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: Written by: Kacey Sycamore; Published: 31 March 2020

Updated March 31, 2020, 4:00 p.m.

SR PD The Santa Rosa Police Department reported today that Detective Marylou Armer passed away from complications from COVID-19.

Detective Armer served with the Santa Rosa Police Department for 20 years and was recently assigned to the Santa Rosa Domestic Violence Sexual Assault Team.

Armer was the first Santa Rosa Police Department employee to test positive for COVID-19.

On March 24, the police department first reported that two employees had tested positive for the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Later that same day, it was announced that a third employee tested positive. Then, on March 27, two additional employees were added to the running total of positive cases in the department. On March 30, the department announced three more cases.

In a video update from Monday, March 30, Santa Rosa Police Chief Rainer Navarro said that 107 employees have been tested so far. Of those, 92 have tested negative and 7 results are still pending. Currently, 8 employees have tested positive for the disease.

Navarro urged residents to comply with the county shelter-in-place order and said the department is considering additional enforcement measures if officers continue to see people out and about in violation of the order.

“I cannot emphasize this enough: our police officers and staff who are potentially exposed to coronavirus as they respond to calls for service need you to stay home so they can continue to go to work,” he said.

Navarro said in a March 27 release that Sonoma County testing guidelines prioritize first responders. The department then began working with the county’s public health officer to test additional staff who may have had contact with the affected officers. Navarro said in the March 30 video update that he does not anticipate more tests being needed for the department, but would provide updates to the public as needed.

For each case of COVID-19, county health nurses conduct an interview to discover who else may have been exposed to the virus. From there, people are notified of potential exposure and asked to self-quarantine for 14 days.

Navarro said that based on some of the investigation work done so far, it is believed that contact for some of the cases within the police department may have happened prior to the county shelter in place order being put into effect March 18.

“The Santa Rosa Police Department continues to operate under strict sanitization and social distancing protocols and will take additional precautions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus,” he said on March 27.

One such measure is altering scheduling protocols for patrol teams.

“Officers will now be assigned either day or night shift, for a two-week period, then self-isolate for the following two weeks,” Navarro said. “Meanwhile a second set of officers will work either a day or night shift for a two-week period, and so on.”

: Written by: Adia White; Published: 30 March 2020

During emergencies, vulnerable community members are often left out of response plans. Assistant News Director, Adia White, asked the founder of Equity First Consulting, Ana Lugo, about how everyone in our community can be supported equitably during the novel coronavirus outbreak.

KRCB News Director, Steve Mencher, interviews Ana Lugo in 2017, about the response to the Sonoma Complex FiresWhat does an equitable emergency response look like?

Equity in practice is really about accounting for the most vulnerable populations in our community and making sure that we are providing for them. I think that our county is definitely trying to do that, through policies like the eviction defense policy. I think that we are going to have to place a focus, especially on our undocumented population and make sure that we are providing protection for them that they will not otherwise have. Especially because it is no secret that they are in many ways the backbone of our economy here in Sonoma County and in many other places in California. When we talk about equity we really have to look at the different populations, the points of vulnerability and figure out how to better serve them in ways that can really account for that vulnerability to make sure that we have a community that can recover and I think that the more that we look at how to protect the most vulnerable in our community, the easier it will be for our community to recover.

What kind of additional measures does our government need to fill these gaps?

I think this is a moment where our county government is going to have a huge responsibility. As you know, our federal government is not going to be supportive of the undocumented population. As for our State government, I think that is where we have the biggest opportunity as a local government to push for support and protections for populations that are not eligible for aid under the federal guidelines. Our local government also has to figure out how to work with our local philanthropy partners, our local nonprofits and regional and state sources to be able to fill in these gaps.

You’ve been fielding a lot of phone calls with questions and concerns, what do people want to know right now?

In terms of community members, the number one question I’m getting and I know other community leaders are getting is rental assistance. A lot of people are losing their jobs or haven’t been able to work. As you mentioned earlier, some of them are not eligible for unemployment and will not be eligible for anything in the stimulus package. The biggest concern, and I think the thing that threatens people the most, is ‘am I going to get kicked out of my home?’ That has been a huge strain in communities, I think, across cultural backgrounds. People have a real sense that their safety net may not be as sturdy as they thought it was because across the board everyone is feeling like their job is not stable, and certainly within the service industry.

Do you have any resources you can share with people?

