July 9, 2020 — As of July 9, Mendocino County had 107 known positive test results for covid-19, with 85 people recovered and 78 close contacts in quarantine. One employee at a skilled nursing facility on the coast and another at Building Bridges, the homeless shelter in Ukiah, have tested positive. Bekkie Emery, the Department Operations Center Manager with Public Health, briefed the board of supervisors at a special meeting on July 8, when the known number of positive test results was at 103. Public health officer Dr. Noemi Doohan was not present at the meeting.
“We have eleven cases from yesterday,” Emery told the board. “So we are having significant community spread.” Wednesday morning, there was testing at Building Bridges, which Emery described as “a great partner for us...they were very proactive in ensuring that they cleaned their entire facility.” The person who tested positive, she said, had had outside contact, “so it was not within that homeless community.” Contact tracers are investigating.
CEO Carmel Angelo said she has requested ten more contact tracers, five of them bilingual in Spanish, from the state through Mutual Aid.
Emery added that the Consolidated Tribal Health Project has started doing more testing along the 101 corridor, starting with 267 tests in Redwood Valley in late June. Tribal Health is working with the Hopland Band of Pomo Indians, the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians, and the county to offer free testing to anyone, whether they are tribal or not, at two events this week: in Hopland on July 10, from 8am-11am at the corner of Highways 101 and 175; and in Willits on Saturday, July 11, from 8am to 11am at the Sherwood Valley Tribal Office.
Back in April, the county’s fifth known case of covid-19 was an inmate who had been released from the state prison in Chino. He came to Mendocino County with no one finding out about it until he had been in Ukiah for several days. With the prison outbreak now spread to San Quentin, Supervisor John McCowen asked Angelo how the county is preparing for inmates who are being released and coming here. She replied that eleven early releases should be arriving within the next two weeks, and Public Health would do what it can to find out more details, work with the sheriff, and then test and quarantine the people who had been released.
The former Chino inmate had originally been expected to go to Stanislaus County, where he had no residence. In a statement on social media, Sheriff Kendall wrote that many of the inmates who are currently being released are also homeless. But Deputy CEO Darcie Antil told the board during her financial presentation that Project Roomkey, which housed homeless people in hotels, is winding down. As of the end of June, the program is now available to symptomatic homeless people only. She told the board that the county has terminated 73 rooms, and retained 38 through July 15.
Antil went on to point out that nothing about the pandemic response has been cheap, as the county has spent about $11.8 million on the response, not including the loss of revenue. State and federal agencies have committed to paying the county $1.2 million, but, she said, “We have not received those funds...what is not included in here is the large amount of testing response that we have had and what we are putting into the Optum Serve and the additional testing that Bekkie spoke of earlier. So now we’re looking at $12.8 million,” plus $4 million in lost revenue, between $2 million for the last fiscal year and projections another $2 million loss for the current fiscal year. “So now we are looking at about a $16.8 million fiscal impact,” she told the board.
Antil is hoping to get another $3 million from realignment in the fall, and the county expects $8.8 million dollars from the CARES Act. “As you can see, this is a minor dent in the $16.8 million,” she noted. “And saying that, we have a long way to go.”