04.01.20 COVID-19 Briefing Live Stream Transcript

The County of Santa Clara
April 1, 2020
Live Stream - Live with the County of Santa Clara
10am PT

DAVID CAMPOS: Good morning! For those of you that are watching, we are live with the County of Santa Clara, my name is David Campos, I’m a Deputy County Executive, and we’re actually, this morning, live from the emergency operations center for the county of Santa Clara. We want to welcome all the residents of the county of Santa Clara that are watching, and just know that going forward, Monday through Friday at 10am, the county will be doing this briefing to give you, the residents of this county, as much information as we can give you about what’s happening.

We want to note, that as we speak, there are hundreds of county employees in this building, and there are thousands throughout the county that are working hard to make sure that this county is doing everything we can to deal with this crisis. We also want to acknowledge all the heroes and heroines that are out there, doing their part, whether it’s the healthcare workers that are in our hospitals and our clinics, the workers at our supermarkets, the folks that are driving buses, that are delivering our food, we want to thank them, because that are helping us deal with the crisis, and the only way that we know how to do it, the Santa Clara County way.

So with that in mind, I want to start by just giving some numbers, and one of the things that we’re going to do moving forward is to give you information about what is happening. What we reported yesterday in terms of the cases that we have in the county, we have 890 cases of COVID-19, we have, unfortunately, 30 deaths, and of course our hearts go out to the families, the loved ones of the people that died, and you can be sure that our personnel and our hospitals are doing everything they can to save as many lives as possible.

So with that in mind, speaking of heroes and heroines, we’re going to hear from three amazing people today that have been at the forefront of the battle of fighting this crisis. And so we’re going to have a conversation with them, and we’re going to begin with someone that I think all of us had been hearing about, and that’s Dr. Sara Cody, who is the public health officer for the county of Santa Clara.

Dr. Cody, we know how busy you are, as the commander really, of this war against COVID-19, the person who actually had to make the monumental decision to actually institute the first shelter in place Order, not just in the Bay Area, but in the country. So, residents trust you, you’re the voice that people want to hear from, what do you have to say to our residents? Where are we today, what should they know from their public health officer?

DR. SARA CODY: Thank you for the opportunity, and I’m delighted to speak to everyone directly. I think that what we’re all experiencing is something that we have never experienced before, that it’s hard to even wrap our minds around what’s happening, and it’s all happening very fast. So I want to just acknowledge that, and I feel it too.

So it’s hard for me to even believe that when we put our first shelter-in-place order together, in collaboration with health officers across the Bay Area, that was just a little over two weeks ago on March 16th. And at that point, in our county, then as now, we were the epicenter with more cases than anyone in the Bay Area, and it looked like the trajectory was very, very, very worrisome, and that spurred us to act. It felt a little bit like holding hands and leaping into deep water, but what I want to say is, even though I’m tasked with ultimately making the decisions, the collaboration and the support in our area and our county is something, I always knew we had it, but I never understood just how important it was until we were faced with making these decisions.

So, on the 16th we had just 40 some odd cases, we took very swift and aggressive measures, that were a difficult decision to make, and I know created, and are still creating, enormous hardship for many. There’s been incredible sacrifice that everyone has made together to slow down the spread of infection. We have some signs, very soft signs, but I think that the train is beginning to slow down a little bit.

I want to remind everyone why we’re doing this. We’re doing this because we need to make sure that our hospitals, every hospital in our community and in our surrounding communities, are able to take care of us when we need them, that we have enough hospital beds and hospital capacity and well healthcare workers who are protected and able to take care of anyone who’s sick with COVID-19 or anything else. If we have the capacity in our healthcare system, we can prevent people from dying of COVID-19, and that is our top level goal, and that’s why we’re doing all this, why we’re doing it together. And we’re going to unfortunately need to keep at it for a bit of time in the future.

DAVID CAMPOS: Dr. Cody, you issued the first Order, and then yesterday you made a very important announcement that a subsequent Order was issued. Can you talk a little bit about why you needed to do that and how you came to that decision?

DR. CODY: Yes, so the first Order I issued on March 16th, and then a follow-up Order yesterday, and that’s because, even though we’re making progress in slowing the spread of COVID-19 it’s apparent that we have to do even more. Our first Order, our amazing team in county council wrote this Order, it was fantastic, but there were areas where there was still more activity going on than--our system really can’t tolerate it, and the top level message is everyone needs to be in their home, sheltering in place. We wanted to tighten the guidelines so people really understood what exactly is an essential business, and when you’re conducting essential business, what are all the things that you can do to reduce the probability of spread. So for example, if you’re in a grocery store, we wanted to have guidelines so that the grocery store can do--what they need to do in order to protect people while they’re shopping, and so that and a number of other revisions were made to the Order to make it more clear, easier to follow and to provide additional protection.