The number one resource people have at this point is Undocufund. I also think the county has the most reliable information so people should definitely be looking at socoemergency.org. Also, just making a call to our philanthropic community to look at organizations who are doing work on the ground, who have leaders of color, because those are the organizations that are going to help the most vulnerable in our community. This is also a good time to start thinking about how our systems are failing our communities, how we can transform those systems, and how we can hold our institutions accountable. We need to look at those fractures within the system and change them because this will certainly not be the last emergency we face. We’ve been facing emergencies pretty much every year.

: Written by: Kacey Sycamore; Published: 30 March 2020

By Nigel Duara and Ana B. Ibarra, CalMatters

Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed confidence Saturday that California has the capacity to produce enough ventilators to meet its projected needs in response to the coronavirus pandemic. But during a tour of a San Jose energy company that is refurbishing outdated ones, he cautioned that the state’s need could expand significantly if the public doesn’t maintain social distancing and the crisis worsens.

The tour of the Bloom Energy facility demonstrated the state’s ability to leverage its massive technology and manufacturing sector into production or refurbishment of ventilators, something Bloom Energy did this week when it repurposed its fuel-cell manufacturing facility.

“It’s one thing to make new equipment,” Newsom said from a podium positioned in front of stacks of outdated ventilators from the national stockpile. “It’s a challenge to refurbish old equipment.”

Bloom Energy Chief Executive KR Sridhar said his company’s employees had to quickly learn the inner workings of ventilators, a machine they hadn’t worked with before.

“A week ago, none of us knew anything about ventilators other than we knew what it was being used for,” Sridhar said. “But at the end of the day, here’s what we knew. … There are electrical devices, mechanical devices, floor devices. We understand them all.”

(Image: Gov. Gavin Newsom said Saturday his goal is for California to acquire 10,000 ventilators. File photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

Employees had to learn on the job quickly. On Thursday, their first day working in the repurposed facility, Bloom employees refurbished 24 ventilators. On Friday, they refurbished 80, and Sridhar said 120 more would be done by the end of the day Saturday.

“We thought, how difficult can it be, and what’s the worst that can happen,” Sridhar said. “We’re going to try, maybe we fail. But if we’re not training [to refurbish ventilators], we’ve already failed. I don’t care how difficult this problem is. We will solve it.”

Newsom used the language of the tech sector to emphasize that the state must “lean into the future boldly and confidently” and “move at Silicon Valley speed” to “meet the moment” of the coronavirus pandemic. But the bottom line was simple: Newsom believes the state can build and buy its way out of its ventilator shortage.

The state has more than 4,000 ventilators in its stockpile beyond the ones already in hospitals, and Newsom’s goal is to get to 10,000, whether that’s through manufacturing or purchasing ventilators from other countries.

“Thousands more we are confident will be on their way very, very shortly,” Newsom said.

The number of people in intensive care units spiked 105 percent between Friday night and Saturday morning, he said. The state had its 101st death from the virus on Friday night, and Newsom said hospitalizations were up more than 38 percent.

The state had conducted nearly 90,000 tests and had 4,643 confirmed cases as of Friday afternoon.

If Californians practice social distancing, Newsom said the state can cope with the crisis. But “if we’re unsuccessful, the one treatment we know that works? The ventilators. The one treatment we have at our disposal? The ventilators.”

Across the country, the projected need for ventilators has government officials and private industry scrambling to respond. In New York, one hospital has begun sharing ventilators between two patients as the state’s shortage grows.

“Over the course of time, hospitals have understood how many ventilators they actually need,” Dr. Cedric Jamie Rutland, an Irvine-based pulmonary and critical care physician, told CalMatters on Friday. “There’s a rhythm to it, we know who is going to need a vent, but then you introduce a new illness to society and you’ve got these numbers — an exponential increase in the amount of patients who are developing this illness and needing ventilators.”

The danger is when the number of patients needing ventilators exceeds the supply.

“My friends in hospitals in New York have reached that number; out here in California we’re not there yet, but I’m pretty certain we’ll get there,” Rutland said.

And once someone needs a ventilator, they can spend weeks on one, if they get off at all — once patients confirmed to have COVID-19 or displaying its symptoms require a ventilator, the probability of recovery dips significantly.

“What we’re hearing is when you get on a ventilator with COVID-19, that is not a good prognosis. With other diseases it might be a little bit better, but with COVID-19, it seems to be a terrible prognosis overall,” Rutland said.

Another issue is not all physicians and nurses are up to date on how to operate a ventilator. Rutland said he has received messages from colleagues asking for a refresher on how to run one. And appropriate care for someone on a ventilator requires several staff: a respiratory therapist, a nurse and a physician.

“We’re used to having certain [patient-to-staff] ratios,” Rutland said, “but it seems like those ratios are going to get higher as we get more and more patients.”

