in the work that i do with the division of equity and social justice we really are are looking at ways that communities of color are impacted in disproportionate and in significant ways. And we also recognize that to do this work right we have to engage in anti-racism work meaning that we have to work really hard to undo some of the conditions that have created these biases in our community that not the community itself is responsible but we've been building on conditions that have existed even before the pandemic. um let's look at another data set about our county as well. So here now we're looking at a map of our county area.

DMF: So this is a map of Santa Clara County um again the north county down to the south gilroy area and what the first thing that we see on this is that the colors represent cases and where people live the first thing we see is that it affects all of our county every every sector of our county every area is affected by some level of COVID however if you look at the darker blue areas in the south county and then in areas of east san jose that's where the highest concentrations of COVID cases are again it's everywhere else but in those areas there's more cases than any of the other areas when you start looking at neighborhoods so south county Gilroy and then the east side of San Jose

MM: So, this is significant because every part of our county in some way is impacted right there isn't an area that does not have a case we're all impacted and it's even more so in some areas. You know I grew up in east San Jose starring king area my mom my sister my nephew live in evergreen and on my wife's side we have family in Gilroy so these are our families this is our community that we need to protect and we need to be aware of all the challenges that folks are facing uh in our county. um

DMF: Yeah i i i totally agree i mean we're all affected i'm concerned i don't my family isn't here i grew up back east and my dad who is in florida where the where COVID-19 is out of control he's 93 years old and so i worry about him i worry that he'll come into contact with somebody who's infected so i basically call him every day and say did you go outside today and did you have your mask on and i you know every day i just check on him so i think we all do that no matter where you are but i think it's our responsibility it's all of our responsibilities to take care of each other and protect our families as best we can always

MM: Absolutely and you mentioned that your father is 93 my mom is 72 years young let me underscore that years young she would she will remind you of how young and vibrant she is and we have to protect our community members and our family members so let's look at the age breakdown of the data. So again this is the cases by age group and you can see you can put yourself in one of these age groups because we cover every age group and there are cases in every age group i think of note really is that whereas before we used to think this was a disease that affected the elderly in our community and granted that's true and in fact the people that are in hospitals and the people that get the sickest are usually the elderly. however, if you look at um all of them put together that if you add up the cases in the young people under 35 you'll find that half of our cases of old people it's a disease of all people especially the young people and the young people who may not have a lot of symptoms or feel sick all the time and maybe with no symptoms can still bring that disease home to the family and our your mom my dad and again not willingly or knowingly sometimes but they could potentially infect them if they're not really safe

MM: Yes you know I think about that because my mom lives with my sister my younger sister and my nephew who is five years old and so, we have a household that's multi-generational that my sister sometimes has to leave the home to do grocery shopping things like that and so we're very cautious of the fact that we have multiple age ranges in a single household and we have to have precautions take precautions to make sure everyone's safe what are some of the things that multi-generational homes should be thinking of in keeping our all of our community safe

DMF: Well Maribel you make a very good point again um depending on where you live I mean maybe you have a large house and there's only a couple people in there but many people live in communities and neighborhoods where the families are living in very small quarters maybe there's an extended family maybe there are more than one maybe there's more than one family and if somebody comes and infects who's young like we talked about comes home and there's people that are older and perhaps at higher risk what can you do well we even though we love our we love our families we want to hug them and kiss them in those cases we really have to be careful the new normal is we don't jump run over to our grandpa anymore and hug them we try to keep our masks on we can even open the windows because we know it's safer outside than inside so that's one way of doing it and we try to keep as separate as we can so that's in order sometimes to protect and to love our families and take care of them we have to keep separated um which is different than what we usually are used to

MM: You know i think um me coming from a family of immigrant parents we definitely understand that families have sometimes made decisions to move away or have a lot of physical distance and we do that for the betterment for the future right to have to have a better future and so this this notion of staying away as a way to show love is actually part of what we've done before too so um just wanted wanted folks to to remember that as well. We know that frontline workers have a higher risk because they're interacting with the public but could you share a little bit more about what do we mean by front-line workers that's kind of a new term that's being used.

DMF: Frontline workers or people used to call it essential workers basically we're looking at people who take care of us when we go shopping they're the people that are stocking the shelves checking us out they're the people who drive the buses they're the people who are working in the restaurants those are front line they front line facing us in the community and they put themselves at higher risk every day when they go to work and again they have to come home to their families and we do know um from our other data that again the latino population is overrepresented in the frontline workers so we're we're we see more latinos that are working in the front line and because of that because of them their work and helping us and serving us they put themselves at higher risk and therefore they potentially put their communities at higher risk their families at higher risk also.

