Infected workers get quarantine incentive

Payment would ease economic hardship

Marin County and the Marin Community Foundation have allocated a combined $750,000 to encourage coronavirus-infected workers to self-quarantine for 14 days.

The funding is intended to provide relief payments to people who have tested positive for the virus or are at high risk of contracting it.

Health officials say the money is urgently needed to address the main cause of coronavirus spread in Marin: essential workers, most of whom are Latino, failing to stay sequestered.

“They’ve been the backbone of our workforce since the beginning of the ‘shelter in place,’ people who are not able to shelter at home for economic reasons,” Dr. Matt Willis, the county’s public health officer, told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

More than 78% of the people who have tested positive for the

coronavirus in Marin are Latino.

The at-risk workers, some of whom are undocumented immigrants and don’t qualify for other government relief, can’t afford to selfquarantine if it means missing a paycheck. Some live in crowded households that make social distancing difficult if not impossible.

This isn’t the first attempt to convince essential workers who test positive to self-quarantine by offering them an incentive. In midMay, the Marin Healthcare District board allocated $10,000 for a program to supplement the income of senior care center workers and other health care workers who test positive for the virus. Since then, the district has allocated an additional $40,000 in assistance.

Then, in early June, Marin County and the Marin Community Foundation each contributed

$50,000 for relief payments for infected people. Marin County Assistant Administrator Angela Nicholson told supervisors on Tuesday that $110,500 has been distributed to 60 people so far.

“Based on our current burn rate,” Nicholson said, “we’re expecting this new $750,000 will last approximately three months.”

The payments are $1,000 per person and $1,500 for families. Anyone who qualifies for two weeks of paid sick leave for self-quarantining under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act will be ineligible. This sick leave is available only to people who work for businesses with fewer than 500 employees and in some cases more than 50.

To date, the help supplied by the county has been less effective than hoped. As the number of new coronavirus cases has increased statewide, the time it takes to get test results has also increased.

Contact investigators aren’t notified of infected people until they test positive. By the time results arrive

and people who test positive are cleared for relief payments, most of their quarantine period has elapsed..

“Transmission is occurring in the Canal because testing is completely failing,” said Lucia MartelDow, director of immigration and social services at Canal Alliance in San Rafael. “People are not informed about their results for a week. They’re walking around, a lot of them are symptomatic. What do you think is going to happen?”

Nicholson confirmed that it has been taking seven to 10 days to get results from tests processed through Quest Diagnostics.

“If you’ve got somebody who is supposed to isolate for 14 days and they don’t get their results for 10, at that point you’ve missed your opportunity,” Nicholson said.

She said the county expects to sign a contract with a new testing site with its own laboratory on Tuesday.

Nicholson said the county is also changing its

procedures. Instead of waiting for a positive test result before offering people relief payments, it will begin offering relief to people at high risk of spreading the disease as soon as they request a test.

“It won’t be everyone,” Nicholson said, “because we would burn through the money in two minutes.”

She said the county will reserve the advance aid for people who work in jobs where they are at high risk of spreading the virus to others, such as employees at skilled nursing centers. Many of the coronavirus deaths in Marin County have occurred at nursing homes.

To speed up delivery of the relief payments, Marin County is collaborating with the Multicultural Center of Marin, which will distribute the funds. The county has contracted with Canal Alliance and North Marin Community Services to facilitate communications with Latino residents in Novato and San Rafael’s Canal neighborhood. The county has

also recently hired 15 new contact investigators who speak Spanish.

Marin County is counting on being reimbursed by the state and federal government for the $550,000 it has contributed to this effort. Nicholson said due to restrictions on how that money can be spent, none of it can be used for the advance aid to people who have not yet obtained a positive test result. For that reason, she said, the Marin Community Foundation’s grant has been key.

As several families of essential workers often share a single apartment due to the high cost of housing, relief payments will be available to more than one family per household.

Nicholson said free housing is available for people who want to self-quarantine away from their families. Alternatively, she said, Marin County is making sure food is available if the members of a household wish to sequester together and avoid going to the grocery store, where they might infect more people.