At the Santa Maria City Council’s July 7 meeting, County Public Health Director Dr. Van Do-Reynoso presented findings from a demographic study conducted by the county that compares Santa Maria COVID-19 cases to those outside of Santa Maria.
“We were able to denote that, countywide, 18 percent of our cases as of June 11 represent ag workers,” Do-Reynoso said. “Whereas in Santa Maria, Guadalupe, and Orcutt, that number hovers around 26 percent.”
Do-Reynoso first presented the study findings to the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors back on June 16. Given recent concerns in the community about the number of Santa Maria agricultural workers affected by the disease, Do-Reynoso spoke about some of the county’s recent public health efforts to address this disparity.
“We have partnered with community members to increase distribution of face coverings, [and] of health information,” she said. “We’ve also partnered up with our employers on preventative measures. Some of that includes with growers on the prevention messaging and the ag commissioner, I know, has distributed N95s.”
Do-Reynoso said the county has also met with growers and “had conversations with them about the outreach that’s needed, about the workplace adherence[s] that would discourage clustering, like having more bathrooms, or more water stations, more shade, and offering time to do temperature screening and symptoms checking.”
She said public health is also working with “community partners on the destigmatization of COVID-19 once a worker has been infected, and then always thinking about how we partner to address the income replacement.”
The council also heard from Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties President Claire Wineman, who talked about what the farming community is doing to address these issues.
Wineman said the commission has partnered with the Western Growers and the California Strawberry Commission to develop “outreach materials in multiple languages and multiple formats,” that are targeted toward both domestic and guest workers.
Wineman also said that they are continuing to “provide outreach on the county’s availability of isolation housing to essential employees, including farmworkers, and we’ve increased our outreach to employers and employees on safety considerations during non-work hours, especially before holiday weekends.”
This article appears in Jul 16-23, 2020.