Fractured Bay Area COVID-19 response could lead to chaos

The fracture of Bay Area health officers’ unified approach to slowing the spread of the deadly coronavirus invites confusion and creates a higher risk of more cases and deaths.

The sooner the health officers get back on the same page and adhere to their own prior benchmarks for loosening restrictions, the better.

COVID-19 doesn’t pay attention to county boundaries any more than Bay Area workers and shoppers. What one county does impacts the entire region.

Alameda County was the first to break away from the Bay Area-wide strategy when officials caved Tuesday to Elon Musk’s selfish, wrongheaded request to reopen Tesla’s Fremont factory. Then, San Mateo County leaders announced Wednesday that they will follow the state’s less-strict rules, allowing offices to open and strip malls to provide curbside pickup service. San Francisco and Marin County followed suit that afternoon with similar plans of action.

That left Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties as the only two from the original coalition standing firm with their shelter-in-place orders.

The inconsistency invites chaos. In parts of the Bay Area, some businesses will remain closed while others a stone’s throw away are free to reopen. That doesn’t make sense for either owners or customers, and will lead to people questioning the health officers’ logic.

But the more alarming threat is to the safety of Bay Area residents.

The region was one of the first hot spots for the coronavirus in the United States. The health officers’ prudent, uniform approach served as a national model, played a major role in “flattening the curve” and prevented the kind of surge that overwhelmed hospitals in New York.

But the virus is far more prevalent now in the Bay Area than it was in March, when the health officials issued their first unified shelter orders. Some counties’ hospitalization rates and hospital room availability are meeting established standards for experiments with reopening the economy. But the most important criteria — testing and contact tracing — are not.

Health officers have acknowledged from the outset that the most fundamental element of keeping our economy open is making sure you’re identifying as many infected people as possible and isolating them.

Harvard researchers say that the minimum daily number of tests needed to detect and control outbreaks is 152 per 100,000 people. Bay Area counties are ramping up their testing and contact tracing capacity, but they are still far short of reaching that goal.

Santa Clara County officials said Thursday they are testing only about 1,000 people per day. Dr. Martin Fenstersheib, who is charged with helping the county reach its goal of 4,000 tests per day, said he expected to hit that goal by May 31.

Contra Costa Supervisor John Gioia said Friday that his county is performing 800 tests a day, which is far short of its goal of 2,400 tests a day, or 200 per 100,000 people.

No Bay Area county has announced that it has achieved its testing goal. Nor have any hired the staffing necessary to conduct thorough contact tracing.

Gioia acknowledged concerns about Bay Area counties’ fractured approach and the subsequent risks.

“We’re interdependent,” he said. “When a county like San Mateo goes significantly further than other counties it takes away from the unity we’ve had in the Bay Area.”

The desire to reopen the economy is understandable. But the success of any effort to experiment with loosening restrictions depends on public cooperation and adequate testing and contact tracing capability to prevent a serious, second wave of cases. A unified message from health officers enforcing that point offers the best public protection.