According to State Senator Mike McGuire, Governor Gavin Newsom wants testing ramped up to 25,000 per day by the end of the month. McGuire spoke during Monday’s meeting of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors.
“Our priority continues to be able to test the most vulnerable populations including skilled nursing facility residents and employees and frontline workers that include law enforcement, emergency service workers and health care workers.
“We need to greatly expand sampling; we have to focus on rural; we don’t have the necessary samples here to make a definitive decision as to when we can return to some sense normalcy. We have to get a testing protocol in place which will tell us how quickly we can loosen up the SIP orders.” he says.
Plans are under way to roll out a larger testing protocol with personnel and supplies by May.
“We will not see normal seating in restaurants for the rest of the year. I’m not sure about large events happening throughout the county this year. There will probably have to be some type of attendance limit and social distancing. With county fairs, baseball games, etc., I think things are going to look different.
“Dr. Fauci believes it won’t be until the end of the year that we will be able to get back to what we all believe is normal. We may not see complete normalcy until we have a vaccine for this.”
He expressed concern about coastal Mendocino, Sonoma and Marin relaxing SIP orders, even for locals to go to their parks and beaches, and that there will be an influx of folks from down south.
“How can we message and how we can do this all together?” he asks.
In our county 30 per cent of the population have access to high speed Internet; in Santa Clara County, it is 89 percent; it is a countywide concern for business as well as for children and distance learning.
“We do not have adequate supplies for testing. Every state is eating each other alive. We’re all chasing the same supplies. This should have been nationalized from the very beginning. Now we are all competing with each other and getting outbid.”
Supervisor McCowen expressed his concern for the economy.
“We have kept the COVID curve flat but we are also flattening our economy,” he says. “There needs to be some sort of balance with appropriate social distancing in place; we have to be able to get our small local businesses back up and running while they still can.
“I can walk into a chain department store that sells food and I can buy any consumer product under the sun but I can’t go to the local bookstore, clothing store etc.,” he says.
“The best thing for public health at this point is the worst thing for our economy,” responds McGuire. “In our neck of the woods, our communities are hit harder in times of recession than the urban areas of our state. It’s evident talking with folks every day, hearing them crying because they’re going to lose their business, lose their homes; talking to a man from Humboldt who can’t pay his mom’s rent and she’s going to lose her house.
“This nation made some critical blunders in the beginning when it came to testing. We should have gone with the WHO tests; they were ready to go but we decided to do our own tests, taking 6-8 weeks to get them rolled out. Contamination within CDC labs is another huge issue; tests had to be thrown because of the rush to make test kits. One of the largest batches of test kits we received from the CDC came without one solution or two needed to complete the actual tests.
“Now we are taking things into our own hands; we can’t continue to wait; our economy is cratering; the heart and soul of Mendocino County is small businesses. The more coordinated we can be as a region the better we are—from the Bay Area all the way up the North coast.
“As Dr. Doohan has said, we need to have better communication with the Bay Area Counties and we need to be on the same page and be able to make sure that rural gets what it needs to be able to reopen.
We have to get the testing regiment rolled our because that will define what this loosening will truly look like. Testing is ramping up; you will see some movement here in the coming few weeks. We have to get the economy up running…safely… so that it can stay that way.”
