Officials Discuss Cost and Timeline of Reopening Businesses

April 16, 2020, 9:22 am 17.1k Views 95 Comments

Governor Gavin Newsom leading a press conference (Photo: Office of the Governor)

By Lauren Bray, edhat staff

Santa Barbara County Supervisor Gregg Hart discussed the financial constraints of reopening businesses on Governor Newsom’s framework.

Earlier this week Gov. Newsom announced six indicators that are needed to modify the stay-at-home order. The first one being the ability to monitor and protect communities through testing, contact tracing, isolating, and supporting those who are positive or exposed.

During Thursday afternoon’s local press conference, Hart explained this is beyond our current testing capabilities. Local governments and healthcare providers will need more financial assistance from state and federal governments to take on the new responsibilities required to make the transition work, he said. 

Hart stated the county will take a $37-40 million dollar economic hit due to the coronavirus (COVID-19). He estimated the county has already incurred $7-10 million for its COVID-19 response, most of which include the cost of opening and staffing the Emergency Operations Center. 

Approximately $30 million is related to revenue declines in sales and transient occupancy taxes ($3.7 million), local public safety sales tax ($4.8 million), state public safety realignment funds ($7.9 million), and health and human services realignment funds ($13.3 million).

On March 27, the third supplemental response package to the COVID-19 pandemic called “The CARES Act” was signed into law. The act directs $150 billion to be divided among the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the territories, and tribal governments. Within a state, only “units of local governments” with populations that exceed 500,000 are eligible to receive direct funding from the federal government as a portion of the State’s allocation. Santa Barbara County falls below the 500,000 population threshold, and therefore will not receive such funding.

“Now more than ever we will need even more assistance to help us get the financial resources necessary to implement the Governor’s COVID-19 transition framework and get our community back to work, This is the critical first step to making that happen,” said Hart. 

Newsom has made it clear there is not a precise timeline for modifying the stay-at-home order, but the six indicators will serve as the framework for making that decision. 

During a national press conference on Thursday evening, President Trump announced guidelines for opening states and left the decision up to governors. State leaders were provided with a phased list of criteria to lift social distancing restrictions.

The guidelines suggest states should see a decrease in confirmed COVID-19 cases over a 14-day period. This falls in line with Newsom’s statement that California will not reopen until there is a decline in the number of deaths, hospitalizations, and patients requiring care in ICU beds.

The White House guidance also states that hospitals should be able to “treat all patients without crisis care” and have a “robust testing system in place for at-risk health care workers” before proceeding to a phased reopening.

Newsom stated since the pandemic began, the number of patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 in California hospitals declined. He said the number of patients in ICUs statewide increased by 1.4 percent to 1,191, but isn’t drastically different than the 1,175 patients who tested positive in ICUs throughout the state on Monday.

“You have successfully bent and arguably flattened the curve in the state of California,” said Newsom. “We continue to need to maintain our vigilance, guided not by political decision-making, guided by data, guided by facts, guided by science, guided by health professionals all throughout the state of California.”

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Written by lauren

Lauren is the Publisher of edhat.com. She enjoys short walks on the beach, interesting facts about bees, and any kind of homemade cookie.

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95 Comments

  1. Please allow cosmetologists esthetician’s and nail techs to go back to work. We will wear masks and gloves and sanitize everything. A lot of us will lose our businesses. We can work on one person at a time! We can’t get PPP loans and we still can’t apply for pandemic unemployment assistance until the 28th that means we will not have had any income for SIX WEEKS. We have mortgages, and are still responsible for paying our business rent out of our own pockets since the PPP loan was out of money when they finally allowed us to apply. How do we feed our families if we didn’t have savings with no end in sight and all of our expenses. The self employed are screwed once again!!! If you are FORCING us to stay home TAKE CARE OF US! You have left us out here to starve!

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  3. Quit whinning . We are all in the same vote . I, too am out of work . You are already being helped by the President and there is unemployment benefits even food stamps if your in need . If you and everyone else jumps the gun then confinement and joblessness will last that much longer . Bare with it . The sooner you do, like the rest of us the faster this crisis will end . If you think i like sitting in my house all day your wrong . We’re all in this together so quit your whinning .

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  4. I’m not saying back to normal and certainly not having large gatherings for the foreseeable future. Let non-essential business open back up that don’t require large groups of the public in a confined space (theaters, bowling alleys, etc.). Let small businesses reopen with basic protective measures in place, even restaurants with spaced out seating and servers in masks. Remember just before this first started people weren’t even washing their hands! Now we’re supper sensitive to this, keep more space between people, more cognizant how we sneeze/cough, etc. so it won’t spread like wildfire. But, as we can’t wait out a vaccine, it will spread and most of us will get infected. Extending the stay home beyond what is needed to flatten the curve below health cares capacity unnecessarily delays the inevitable, most of us getting it.

