More changes to Santa Clara County’s shelter-in-place restrictions — which will be loosened starting Friday — remain weeks away, according to Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody.
In an address to the Board of Supervisors Tuesday, Cody said that while the county has done an “amazing” job following shelter-in-place orders and tamping down a surge in new coronavirus cases, residents should expect to wait at least three weeks before more restrictions are walked back.
This summer, she added, health officials will consider reopening strategies more focused on risk reduction — rather than the “blanket” shelter-in-place approach. But it all depends on whether the county sees a spike in cases and deaths during the virus’s incubation period of about two to three weeks.
“Our goal remains to continue to contain this virus, suppress it as much as we possibly can, while we reopen … We’re in a very good position to pivot,” Cody said.
Still, the health officer stopped short of providing a clear timeline for which businesses and sectors may be next in line to reopen. A new order released yesterday brought the county more in line with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s guidance and that of other parts of the Bay Area, allowing for outdoor dining, in-store shopping and small religious and cultural services with social distancing requirements.
Cody credited a slowdown in new cases and deaths, plus increased testing, as factors contributing to the reopening decision. But several supervisors questioned how far the county has come with testing and contact tracing in particular, two areas that the department struggled to get off the ground quickly — and has pegged as “indicators” for reopening.
With a goal of conducting 4,000 tests per day by the end of May, the county now averages about 2,000 a day. The number of contact tracers, or people who follow up with COVID-19 positive patients’ contacts and ask them to quarantine, has increased to 94 from 50 a few weeks ago.
Sup. Susan Ellenberg called the confusion surrounding the indicators and the reopening timeline more broadly “incredibly frustrating” for the public and businesses looking to prepare for what’s next.
“Now people are hearing, ‘Well … We might go sooner, we might go later,” Ellenberg said, adding of testing goals, “We have to do better than saying ‘We need four thousand, but we don’t really need four thousand.'”
Health officials and County CEO Jeff Smith pushed back on that characterization, describing the indicators more as guideposts rather than triggers for reopening. The county’s test positivity rate, for example, has been favorable — about 3.5% — in recent weeks, allowing for more flexibility in the testing goal.
“The answer to your constituency is we thought we’d need more, but we did such a good job with shelter-in-place that we could make decisions to relax the shelter-in-place with less testing,” Smith said.