DAVID CAMPOS: Thank you, thank you, Dr. Cody. Now, we’re going to hear from someone that maybe a lot of people may not know, but he plays a very important role in the county, and that’s James Williams, our County Counsel. And we’re following Dr. Cody’s directive, her vision for what needs to be done, and James, you and your team are the people who are responsible for putting that vision into paper, and actually crafting it in a way that is not only legally appropriate, but also makes sense. So as the County Counsel of the county, what do you want residents to know in terms of what that means for them?

JAMES WILLIAMS: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right, our task is to take--our collective task on the part of the legal offices from all of the jurisdictions that are involved, is to take the direction from the health officers and put it in writing, into something that’s actually workable as best as we can, and on a very quick timeline.

I think one of the biggest changes with the new, the revised Order, is the implementation of a social distancing protocol that Dr. Cody referenced. That is something every essential business has to have in place. And a lot of what we heard, and we were responding to a lot of questions and inquiries, FAQs that we were working to help answer, and a lot of concern around what can essential businesses do, based on their own facility and specific circumstances, to ensure that they are taking the steps that they can so that even when we conduct the activities that we need to in order to continue to survive, in order to go get food and take care of household needs for example, that we’re doing so in as safe a manner as possible, both for our own families and those around us.

By having the social distancing protocol, the idea was to create a tool that could be individually tailored to each facility rather than trying to come up with some complicated regulatory structure that wouldn’t be workable and couldn’t be developed, but really allow each entity to craft their own protocol, post it, implement it, provide notice to the public, to make sure that we are doing what we can in each of those locations.

DAVID CAMPOS: Thank you, thank you, James, and thank you to your team as well for all the work they’ve done. Now we’re going to hear from someone who is a really important player in all of this, the President of the Board of Supervisors, and we do want to note that our Board has been very proactive in that all of them right now are sheltering in place at home. But President Chavez, you’re the President of the Board, you were elected, you represent this jurisdiction, what do you want your constituents to know about what the county is doing?

SUPERVISOR CINDY CHAVEZ: Well first of all, let me just say thank you for all of you who are watching this, and I know it’s not just our residents, but also people who work for the county and who are out there doing very important work, so let me start by saying thank you. And also, on behalf of my colleagues, Supervisor Mike Wasserman, Supervisor Susan Ellenburg, Supervisor Joe Simitian, and Supervisor Dave Cortese. All of us have been working to try to support you in this effort, and we’re really, to be blunt with you, we’re at the end of our time with you, so there were only three things that I want to make sure I said to all of you.

One, I want to thank everybody who’s cooperating. Every business that’s having a hardship, that you’re staying closed anyway, every family that’s learning how to homeschool, every family that’s struggling right now to figure out how to make ends meet, because your paychecks are gone, for people who’ve been laid off, every one of you, thank you for doing your part, and we’re so sorry for the hardship that you’re undergoing, and we’re trying really hard at the county to stand up services in partnership with all of our cities to be able to support residents. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is I wanted to say a big thank you to all of our first responders, and just to say to all of you, if you’ve got to go to the grocery store, don’t go three times a day, go when you need something, please stay socially distant, because we want our first responders and essential employees, including our grocery workers, to stay safe. And then lastly, I just want to encourage you to come every day at 10, you’ll learn something new that the county’s doing, and you’ll get an update. We hope that this is a way that we can be as transparent and clear with you about what’s happening in our community. And we want you and your families to be safe, healthy and well. Thank you.

DAVID CAMPOS: Thank you. And we want to note a couple of points, and you have the information on the screen about our website, so please make sure that you visit our website, sccphd.org/coronavirus. We also have frequently asked questions that really address most of the issues that people worry about. And, by the way, all of this information is provided in multiple languages, we are a county that is very diverse and we want to make sure that that information is given to our communities.

But the last point is, today’s April 1st, rent is due to many people, and we want people to know that our Board of Supervisors actually passed a moratorium on evictions, so during this time, you cannot be evicted for not being able to pay your rent. You do have to provide information to your landlord, and we also know from our Governor that those that have mortgages, like myself and others, that he has worked with banks to have a moratorium on that as well. You do have to make sure that you contact your bank, to see if they’re part of that agreement.

Again, we will be doing this every day, not only providing you basic information, but also focusing on key issues of concern. Thank you very much for watching, thank you to our Board President, to our County Counsel and of course to Dr. Cody. We will also be doing multilingual briefings in the very near future, so thank you for tuning in, and stay safe out there.