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  5. Well, Sam, you sure seem eager to go out there and get the disease. Go right on ahead. I’m staying safe. We have not seen anything like this before, and until ALL the science is in on this one, I’m not taking any chances, and neither should anyone else. It’s selfish because of the way this thing spreads. You are careless? You spread it to people who aren’t. Terrible. Just be careful out there. We do not need to reopen non-essential businesses yet. We can figure this out.

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  8. Don’t tell people who are genuinely suffering to “quit whining” and this president isn’t helping anyone! Stimulus check should be a given, we pay our taxes. Trump has handled this whole thing horribly. He needs to go back to reality tv. He wasn’t even good at that.

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  11. SAM – the whole reason I’m working from home, with my kids doing remote school, not playing baseball, not going to concerts, etc etc… is so that I don’t get covid. That’s the whole point of all this. If not, then I’m confused.

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  14. @ 2:03 sort of, it’s so you don’t get covid right now. The point of all this, at least as originally pitched by the doctors and politicians, was “bending the curve” to get the number of cases that require hospitalization at any given time under the max capacity of our health care system so it doesn’t get overwhelmed and lead to a higher mortality rate due to the inability to effectively treat everyone that needs advanced care. It was never a stay at home until this goes away. Those at high risk, should stay home until it goes away.

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  17. The idea of herd immunity is simple: Once enough people in society are immune to a disease, if one person becomes infected, the chance they give it to someone else is less than one. It is estimated that 80% of the population would need to be immune to have true herd immunity. However, if we have even half that, we would slow the increase of the virus dramatically. This would make surveillance easier and decrease the chance that a second wave could overwhelm our health care system this fall.
    In summary
    Continued shutdowns threaten our economy, our health and even our healthcare system.
    The state of our economy is not just a monetary risk, it is a health risk. When people lose their jobs, they typically lose their health insurance. The British Journal of Psychiatry found that there were more than 10,000 “economic suicides” as a result of the 2008 recession. Similarly, a 2016 study from The Lancet found that there were an excess 260,000 cancer deaths as a result of the recession. These statistics also fail to mention the increased domestic violence, increased child abuse and home loss when schools and businesses are closed.
    In spite of the changing goalposts: The number of new cases is declining. The mortality is likely much lower than early estimates. Those who have been infected by the disease will most likely be immune for at least a year. Finally, the lives saved by starting the economy sooner vastly outnumber those that could be saved by extended shutdowns.

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  19. Right on 3:12! I don’t believe our Public Health experts, or politicians, are taking into account the negative HEALTH consequences of extremely high unemployment in a tanking economy when responding to the covid threat. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448606/ AND https://news.yale.edu/2002/05/23/rising-unemployment-causes-higher-death-rates-new-study-yale-researcher-shows with many others out there.

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  20. If it was your husband, wife, or child in ICU and it could have been prevented then I am sure you would think it was worth shutting down business for awhile so they could live. It’s all hypothetical until it’s not.

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  23. STD – It seems you didn’t read your cited articles very carefully. The Yale article is from 2002, and the NIH article is from 2004, and neither shows that the mortality rates come anywhere near what COVID-19 could do, just that there is a correlated uptick in mortality when unemployment is high. Not surprising, especially with our system of for-profit healthcare.

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  32. Remember early in March when Trump had the press briefing with all those CEO’s? He said in very short order there would be drive-thru testing through out the nation in the parking lots of Walmart, CVS, Target, etc… He Google said was creating a website that would allow anyone with symptoms to enter some data and determine if they needed to be tested and if so where to get tested. Here we are over a month later and we still don’t have it. Pathetic!

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  34. The virus was spreading rapidly throughout the Bay Area Dec-Mar, 750,000 traveled from China to CA Nov-Jan! Highly contagious, do the math. Most didn’t have symptons, or maybe got a bit sick, some went to the hospital. The big question, did the healthcare system melt down then? Is it melting down now? The TRUE mortality rate, when you re-do the numbers, is around 0.1% or even less, just as many of us were saying all along, yet we were slammed as ‘deniers’ or ‘mass murderers’ or something, simply because we know math_and_statistics and don’t have a political agenda.

