For Cloverdale, located at the northernmost tip of Sonoma County, access to COVID-19-related resources like readily available testing has been difficult. Slowly but surely, community leaders are working to make strides to make both testing and vaccination more accessible, but say that there’s still more work to do.
One Cloverdale resident, who asked to remain anonymous, said that finding a COVID-19 testing clinic nearby after her family had been exposed to COVID-19 was a struggle. The resident, a 28-year-old former vineyard worker turned stay-at-home mom of two young children, was the only one in her family who didn’t contract the virus.
“(The school) called us to get her tested and we did the first one and it came out negative. But the school told us she had to get tested after four or five days and she came out positive. She didn’t have any symptoms but she looked tired,” she said, noting that her 7-year-old daughter is believed to have come into contact with a student at school who was tested positive for COVID-19.
When it came to her husband and son getting tested, her family found it difficult to find a testing site when they needed one.
“My daughter’s school was giving tests but I could not find a testing site on a Thursday and we waited until Saturday,” she said. They ended up going down to Alliance Medical Center in Healdsburg, which had a mobile testing unit outside. “That was the test that helped us.”
She and her husband are vaccinated but her children are not yet. She said getting vaccinated was not a problem. However, she wishes there were more testing sites.
“I think there should be more places to get tested. You never know when you might need it, I think there is not enough help but La Familia Sana was helpful,” she said of the Cloverdale-based nonprofit that seeks to help the community’s underserved people.
Getting testing and vaccines to town
The Cloverdale Unified School District began vaccination for staff earlier in the year in order to reopen its schools. Testing for COVID-19 continues to be available Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.
However, it has not been easy to navigate the pandemic and make resources available, according to Superintendent Betha MacClain.
“It’s been very challenging. The community has been hit very hard, it has been difficult to get resources. We have had to be aggressive to get resources. There’s no good public transportation to Santa Rosa or Windsor. Our families have to drive a great distance to get, you know, access. So we’re really fighting to bring it to our community since our community has been so impacted,” she said.
At the same time, MacClain added it has been challenging for educators to also coordinate public health care information on top of their teaching duties.
“We’re not trained in this and we’re expected to do a lot of things on top of everything else we have to do right now. I want to be vocal about the fact that we need more support, or this system is going to break,” she said.
One of her many concerns is educator — which she referred to principals, secretaries, teachers, everyone in the education field — mental health.
“I don’t want to say that we are more maxed out than health care, but health care workers are working in their lane. We are being asked to work out of our lane. We’re doing all of our education work, and we’re doing all this health care related work, too,” she said.
“Even if we can pay people overtime I don’t think it is okay for us to deprive them from quality of life. The burden on public schools has been unsustainable and unhealthy. And, it’s unreasonable to think we can keep doing this,” MacClain said.
MacClain praised Alexander Valley Healthcare for working hard to serve the Cloverdale community. She said she believes everyone is struggling with staffing at the moment in every area, which could be why resources become difficult to obtain.
“My feeling is that part of it is a struggle to get the right people to the right place. The state and the county seem to be struggling to coordinate their efforts and that’s made it harder for us locally,” she said.
For Alexander Valley Healthcare CEO Debbie Howell, keeping the community informed has been a struggle. She said the clinic currently has the capacity to get people vaccinated and offers testing five days a week, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day. The clinic offers lab COVID tests, not rapid tests.
“We do that to try to mitigate the spread,” Howell said. “I just think it’s more about communicating the information and us as a community health center, we do not have the resources to do radio or big newspaper ads. It’s a barrier to get the information out, the biggest problem is the communication piece.”
Howell agreed with MacClain that there is a labor shortage.
“We are a small health center to begin with, we are not getting a lot of applicants for employment and that does impact our ability to do all the things we need and want to do,” Howell said.
Currently, Alexander Valley does several pop up events when possible. Howell said their primary focus is the school district.
Melanie Hall, program manager at Cloverdale Senior Multipurpose Center, said the center has provided a testing site for a while now.
“It is done in the front yard (of the center), early on we were with the county and they did a pop-up for a couple of hours on Thursday mornings. Then they contracted with Curative and we worked with them for some time. They brought a mobile clinic and did self administering tests every Tuesday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m,” Hall said.
“They just recently moved their site over to the high school so we contacted the county again and we are back to having the county do pop ups on Thursdays from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.,” she continued.
People can make an appointment but also walk-ins are welcome.
Hall said the center is currently working with La Familia Sana in coordinating a pop-up vaccination at the senior center on Nov.30.
“Could we do more? Definitely. Per population our numbers were up. With the farmworker community, they are out working hard and by the time they are off work the pop up or clinic is done. We need to do it with hours like 2 to 6 p.m. or something like that,” Hall said about schedule hours being a conflict for people.
Alexander Valley has a contract with Sonoma County to help cover the costs of the vaccines from January through May which went into effect around July. But the county does not actually have employed staff to do public vaccine events, Howell said.
“We are happy to partner with them. We have always partnered with them because of the need and spread of our county. Resources are always a problem but we cannot get back to normal until we get a handle on this pandemic,” she said.
Sylvia Lemus, a spokesperson for the County of Sonoma said the county recognizes there is a gap of services for Cloverdale.
“We have also heard the need for more testing in Cloverdale and the north county. It is an area that our team is pertaining to address and problem solve and find better partnerships,” she said.
Lemus said the county is working with both Curative and La Familia Sana to identify more testing locations.
“We want to bring more testing to the area. We are just kind of waiting for some confirmations for locations and sites to be able to work on that partnership. In addition to that, we are utilizing a testing team which does pop ups around the county,” she said.
“We do our best to try to provide to all of Sonoma County but sometimes, with Cloverdale being further out, it is more coordination with our service providers to have staff out in the different areas. We are looking at different options and multiple approaches to provide more testing and vaccines in the area,” she said.
The county also partnered with the Sonoma County Office of Education to identify locations throughout the county where vaccination clinics can be set up that are focused on the students and the families where those schools are located.
“We try to apply equity by looking at census tracts, high COVID rates, low vaccination rates, anything to identify the location to have a school vaccination site,” she said.
“We have worked with the office of education to let parents know ahead of time, have charlas (conversations). We have resource flyers we have been working with La Familia Sana and their organizations to help us distribute. We are trying to coordinate a better effort in getting education outreach to the Cloverdale community,” Lemus said.
Howell believes the county is doing everything that they can but do not have the staffing resources.
“They did coordinate the scheduling of state nurses when they were available and they continue to supply our vaccine orders, they are doing everything they can and we are doing everything we can. It is just a lack of resources but I think that is the story throughout the entire country,” she said.