MM: And i think that's a great point and that also means that we all have a responsibility to keep those front line workers safe by us following all the prevention measures and a reminder that not one person can defeat COVID-19. it takes all of us working together and again if we're really interested in doing transformative anti-racist work we have to make sure that we keep our communities of color of vulnerable populations safe and that includes our frontline workers. Because many of them are in positions That maybe don't have job protections like sick leave or if you don't show up to work you are losing pay or are perhaps not being able to come back to a job and so we have to really really think about our actions and ways that we can prevent the spread of covid especially for thosethat are serving us in these front-line positions so we are now entering this new normal because covid is real and we're doing things differently. I know that i perhaps have not been following some of the methods that my mom would like which would be to visit her every single day at home because we are keeping this distance what are some other things that we can be doing to lower risk in this new normal?

DMF: Well as we all know and i think we keep talking about wearing these masks and we have them on today to show again that this is what we do this is our new normal and that's the way it should be for the entire population i think that if everybody wore these masks 100 of the time we would see our case numbers drop tremendously so don't take it lightly that these masks aren't important they are very very important so, remember no matter where you are outside your house you need to wear your mask and then again we we talked about meeting other people we want to make sure we keep our distance outside is always better than inside because we know that having the air and the breeze it's less likely that we'll be infected so i think those types of things and then trying to not visit people at higher risk or at least maybe calling them on the phone more maybe saying hi from from a distance outside as opposed to going in and giving them a big hug and then i know people are having birthdays come up and parties i know it's hard for people not to get together that's what we like to do we get together but we have to be aware of the risk that people put themselves into so put on that mask keep your distance and and do more things outside.

MM: And as you've seen i've had to adjust my mask a couple times during our interview because as i'm talking it shifts around and we want to make sure that the mask at all times is covering our nose and our mouth those are the areas that we want to keep covered and we might need to adjust here and there to make sure that it is securely on um i've also started to send my mom cards and last week i sent her some flowers and that seemed to really brighten her day so even though i couldn't physically go visit her and have been staying away for safety reasons there are lots of ways even low-tech ways that we can make sure that our loved ones know how much we are thinking about them.

DMF: Um you mentioned that the mask i just wanted to reiterate that a lot of times i've gone out in the stores and i'm seeing people with their masks below their nose you know i'm kind of walking around with that um just remember that it's really important that it totally covers your nose like you said and your mouth so maybe you can even if people aren't wearing it right you can kind of just hint pull it up and help them out and it will help you stay safe.

MM: Now a lot of the times we give messaging About not interacting with people that are not in your same household but we also want to highlight that there could be some additional risk when you have members of your house that are essential workers what are some of the things that we need to remember if we are an essential worker and are coming home to our loved ones right so if we've been out there and perhaps we've been in an area that maybe we had not the ability to do such of such social distancing from someone else maybe they weren't wearing a mask so we put ourselves at risk and i think coming home we have to be aware of that so again keeping um keeping the mask on when we when we're near other family members at risk making sure we wash our hands um changing our clothes um again it's more the respiratory um exposure than than things on you but but but that could also be a risk opening the windows as i say is something it's so simple but again it it really goes a long way to do that.

MM: And of course as always with a lot of other diseases as well and just overall good health washing your hands wash your hands frequently don't touch your face if you haven't washed your hands or used a hand sanitizer so making sure that your face your nose your mouth is covered and that you're not touching it with hands that have touched something else so let's shift now to to look up to talk about our resources and the testing that we're doing in our county again to make sure that our community is safe.

DMF: Right so um again there's recommendations out from the health department on getting tested and we've really increased the amount of testing that's available in our county we've done i think a great job and a lot of times um there is some delay in getting the test back but um we're working on that we would like people obviously if you have symptoms of COVID to get a test and we want you to go to your call your doctor go to your provider for that if someone told you that you were a contact of a case then we want you to go and be tested and then all those front line workers we really want you to go and get a test we think on a monthly basis is good not any more often than every couple weeks all the health providers in the community are required to provide a test for you we also have these pop-up sites that you can look on our website and find a location near you to be tested so i think that's those are some of the things that you can do to be tested  if you get if you are positive the one thing we want you to do is answer the call when we call you to talk about it because we have resources for you  don't be afraid to answer our call there is no is those the data that we use is not shared with immigration there's no there's no issue around that it's all kept very confidential so, we want you to answer that call and we can provide you with some resources if you have trouble staying at home separated from other people in the family if you need help with your rent if you need help with food we have shelter opportunities for you in the community just answer our call and we will be able to provide that for you if you need it.

MM: Here in the county we are with you we want to support you so as as Dr Marty mentioned we provide testing if you don't have health insurance we can connect you with health care and if you need support whether that's financial with rent or with food we can connect you as well if you are a confirmed case of covid so, we are here to support well that's all the time we have today thank you so much thank you Dr Marty for all that you've been doing thank you community out there keep wearing your face covering practice that physical distance and wash our hands frequently. For any other information please go to our website at www.sccgov.org/coronavirus please take care of yourselves and those around you have a great day.