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  40. I think nail and hair salons should be allowed to reopen with strict rules, and with clear caveats that going to one is risky. No one over fifty or with underlying conditions allowed in the door, one customer and one tech per hundred square feet, and everyone must wear N95 masks constantly. Oh that’s right, we don’t have N95s. Never mind.

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  41. Things need to open up soon or there will be unprecedented economic suffering at many levels. This city has shown how to stall the progress of the virus, and now we need to reactivate the economy using the same precautions.

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  44. This is all very interesting when we know so little about the long-term effects of COVID. The survival rates by age group seem straight forward, but so much more data is coming out – and lot of it is scary. A lot of that data, too, will take years to properly understand. For instance, we are seeing what looks like long-term lung damage, heart damage, kidney damage, etc. in numerous patients who have survived. I’m not talking about someone who is 82 year old, who some people on this website seem to think are expendable due to advanced age. I’m talking about people in their 40s, etc. We’re seeing liver panels, etc. that even weeks after testing negative for the virus are not normal. We are seeing a profile of a disease that also targets fertility, including the testes. SARS had documented long-term effects on many men’s fertility. The expression profile for this disease targets similarly – will we see a decline in fertility in young, healthy men due to this? What about women? When this first hit and we went into lockdown a month ago I was very much in favor of the idea of “reopening” the economy. I have since completely changed my view upon endless research of this disease, seeing the disturbing things we do know, as well as realizing how much we DON’T know. It’s too soon to make a call. We need way more information on what this does to people longterm. It is not about surviving a common cold. Even Dr. Fauci said there is something about this disease we do not yet understand, that doesn’t quite make sense. Why it hits some people so hard who have no underlying issues like age, obesity, etc.

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  45. Below is a link to an article about the recent study in Santa Clara County. Antibody testing indicates the true number of cases is 50-85 times higher than the official confirmed case count. That also means the true fatality rate is 1/50th or 1/85th what is indicated based on the “confirmed” case count, in the neighborhood of 0.1%. That is comparable to the flu. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/covid-19-has-infected-up-to-85-times-more-people-in-santa-clara-california-than-reported-study-estimates/ar-BB12O5w8

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  46. An article that has not passed peer review, and the same article cited by Shasta earlier. Is the state of antibody testing reliable enough to make those conclusions? And as one of the authors of the study is quoted in the article: “If 50 times more people have had the infection, the death rate could drop by that same factor, putting it “somewhere between ‘little worse than the flu’ to ‘twice as bad as the flu’ in terms of case fatality rate,” Bhattacharya said.
    But he cautioned that the flu and coronavirus are still quite different. For one, we don’t yet have a vaccine for Covid-19.”

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  47. The problem is that California was never on lockdown nor the US. It was/is a stay at home order that was slowly modified as they waited for more cases and deaths and that order was really never enforced. People were and still out living a normal live like they are on vacation. Many people don’t even believe in the pandemic.

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  48. We went under the stay at home order for one reason: to flatten the curve so as not to exceed our health care systems capacity. Stay at home was never meant to be a stay at home until there is a vaccine or to prevent everyone from ever getting it. Most of us will get it. Flattening the curve just limits the number people at any given time who have it and delays the peak so that health care providers can better prepare. This is a disaster no doubt about it. Many have died, many more will die, and many may have lasting health issues. It sucks, its sad, it’s the reality we’re in. But! We’ve flattened the curve, improved the capacity and capabilities our health care system, significantly reduced the mortality rate and even discovered many who get it might not even show symptoms. It’s time to get back to work! Those at higher risk, stay home, stay safe, we’ll get the car warmed up for you.

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  50. 8:41 – I also don’t think most Americans understand the extent to which Asian countries “getting back to normal” (China, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea) are in extreme control. Temperature scanning everywhere – at every restaurant, store, mall. Forced handover of ID and subscription to tracing apps. Rapid testing, which makes contact tracing actually work. Etc. America has basically none of this, and will have none of it several months from now. We won’t be “getting back to normal” anytime soon.

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  53. way to be obtuse in a thread about opening local businesses..
    state st is dead, lower and upper. air traffic is down 95%. there is basically no tourism happening…
    we currently aren’t part of the “world”.

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  61. This is not a political post, but Trump did just encourage protesters to “LIBERATE” (his words) Michigan, Minnisota and Virginia from the stay at home orders. This is dangerous. This gives legitimacy to what could become violent protests. This will make it that much harder for our country to get back to “normal” when we now have a “command” from the top to ignore stay at home orders. This is not good.———–
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8230031/Trump-tells-Dem-governors-LIBERATE-Michigan-Virginia-Minnesota.html

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  63. Coolio – as much as I’d love to thin out that herd, problem is what happens when they bring their infected butts over the state line and start spreading it all over again? I think we need put a wall around these states pronto! If we can put a wall to keep people from coming here to work, we should be able to get support for a wall to keep people from spreading a deadly disease!

