Remains in a ‘wait and see’ situation as health officer consults with hospitals, further examines metrics
During a briefing about the state of COVID-19 in the county on Wednesday afternoon, Dec. 9, county Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase once again reaffirmed that the county’s health department is continuing to monitor virus metrics to determine when, and if, the county should issue a stay-at-home order ahead of when it would potentially be under a regional order from the state.
Issued last week, the governor’s order split the state into five regions, and introduced a metric that would trigger a stay at home order when ICU bed capacity in the region dropped below 15%. Sonoma County is part of the Bay Area region, which currently reports 20.9% ICU bed capacity.
However, as cases continued to surge statewide and locally, several counties (Marin, Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara and San Francisco) felt their rapidly diminishing capacity indicated they should implement their own stay at home orders ahead of any mandatory orders from the governor. Since their announcement, however, Sonoma County has made the decision not to join the other jurisdictions in issuing an order ahead of the state.
As of Wednesday afternoon, data from the state listed Sonoma County as having 11.6% remaining capacity of its staffed ICU beds (the county’s ICU bed reporting portal is currently down). When it comes to case rate metrics, the county’s daily case rate per 100,000 residents has doubled since last week — the current rate of new daily cases per 100,000 is 17.9, last week it was 8.8. The county’s testing positivity rate has also increased, from 3.3% last week to 5.7% this week.
“Our numbers are climbing in almost every area, which is very concerning,” Mase said. “For now, our region remains above the 15% threshold that triggers the regional stay-at-home order and we have not chosen as yet to join the five other Bay Area counties and Bay Area city in preemptively adopting a stay-at-home order, but we remain concerned about these increasing numbers. We remain very much in a ‘wait and see’ situation.”
When asked what the county is looking at to help determine if it should preemptively issue a stay-at-home order, especially as case rates locally continue to rise, Mase said that the county health department is continuing to monitor virus data, and is checking in with local hospitals to gauge how concerned they’re feeling.
“At this time, they feel like they have the capacity and they’re not quite there yet where they feel extremely concerned,” she said, noting that she isn’t hearing that there’s a crunch when it comes to making sure hospital beds will be able to be staffed.
“What we’re most worried about is exceeding the health care system’s ability to take care of our community, and we’re not at this time seeing large increases in hospitalizations. We do have some increases in hospitalizations, but we’ve got a little bit of leeway yet and the ICU bed capacity metric is one of many of the different parameters we’re looking at,” she said. We’re also looking at economics and what it would mean in terms of a shutdown to our business community. There’s different things to note that being a smaller county with not as many ICU beds let’s say, for example, as San Francisco and Santa Clara, we also quickly reach that under 15% ICU bed availability because of the low number of beds we have to start off with.”
In addition to monitoring county metrics and checking in with hospitals, Mase said that the county has also been talking with other Bay Area counties that have withheld from preemptively issuing a more restrictive health order.
While Mase said it’s difficult to predict what’s going to happen to the county’s numbers looking ahead, she anticipates the county will continue to see increases in case rates throughout the month, as the state’s virus modeling has predicted. Should the county decide to issue more restrictive measures in the future, or if the Bay Area ICU bed availability dips below 15% leading to more restrictive measures, Mase noted that the order will only be effective if people follow it.
“A stay at home order is only as good as how well people abide by it,” she said, noting that people following the order in March is how the county decreased virus numbers. “I would hope to think that if we go that direction again, people will abide by that order again so we can really shut down transmission.”
