A year like no other: Sonoma County reflects on pandemic’s deep and lasting changes

Uneven impact

While the pandemic has imposed hardship on nearly all of us, the shared experience has not been uniform and some have borne much greater loss than others.

The financial hits were merciless, especially for those in lower-income brackets and for business owners and workers in industries that closed down. Their income stream suddenly dried up. As the weeks went on, hardship became despair, exacerbated by the uncertainty of how long the pandemic and its attendant restrictions would persist.

The pandemic exacerbated long-standing socioeconomic inequities that weighed most heavily on the county’s Latino residents. The demands of on-site work and sometimes crowded quarters at home made them substantially more likely to become infected with the virus than their white counterparts.

Since the county began collecting information on race and ethnicity several weeks into the pandemic, Latinos have accounted for 65% of all COVID-19 cases, though they make up only 27% of Sonoma County’s population. White people, who make up 63% of the county’s residents, were 27% of the COVID-positive cases, where race and ethnicity were known.

Local pandemic deaths hewed more closely to demographics. Of the county’s 181 deaths by December, at least 124 or about 70%, were elderly individuals, predominantly non-Latinos, living in senior care homes. Latinos made up nearly 25% of the pandemic deaths at that point.

Pedro Toledo, chief administrative officer of the Petaluma Health Center, said the disparities have only brought greater transparency to long-standing social inequities and the importance of diverse representation among those in charge at every level.

Policymakers, he said, need to “understand what it means to have eight people living in a home or three generations living in a household,” and the implications of bringing coronavirus into a home with “grandparents, parents and people with chronic medical conditions, in a precarious case of viral Russian roulette.”

He also noted that recent vaccination data showed Latinos and other people of color represented only 7% of the county’s health care workforce, a reflection of the potential for language barriers and other obstacles to accessing medical care for some residents.

County supervisors sought to confront the problem by investing heavily in a suite of efforts to combat increased transmission among Latino and lower-income communities. The extra dollars supported increased outreach, testing, culturally competent support, case management and financial assistance to ensure those who needed help staying home and isolating could do so.

Separately, volunteer supporters of a newly formed nonprofit called IsoCare have been working along a similar track to offer guidance and support to those who need to isolate and quarantine.

Ana Horta, a social worker by profession, is among the 180 or so trained IsoCare volunteers who has found the work sobering, as well as gratifying.

She and another volunteer, Mario Castillo, described the situations they encountered: the live-in caretaker of a paralyzed woman tested positive for COVID, but had nowhere to go and no one who could replace her in caring for the client; two parents were hospitalized with COVID, leaving two sick children at home; a widow whose husband had died of COVID-19, leaving her alone without help, facing eviction, though she could neither hear nor speak.

“It really put in perspective how we take things for granted,” among them, “that we can have a room that we can just go and shut the door and isolate,” said Horta, 44.

Horta, Castillo and IsoCare founder and Medical Director Panna Lossy also cited numerous instances in which clients described being pressured to work even when infected or symptomatic, and fearful of retaliation.

“Over the time of the pandemic, I think the disproportionate way people are impacted has magnified over time,” Lossy added, “so if you were poor before the pandemic, with job losses all around you, and all your friends and family are poor … Wow. It’s been compounding for a year.”

Economic catastrophe

Though joblessness in Sonoma County has dropped since mid-2020, reaching 6.5% at the end of December after being in double digits from April through June, the financial fallout in the region remains staggering.

An estimated 10,545 renters in the county have accumulated debt averaging $3,460 per household, or $36.5 million total, according to a recent report.

Peter Rumble, chief executive officer of the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber, said there’s no way to know exactly how many businesses have gone under, but the chamber itself has “lost well over 100 due to financial hardship or business closure.”

Some local losses have been highly visible: Bistro 29 in Santa Rosa, Healdsburg’s Raven Film Center, Petaluma-based Three Twins Ice Cream. But others — small offices, personal care salons or self-supported entrepreneurs — may have closed their doors with less notice, Rumble said.