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  64. Most of us thought the original stay at home order for a month or so was wise, we understood why we needed to bend the curve (see prior post). Most are not okay with continuing that stay at home order after the curve has been bent. Many would not have been on board for an extended shutdown while our business failed, jobs disappeared and bank accounts evaporated until the virus was gone. If Newsome or our local county leaders continue this stay at home after the curve is bent it is up to us citizens to make our voices heard and remind these politicians they work for us.

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  68. SAM – why do you republicans always use car deaths as some sort of “argument” against everything? It is so completely outdated, tired, illogical and just plain silly. You can’ compare everything to cars. Try something else.

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  69. You’re reading too much into a tweet. I have never even considered joining any type of protest but if the stay at home continues in Santa Barbara County into May I will be out there. People still aren’t accepting the fact that most of us will get it. Staying at home until a vaccine is developed is not an option!

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  70. I have not used that before but in this case it is dead on in my reply to JFC’s comment. I could use bicycle accidents and pool drownings. Do we ban all bikes and swimming pools? There is a certain level of risk society accepts with everything, we make strong attempts to mitigate those risks but they don’t go away.

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  72. SAM – If you think I’m reading too much into a tweet by DJT, you haven’t been watching the news. His followers hinge on his every word. He says “liberate” and it means only one thing: at the very least, ignore the stay at home order and go to work. For his more extreme and violent followers, it means more. When he says something like this, it legitimizes the absurd (and heavily armed) protesters who are out marching close to each other, ignoring social distancing and basically not giving a hoot about this disease. We should not be legitimizing those actions, we should be condemning them.

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  73. Sam the dog – then you better get your poster board and megaphone ready. The stay at home will definitely go into May here in SBC. Heck, they’ve already cancelled Solstice in June. I agree that staying closed until we have a vaccine is ridiculous, but we need a little more time to keep the curve flattened. We go back to normal now and will end up starting all over again. Give it another month. But, if you want to go protest, have at it!

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  75. How do you figure that? There is no way of knowing the true fatality rate without knowing the true number of people infected — and without universal testing we will not know. In the LAT this morning there is a story about how the numbers of those infected in the Bay Area are considerably higher than first thought, approximately, the size of the annual number of deaths from flu. There’s a similar study underway in the LA area and they’ll report the results on Monday.

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  80. Professor Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, claims that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Chinese researchers are said to have used coronaviruses in their work to develop an AIDS vaccine. HIV RNA fragments are believed to have been found in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

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  81. The flu shot “vaccine” is different because the flue virus changes so frequently they make new vaccines on their best guest as the the type(s) of strains that will be prevalent in the coming year. The flue shot doesn’t prevent you from getting the flue in the way the ones for smallpox, MMR, chicken pox, polio, etc. protect you for those.

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  83. STD, your lack of knowledge certainly doesn’t stop you from flaunting it. Those other vaccines also need to be boosted or repeated occasionally because antibodies may not persist. All vaccines potentially have a time limit as immunity wanes, especially if the pathogen is a virus that mutates rapidly, like HIV or influenza.
    (And a flue is a way to get smoke out of your chimney.)

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  84. Antibody tests are not yet valid because they haven’t been validated as accurate. I know that sounds like a circular argument, sorry. I won’t cite sources; It’s easy to find news, both public and technical, about the tests. We’re not there yet; they’re not ready for nation-wide, accurate testing.

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  88. This is an old non-scientific hypothesis, also known as a conspiracy theory. Can you cite Dr. Montagnier? I hope he too would feel maligned by your association of him with such a theory. Hell, *I* even posted about this news months ago, but it was to question and expose it to the light of day!