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

: Written by: Kacey Sycamore; Published: 30 March 2020

032720OutbreakCoronavirus California and the nation have seen a surge in unemployment claims as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies to close their doors, leaving workers with reduced hours or laid off their jobs entirely.

Local, state and federal governments are responding to help affected people. Here are some resources for Sonoma County residents struggling financially due to the crisis.

Residents

Paying Bills

Utilities: Salvation Army, 93 Stony Circle, Santa Rosa, (707) 542-0981. Help to pay water, electric and other utility bills. Afternoons, Monday-Friday, by appointment only.

Evictions: Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed an executive order banning evictions statewide. Renters who have lost work or wages because of the virus must declare in writing to their landlord that they are unable to pay rent. They may still be evicted if rent isn’t paid in full by the time the moratorium lifts on May 31.

The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors also enacted a COVID-19 Eviction Defense Ordinance, which creates a legal defense for tenants who live anywhere in Sonoma County and are being evicted due to non-payment of rent and who can demonstrate financial losses due to lost work or medical expenses resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.

For tenant support and questions about evictions, contact Legal Aid Sonoma County at (707) 542-1290 or California Rural Legal Assistance at (707) 528-9941.

Rent

Season of Sharing (SOS), Community Action Partnership of Sonoma County, phone: 2-1-1, https://seasonofsharing.org/covid19/. Disaster assistance with housing costs and critical family needs applications accepted through June 30. Supports low-to-moderate income families with dependent children, age 55 and older, disabled individuals, veterans, pregnant women in their 2nd or 3rd trimester, survivors of domestic violence and transitioning emancipated foster youth between 18 and 24. During the pandemic, support is also available for those who have lost income due to the coronavirus.

Community Action Partnership of Sonoma County, www.capsonoma.org. Visit the website for information on low-income rent and deposit assistance programs.

Mortgage: While federal financial agencies have suggested hardship forbearance for distressed borrowers, you should contact your lender if you have a financial hardship. Do not wait to miss a payment. The State order asks banks to halt foreclosures and related evictions through May 31, 2020.

Student loans: Borrowers who need immediate relief may apply for a forbearance, which suspends payments for a period of time.

Taxes

Income taxes: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has extended the income tax filing deadline to July 15, 2020. The California Franchise Tax Board earlier extended the April 15 deadline for making state income tax payments and estimated payments until June 15.

Property taxes due April 10: The California Board of Equalization is working with the State to see if it could allow counties to provide some penalty relief if property tax payments are not paid by April 10. Each county would have to extend the deadline for its property owners.

Community Action Partnership, https://www.capsonoma.org/

United Way of the Wine Country, www.unitedwaywinecountry.org

Agencies will contact those with a pending tax preparation adjustment to correct and submit.

Other free tax filing options:

Financial Assistance Programs

Redwood Credit Union, (800) 479-7928, option 2, https://www.redwoodcu.org/coronavirus. Disaster-related loan program for current Redwood Credit Union members.

Food

See SoCoEmergency Food Resources list

Employees

Sonoma County Economic Development Board. Resources and guidance for employees of affected businesses.

Unemployment benefits: If your employer has reduced your hours or shut down operations due to coronavirus, you can file an unemployment claim by phone or mail with the State of California. The State executive order waived the normal, one-week waiting period to file for people who are unemployed and/or disabled because of coronavirus.

Instructions on how to apply: https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Filing_a_Claim.htm.
To file a claim: https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/UI_Online_File_A_Claim.htm.

For more information about Unemployment Insurance and COVID-19, visit these links.

Sick leave: For information contact your employer and visit https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/2019-Novel-Coronavirus.htm.

State disability or family leave: Disability insurance and paid family leave are part of the same program, called state disability insurance. If a medical professional has certified that you can’t work because you have, or have been exposed to, COVID-19, you can file a claim for state disability insurance. If you can’t work because you are caring for an eligible relative who is sick or quarantined by COVID-19, you can file for paid family leave. For more on state disability, paid family leave and unemployment, see https://edd.ca.gov/about_edd/coronavirus-2019/faqs.htm.

Businesses

Hello Alice, a free platform that helps businesses launch and grow, has put together a website with resources for small businesses. It's updated daily, with funding, resources and support for small business owners adapting to the impacts of coronavirus.

Federal Economic Package

President Trump has signed a $2 trillion coronavirus response bill intended to speed relief across the American economy. The package includes direct cash for many, plus expanded unemployment benefits and new rules for things like filing your taxes and making retirement contributions. Find details on what assistance it contains for individuals, small businesses, big business and more in this NPR story.