Either way, “that’s a family,” said Sheba Person-Whitley, executive director of the Sonoma County Economic Development Board. “That’s people who have put their heart and soul into this baby, that’s their business. There’s all their staff. It’s so impactful.”

Others, especially those in the hard-hit hospitality industry, are “hibernating,” hoping to reopen when it’s feasible, she said, but the struggle is similar.

There’s just not enough relief funding to go around, either, whether through the federal Paycheck Protection Program or other packages.

The government loan program funneled $590 million into Sonoma County and the surrounding area last summer, with more than 1,500 businesses, nonprofits and small firms receiving forgivable loans ranging from the minimum $150,000 all the way up to the $5 million to $10 million range. Sonoma Media Investments, the parent company of The Press Democrat, received a $3.4 million loan to avert layoffs.

In all, the program was said last year to have safeguarded 64,000 local jobs.

In January, a state-run small business relief program drew more than 334,000 applications from around California during the first round. From that mix, 252 were awarded to Sonoma County businesses, Person-Whitley said.

Locally, county supervisors set aside $2.5 million for small business stabilization last fall, with instructions that grants be large enough to make a difference, drawing more than 1,300 applications, Person-Whitley said. The Economic Development Board could fulfill only 542 requests.

“It gives you an idea how great the need is,” she said.

“None of us, I believe, anticipated that we would be in this very long, protracted, seemingly never-ending event known as COVID-19,” Person-Whitley said.

Peril, isolation for most vulnerable

Some of the greatest suffering of the pandemic has occurred in elder care and skilled nursing facilities, which early on closed their doors to visitors and required residents to remain in their own rooms and apartments in an effort to reduce exposure to the coronavirus.

Twelve months later, some of those sites — which include 20 nursing homes and more than 177 long-term care facilities — are just beginning to allow more open, if cautious, visits.

At the height of the pandemic, the sites proved ideal incubators for coronavirus, typically introduced by asymptomatic staff members, many of them low-wage earners working across two or three facilities, often on a part-time basis. The close contact required during the course of caring for elders and others requiring assistance, and the frequency with which clients share rooms, made it all the more difficult to prevent transmission.

Over the course of the pandemic, at least 1,105 residents and 975 staff members at skilled nursing, board and care and assisted living facilities have been infected with the virus, according to county data.

Patients from such settings account for at least 165 of the county’s 303 COVID-related deaths.

Raymond Jax, 71, feared he might become one of them. He has lived at Petaluma Post-Acute Rehab for over three years, a result of a disabling stroke about 15 years ago. He became aware early on of COVID-19 cases at the facility.

Eventually, there would be 45, including at least one death. Jax was infected in December. It was a shock, as he suffered no symptoms at all, becoming ill only after he was vaccinated six weeks later and landing in the hospital for five days.

But Jax, who uses a wheelchair in the wake of his stroke, may have suffered most from the isolation endured through a year of confinement in his room. He concedes he’d endured some depression.

“It’s been less than enjoyable,” he said.

He had just received new bifocals before the lockdown but couldn’t use them until they were fitted and adjusted, an objective that’s remained beyond his reach for the past year. Using screen technology to visit family has been mostly a bust, though he’s talked with his son on the phone, and his granddaughters, 6 and 8, have made “window visits.”

“I’m still alive,” he said.

COVID cases were peaking in July at Broadway Villa Post Acute in Sonoma, where 12 of 50 infected residents would lose their lives, when Leticia “Tish” Hoover’s husband of 26 years, Bob, 67 died.

His COVID-19 test came back negative that very morning, allowing his wife and her son to be with him as the Parkinson’s disease and dementia that had slowly drained his vigor took him at last.

It was their first visit in five months, a carefully controlled one for which Tish Hoover will be forever grateful after a long separation that had been challenging for her husband to understand. Phone calls and FaceTime often proved disorienting for him, so it was a gift to hold him during his last few hours, to thank him for their time together and tell him how much she loved him, even though he had closed his eyes for the last time a day earlier, she said.

