08.05.2020 COVID-19 Press Conference Live Stream Transcript

The County of Santa Clara
August 05, 2020
Live Stream - Live with the County of Santa Clara
11:00am PT

David Campos: Good morning my name is David Campos i'm a deputy county executive and lead public information officer for the county of santa clara's emergency operations center today we are going to have a briefing from the santa clara county public health officer Dr. Sara Cody who will be making some brief statements and then we will be happy to take questions into the spanish language media we will be available to answer questions after the main press conference so with that let me introduce Dr. Sara Cody.

Dr. Sara Cody: Good morning everyone it's good to be with you good to be back here thank you for standing as far back as you are because i do have my mask off um i haven't seen you all in a while uh and i just wanted to give you an all an update as to where we are with COVID-19 here in in our county. Uh and we've brought some pictures to try to make a point so i'm going to step over here and just project a little bit to tell you where we are. So and actually should i take can i take this with me will that help no oh if i project will this work you know what i'm going to dookay okay  will this work great So this is where we are in the epidemic locally in santa clara county and I wanted to just highlight a few things so remember this is way back in march of 2020 and right there in mid-march is where we put shelter in place into effect and we saw here by may we were down to very low numbers of cases reported each day on some of these days we had just one case reported in the entire county and then as you'll remember in after a period of you know really low case counts in early june we began gradually easing restrictions and reopening as did other counties around us and what we saw was first a gradual increase that really began to accelerate in late June and right up here through mid-july so I want to tell you a little bit about this acceleration as well as what this red part means. So here when we opened i think it was not just that more people were out and about in businesses that we'd reopened but i think that people got a sense that because things were open that it was safe right but the truth is that COVID-19 is still circulating widely in our community and circulating silently person to person to person until then it shows up  in someone who becomes very sick and lands in the hospital so i think that's probably what what was happening as far as who are these uh folks who's who is more likely to be getting infected than others we're seeing a couple of trends here they are also seen in other areas and that is one people who are younger under the age of 35 rates are increasing much faster in that group. Similarly rates are increasing much faster among the latinx community that's true in our county and it's true in surrounding counties as well  here you can see in mid-july you know it looks like oh maybe things are getting better maybe Miraculously something happened but the truth is in this red area we just don't know because the state cal ready system all of the laboratory reports go into a state system and then are reported to each county they're having some technical issues they've gone back maybe as far as mid-july and so this we just don't know. We don't know if our cases are rising plateauing or decreasing and so we are very anxious for this issue to get resolved we expect that all of these numbers are going to go up to what extent we don't know.

 So the data that we do know more about i'm going to show you this this shows this is all of the hospitalizations across all of the hospitals in our county and you can see it over time this is a shorter time period this is just the beginning of july until now and what you can see is that in the first few weeks of july the hospitalizations were uh increasing and then in the last week or so they have plateaued so they've kind of stabilized the last report we had in the hospital those are the blue bars in the red bars sort of superimposed on top those numbers represent new patients with COVID-19 hospitalized on each day you can see that that jumps around a bit but in the last couple weeks here this red line has sort of been coming down so while we again can't interpret what our last few weeks of data mean as far as the cases the last few week or two of hospitalization data is somewhat reassuring that things are leveling off but it's not enough to really know so i just wanted to leave you uh leave our community with a few messages um number one uh COVID is still here it is still very much a threat and it's circulating widely in our community and each of us still needs to do everything that we can to bring it under control there's a lot that we don't know about the virus but there's a lot that we do know and one of the most important things that we can do is to always wear a face covering if you walk outside of your home without your face covering on it should feel weird you it shouldn't feel right it should feel like being in a car without a seat belt you must wear your face coverings anytime you're outside your home number two whenever possible outside is better than inside we know that this virus is spread both by droplets as well as aerosols when you're outside you're much safer the people around you are much safer so if you combine wearing a face covering with being outside with keeping a distance then you will keep those around you safe and and the people that you're with will  keep you safe.
The second thing i wanted to emphasize this is a very human human reaction we all feel a bit safer with people that we know we feel safer with our family we feel safer with our friend but COVID-19 doesn't really care and so you're not actually safer just because you're with a family member or just because you were a friend and and you have a very we all have a very human um a tendency to move physically closer to people that we're comfortable with but that's how COVID spreads from person to person so even if you're at an outdoor gathering with family and friends in a small group everyone needs to be outdoors needs to be at least six feet away and needs to be wearing a face covering that's enormously important so we're going to be at this for a while and as we've been talking about over the last month the key is really risk reduction what can each of us do  every day every time we go out to reduce the chance that COVID will spread from one person to another thank you and i'm happy to answer any questions.

Public: Can you talk about where the data problem is and how at this critical time, how inconvenient that is.