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  89. The false negative rate in testing, and the rate of asymptomatic carriers should be terrifying. Yes, it will drop the fatality rate. But the fall-out?! ———————————
    I truly don’t think I’d make it through this illness, were I to get it. That’s okay, I’ve had a DNR for years. Don’t worry, I left the house once in Feb. and once in early March. That’s because I can live without working. As I’ve said, anonymously, I’ve been intubated in the ER. And that illness was easy, as I only felt sick for about 14 hours — aside from being hospitalized for a week. Believe me, you don’t know how sick you can get. You don’t want this. —————————————————————————-
    I’ve nursed bed-ridden family through real influenza. And through various modes of dialysis, including in-home (thank the gods they’re not alive now!) And through death at home, twice. (Support Visiting Nurses! https://vna.health/) —————————- The damage from non-deaths is and will be huge, including months-long recuperations and possible lung damage. **I agree that shut-down orders are onerous.** But good gods, people, it’s been less than two months! And if you do re-open, how many people are going to come to your business?! Not me. Not my friends. And Look at the polls. People will have to feel secure first. ————————————————————— The damage has been done, and this shut-down will NOT be for a year or until we get a frigging vaccine. Please try to moderate your response to the situation.

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  92. There’s more than this quote. Just saying, it may be rare, but it may be your partner or child or parent. “Simple” pneumococcal pneumonia, the one WE HAVE A VACCINE FOR, almost killed me when I was 33, with no co-morbidites. Yes, we’re going to lose lots of people in this pandemic. But reading about those with it helps us abide by and support social limitations.
    ———————————————————————————————
    “Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL) is a cytotoxin produced by some strains of Staphylococcus aureus. These strains are responsible for primary skin infections and necrotizing pneumonia. This rare entity is mainly described in young immunocompetent patients with an influenza-like prodrome and has a high case-fatality rate (1,2). We report a case of necrotizing pneumonia induced by PVL-secreting methicillin-susceptible S. aureus in a patient infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and who had coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
    In March 2020, during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in France, a man in his thirties who had no underlying conditions came to an emergency department because of fever, cough, and blood-streaked sputum that developed for 3 days. A diagnosis of pleuropneumonia was made, and antimicrobial therapy was initiated with cefotaxime plus metronidazole. Test results for Streptococcus pneumoniae and Legionella pneumophila serotype 1 urinary antigens were negative. A reverse transcription PCR specific for respiratory viruses also showed negative results.
    The next day, further respiratory deterioration required transfer of the patient to an intensive care unit (ICU) for intubation, mechanical ventilation, and inotropic support. Spiramycin was added to the previous drug regimen. Chest computed tomography showed a parenchymal consolidation of the left upper lung without ground-glass opacities commonly described for COVID-19 (3).
    Thumbnail of Chest computed tomography of a patient in France with Panton-Valentine leukocidin–secreting Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia complicating coronavirus disease, showing worsening of bilateral parenchymal damage with complete consolidation of the left lung, cavitary lesions suggestive of multiple abscesses, and appearance of areas of ground-glass opacities in the right lung
    Figure. Chest computed tomography of a patient in France with Panton-Valentine leukocidin–secreting Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia complicating coronavirus disease, showing worsening of bilateral parenchymal damage with complete consolidation of the left lung, cavitary…
    Four days after intubation, the condition of the patient had not improved. We performed a reverse transcription PCR specific for SARS-CoV-2 on an endotracheal aspirate by using the method developed by the National Reference Centre for Respiratory Viruses (Institut Pasteur, Paris, France). The PCR result was positive for SARS-CoV-2 (4). Chest computed tomography showed worsening of bilateral parenchymal damage with complete consolidation of the left lung, cavitary lesions suggestive of multiple abscesses, and appearance of areas of ground-glass opacities in the right lung (Figure). The chest radiograph also showed a left pleural effusion.

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  93. Some info re: antibody testing: —————————————————————-https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/20/everything-we-know-about-coronavirus-immunity-and-antibodies-and-plenty-we-still-dont/?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=87885314da-MR_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-87885314da-150446729

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  94. NY Times Monday 4/20: =========================== Antibody testing is problematic, officials say
    Saying that the coronavirus pandemic requires an urgent response, the Food and Drug Administration has allowed about 90 companies, many based in China, to sell antibody tests that are intended to indicate whether people may have built immunity to the coronavirus but that haven’t been vetted by the government.
    The agency has since warned that some of those businesses are making false claims about their products, and health officials in the U.S. and abroad have found other tests to be deeply flawed.
    Officials fear a repeat of the earlier launch of Covid-19 diagnostic tests that failed to monitor which Americans, and how many, had been infected. ===================================================================================== https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/us/coronavirus-antibody-tests.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_NN_p_20200420&instance_id=17786&nl=morning-briefing&regi_id=78822370&section=topNews&segment_id=25550&te=1&user_id=cbfb792000a61325f4177436cfe9e79f

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  95. I worked in admin at a medical clinic & learned a lot about CLIA. False info, bad info is probably more dangerous than no info. Please, citizens, those working on the front lines, clinically and with patients, Need. More. Time.

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