COUNTY BOARD BACKS GUIDELINES TO REOPEN
■ Supervisors adopt health, safety rules for businesses to follow ■ Board also approves child care vouchers for essential workers ■ UCSD modeler says 12,790 would have died if no interventions ■ County officials confirm 6 additional deaths, 140 more cases
San Diego County supervisors unanimously voted Tuesday to adopt a framework that will allow local businesses to reopen once public health restrictions are lifted.
The board also approved a proposal to provide $5 million worth of child care vouchers for essential workers and vulnerable populations in the region, if the city of San Diego matches the contribution.
The child care vouchers, which will be funded by money the county received from the federal CARES Act, will go to families who are deemed eligible under the statewide California Alternative Payment Program, also known as CAPP.
Among those eligible individuals are children from at-risk populations, families with children with disabilities, and children of essential workers working in health care, food and agriculture, education, among others.
A spokesperson for the City of San Diego said the city is exploring how to use federal
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relief money for child care, as well as other operational priorities.
The county’s Reopen San Diego Business Safety Framework, developed by the Responsible COVID-19 Economic Reopening Advisory Group and supported by unanimous vote at Tuesday’s meeting, lays out guidelines all businesses will need to follow in order to welcome customers again when the state loosens restrictions on business operations beginning Friday.
The guidelines, which have been in development since mid-april by a coalition of more than 30 local business and civic leaders, focus on five areas: employee health, safe work site entry, physical distancing in the workplace, enhanced cleaning and sanitation and employee training.
Supervisors also voted Tuesday to send the reopening plan to Gov. Gavin Newsom along with an official request for the county to be given formal control to make economic and other decisions related to the COVID-19 pandemic in San Diego County.
Ultimately, the state’s stay-at-home order can only be lifted by the governor.
“We’ve heard loud and clear from business owners who are struggling to keep afloat, spending the last of their money to keep the lights on,” said Supervisor Greg Cox, chairman of the Board of Supervisors. “We can’t do anything about the governor’s stay-at-home order ... but what we can do is help make it easier for businesses to reopen safely and as smoothly as possible if they have a set of guidelines to work from.”
The county’s decision to move toward reopening certain businesses comes on the heels of Newsom announcing that some retail stores across the state can reopen as early as Friday with some modifications, including bookstores, music stores, toy stores, florists, sporting goods retailers and others.
The governor also said that later this week more detailed guidelines will be released regarding which businesses could begin limited operations.
In the interim, the county and cities across the region are gearing up to make sure businesses are ready to go as soon as possible.
Under the framework approved by the board Tuesday, businesses will need to develop a sanitation plan with frequent cleaning of public spaces and workstations, make sure employees are provided with personal protective equipment, establish controlled entrance and exit practices to avoid clustering and line issues, and ensure that employees are maintaining proper physical distancing, among other things.
Supervisor Nathan Fletcher, who co-chairs the county’s COVID-19 subcommittee alongside Cox, said the reopening framework is intended to give general guidance and direction to businesses, but is also designed in a way that allows the region to adapt as things change.
“There could be additional guidance from the state or the federal government about what conditions should look like as we move forward and we will no doubt get additional guidance from businesses about tweaks,” Fletcher said. “But this is a good starting point.”
As supervisors looked ahead to reopening businesses, they also received an update from health officials on the county’s progress toward slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 disease.
Among the data presentations Tuesday morning was a description of modeling results indicating the estimated basic rate of the virus’s transmission in San Diego County with and without public health interventions.
The presentation, by Natasha Martin, an infectious disease economic modeler who teaches at the University of California San Diego, calculated the basic reproduction number, known as the R0 or R naught, before social-distancing interventions at 4.67. That means a single infected person would infect about 4.67 others in a fully susceptible population.
But as of Tuesday, after more than six weeks of public health interventions such as social distancing, the effective reproduction number — the number of infections caused by a single infected person at a given point in time — was 0.83 in San Diego County, according to the presentation.
Without public health interventions, the virus would have claimed an estimated 12,790 lives in San Diego County by April 27, according to the presentation. With social distancing and other public health interventions, the county had observed 128 deaths by the same date.
Martin cautioned that while an effective reproduction number of less than 1 is good, if the county were to lift all public health restrictions today, models predict it would see hundreds of deaths per day by the first week of June, Martin said.
Supervisors also received an update on the county’s financial projections associated with responding to the pandemic during the board meeting. County staff said they’re now projecting a revenue shortfall between $260 million and $395 million, and Chief Administrative Officer Helen Robbins-meyer warned the county’s once comfortable reserves are likely to drop below minimum levels.
Cox added he’s expecting the board will have to make some difficult decisions during budget deliberations in August, including potentially reducing the county’s workforce.
Also at Tuesday’s meeting, a motion by Fletcher to pursue hazard pay for county employees who have been deemed essential and have been working during the pandemic failed. Fletcher’s motion did not receive a second, and thus did not receive a full vote before the board.
Later in the day, both the county and the city of San Diego also shared notable updates during their daily COVID-19 public briefings.
The county announced 140 new positive cases and six additional deaths Tuesday, bringing the county’s Covid-related total fatality list to 150. All six — three women and three men — had underlying health conditions. They ranged in age from 62 to 95.
Testing is a tentpole feature of the governor’s fiveitem list of requirements for individual counties to move forward with the various phases of reopening. Being able to quickly test anyone with symptoms and both interview and test all of their closest contacts very quickly is seen as the key to keeping the virus from beginning to spread rapidly once socialdistancing orders are relaxed.
Last week, the county said it expects to identify about 400 new possible infections per day, which would likely create the need to do about 1,200 “contact tracing” interviews daily, a task that would mean the county’s pool of tracers would need to swell to about 450 and the county would need to be able to perform about 5,200 coronavirus tests daily.
But Fletcher delivered a report Tuesday that the total number of full-timeequivalent contact tracers hired to date is just 160. Daily testing, as of May 4, remained just 2,306.
How, then, could Dr. Wilma Wooten, the county’s public health officer, say Tuesday that she feels the county is ready to move forward with phase 2 reopenings if the region has not yet checked off the testing box in the governor’s five-item scorecard?
Wooten said in an email that eclipsing 5,000 tests per day is a local quest but, in terms of the state’s criteria, the region is expected to handle at least 2,100 tests per day, a number that’s already in the bag. Tracers, she said, are on tap.
“Testing is going up each week, and we’ll have double the contact tracers we started with by the end of the week,” Wooten said.
There were some difficulties on the testing front Tuesday.
Three newly opened testing centers, including one at Grossmont College, suffered slowdowns and scheduling problems. Though Fletcher said “hundreds” of tests were performed, the number didn’t reach the 800 that is the operation’s stated maximum capacity.
“We ask all San Diegans to continue to be patient as the kinks get worked out both with the website and signing up, and with the execution of how these tests are operating,” Fletcher said.
Meanwhile, at the city of San Diego’s daily briefing, officials with the biotechnology company Illumina, San Diego Unified School District, The San Diego Foundation and Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced a $1 million donation to support underrepresented students and front-line workers during the coronavirus pandemic.
The donation from the public-private partnership between the organizations and the city will support science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) education and K-12 distance learning programs for students without Internet access, as well as support for health care workers, food security and small businesses programs, officials said.