DSC: Right so just as we had back in February and march when we didn't have enough testing we felt blind i would say that right now we're back to feeling blind we don't know how the epidemic is trending so it's not just inconvenient but this lack of data doesn't allow us to know where the epidemic is heading  how fast it's growing or not the problem seems to be with the the sort of juncture between electronic laboratory reports coming in and um and the routing they're not getting routed the way they need to be into the cal ready system apparently the state is still working on a diagnosis the diagnosis is not yet clear and that's about all i know  i will say that our county has offered to help in any way that we can and so we're actually looking to see whether we have some expertise here that we might lend of course everyone statewide is very anxious to get this fixed.

Public: yes it's just a quick follow-up to him when you say expertise does that perhaps mean of some tech health because we have so much of that here and also I was just curious if there was any new news on the Costco situation i know they have done some testing i believe up in mountain view. And any testing plans for employees in perhaps San Jose and Gilroy

DSC: I don't have any particular updates on Costco but what i will say is that we have a team within our special investigations group that investigates work sites  and i want to highlight a couple of things that are important and that is  in many cases at a large work site such as a Costco you're inevitably going to see cases because the people that work at the Costco live in the community where covet is circulating  so the fact that a large company like Costco has cases may mean only that they're large and probability alone would dictate that  they're going to have workers which cases or it may indicate that there's a spread in the workplace so that's a really important distinction to know and I don't have any particular updates on the Costco situation right we're trying to understand exactly what kind of help uh they need and then we're reaching out both internally with the expertise we  have in the county um as well as with colleagues in the valley

Public: Dr. Cody the new numbers from the state come out as you suspect perhaps higher than what we have now what could change and what sort of new protocols would have to be implemented to cope with that if anything?

 DSC: Right well in some ways we would keep doing many of the things that we're doing which is particular um outreach and work with communities both in Gilroy and in east San Jose  where we have some of the highest rates we also of course need to stay with with your help increasing education with everyone it's to keep up the work that everyone has already done and to to assist everyone in shifting their mindset to a long game right we have to be changing our behavior for a very very long time  if we see that the cases are rising and they're rising fast then we may need to put more stricter controls into place as we did back in march to really turn it down.

Hi Dr, Cody here is a question for you.  There are some concerns about testing and the time does it takes for someone to come back. More specificaly we are hearing from folks some of the verily sites they are not getting results for two weeks at a time can you provide your thoughts on that and your concerns on there and secondly as we're seeing more people out and about and  cases jump among some of our more vulnerable communities do you anticipate issuing some sort of recommendation regarding mass to be worn inside homes some homes where there may be multi-generation multi-commercial families

DSC: So as far as testing we too are hearing and documenting that there are lengthening turnaround times the turnaround times varies quite dramatically by lab some labs are still getting a  turnaround time of 24 to 48 hours and some are taking well over a week so there's a lot of variation and as everyone knows a turnaround time of a week or more doesn't really help the person being tested because they don't know their status and at that point our ability to make a  difference with case investigation and contact tracing has really evaporated so shortening the turnaround time is incredibly important different labs are having different challenges and have different different reasons why their turnaround times have lengthened as far as mask wearing there is not a particular way of  course to enforce mask wearing inside someone's home but if there is a for example a family or a multi-generational household anything that that household can do to protect the more vulnerable members either a separate room or mask wearing by members of the family for example that might be out of the house more work doing essential work that would add protection for vulnerable family members.

Public: Hi Dr. Cody asking for my colleague Kenny Choi who's looking in remotely today two days ago new waiver guidelines released by the state three weeks ago you strongly encouraged elementary schools to look into this process what's the message now to the schools that are interested what's the update on how many have initiated the process how many schools private versus public?

DSC: So the state did provide a way for schools within a county on a monitoring list to apply for a waiver to enable in-person education for elementary schools and that's something that we in the county were very encouraged by as you may know the data regarding COVID transmission in children is still a little bit on the scant side there were a number of early studies that were suggesting that children were more less likely to spread to each other and less likely to spread to adults and that was the reason why the state put this waiver process into effect subsequently there's been a few other studies small that suggest that maybe children spread more than the earlier study suggested and so we are still uh encouraging elementary schools that can um can that can put safeguards into place to look into the waiver process and we are actively working with them I don't have an exact number on the number of applications but it certainly skews heavily towards private schools there's not that many public schools um that have applied and expressed interest in a waiver at this point I want to make one more point about schools and about this epidemic curve the best way that that we as a community can get our children back into school for in-person learning is to crush the curve again that is the best way that we can get our kids back to school because when there's widespread transmission in the community teachers don't feel safe parents don't feel safe staff don't feel safe and whether there is safe or isn't safe it matters a lot about how the community feels and when we're back as we were in may with very very low case counts and we'd really suppress the transmission people felt safer it was safer and that's the way we can get our kids back to school and that's what we want to do.

DC: One more question

Public: Hey Dr. Cody if you could talk about the state, the issues with the state.  what kind of response are you hearing from the state, have they told you as to when they expect to remedy the error.

RSC: So my understanding is right now the state is still working on a diagnosis and because they don't have a diagnosis to the problem they don't yet have a timeline as to when the problem will be resolved