At a Santa Barbara County Public Health Department press conference held on July 10, county officials asked only certain county residents to seek COVID-19 testing at community based testing sites.
“In order to ensure the community has access to testing, we have heavily promoted the broad use of these sites,” Nick Clay, Santa Barbara Emergency Medical Services Agency director, said at the conference. “This has resulted in the sites being booked to capacity with no immediate availability. Consequently, we are seeing a trend of high numbers of missed appointments. This is incredibly frustrating, as we were unable to test those who were at risk, because the appointments were not immediately available.”
This issue, combined with the rise of cases, prompted the county to adjust its messaging from a “want to get tested” model to a “need to get tested” message, Clay said.
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Clay explained the criteria for those who need to get tested. He asked members of the public to consider the following questions when deciding whether they should get tested: Do you work in a high risk environment where you have frequent interaction with the public? Do you live or work in a congregate setting, like a licensed care facility or a shelter? Are you an essential worker? Has a health care provider or public health professional advised you to get tested? Have you had close contact with a person confirmed with COVID-19? Do you have symptoms of COVID-19?
“If you can answer yes to any of these questions, you should consider being tested,” Clay said. “Close contact is not a passing in the grocery store. … It requires four elements to have a close contact, all of which must be present: contact for a duration of over 15 minutes with a COVID positive individual while neither of you were wearing a face covering, that has occurred within 6 feet of each other in an enclosed space.”
County Board of Supervisors Chair Gregg Hart also spoke during the conference about enforcement of social distancing and mask wearing in businesses. He said the county is “working directly with the businesses that folks have complained about and said there are issues with proximity of patrons in particular businesses.”
For businesses that “continuously and egregiously violate those standards,” Hart said county counsel is working with local city attorneys to use cease and desist letters as a business enforcement tool.
At the city of Santa Maria’s July 7 meeting, City Attorney Thomas Watson expressed concerns over the county’s request, and voiced frustration over a lack of COVID-19 resources coming from the county to Santa Maria.
“If you’re asking us to form citations, I guess my first question would be how many public health nurses have been sent up here, and how many other county resources have been sent to assist us?” he said.
Public Health Director Dr. Van Do-Reynoso responded to these inquiries stating that “education and enforcement goes hand in hand.”
“I’m just sharing that we have codes, and we have health officer orders, so not only are we needing to [educate], but we also need to do our enforcement piece,” Do-Reynoso said. “There needs to be a coordinated effort, whether that be a hub where the city can be aware of all the different efforts going on in Santa Maria—I think that would be a really good strategy as well.”
This article appears in Jul 16-23, 2020.