“I knew he could hear us because I was talking to him, and when he heard my voice, tears came out of his eyes,” Tish Hoover, 65, said. “We were blessed to be able to see him because so many families can’t.”

Emptied classrooms await return

As public schools begin to reopen, Steve Herrington, the county’s superintendent of schools, worries about the entire community of staff, teachers and students, but particularly about the youngsters who left for spring break a year ago March 13 and learned only later they would not be returning any time soon.

They’ve been gone for a year.

Most kindergartners approaching this spring vacation have not yet been in a classroom. High school students who graduated last year and started college did so without walking across a stage or sitting in a lecture hall.

“One of the things we’ve done here,” said Herrington, whose mother died of COVID-19 in May, “is we’ve hired, we’ve recruited eight behavioral counselors because that’s what we believe is going to be needed in our county — for not just students, for teachers and everyone in our offices.”

The fallout on mental and physical health as well as academic achievement is already wide and likely to be long lasting. Last fall, high school students were failing classes at rates never before seen in Sonoma County — in some cases double the number recorded in the first six weeks of school last year.

There are reports of severe depression among some young people, and Hopkins said a local pastor recently told her about organizing a COVID-safe funeral for a teenager who died by suicide.

“I think there’s going to be a really significant toll that we are only beginning to grasp right now, that we are only seeing in shadows right now, through emotional disengagement,” said Rumble, with the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber. “There’s anecdotally increased rates of child abuse, suicide and depression. That’s very scary to me.”

As more educators are vaccinated, momentum grows daily to reopen campuses and reunite students with their peers and their teachers. Several county schools have recently been approved to open their doors, while the county’s largest district, Santa Rosa City Schools, has reached a tentative agreement with its teachers union that would allow about 5,000 elementary students to return to in-person classes April 1 and 2. Nearly 11,000 secondary students would be back on campuses at the end of the month if the Santa Rosa Teachers Association ratifies the plan.

A newly signed state bill authorizes $6.6 billion in spending on California’s returning students, including $2 billion in incentives for districts that offer in-person instruction by the end of March.

The challenge of distance learning and the loss of structure and socialization has been immense for many households, and the transition back won’t necessarily be a smooth one.

Herrington said teachers and school staff need to allow kids to readjust, and learn how to be in a group and in class again. Some will be bringing emotional trauma with them, he said.

The logistical issues that come with school plans that call for hybrid schedules — combinations of in-person and online classes — will be another hurdle for families.

Santa Rosa architect Robin Stephani would love to send her first grader back to school, for instance, but the additional exposure would jeopardize their participation in a five-student learning pod for which several families have pooled funds to hire a teacher. Her two high school seniors already are looking forward to college, and Stephani doesn’t think the public health picture is clear enough for the kind of social mixing that would happen on campus, so they won’t be going back, either.

“We are 110% ready to go back to school in the fall, but we need it to be 100% school, not a hybrid model,” she said.

‘Have some hope’

Mase, like many, said falling COVID-19 cases and the arrival of more vaccines — now administered to more than 1 in 5 Sonoma County residents despite distribution hurdles — means there is truly light on the horizon.

The current direction of local metrics has the county on course to advance out of the most restrictive tier of business activity sometime soon. Economic forecasts favor the kind of domestic tourism that Sonoma County has to offer in spades coming out of the pandemic.

“I feel like we’re close,” said Robinson, the health services director.

But reality has been altered, and the personal toll remains overwhelming for many — those who lost loved ones, livelihoods — as well as for so many others who missed out on moments in the past year that will never be recovered.

Life, said Hopkins, “will never be the same after this.”

“It’s exhausting,” she said, “and there’s so much anxiety and fear of the unknown, but we’re also at the part where we’re finally able to have some hope. It’s a frustrating place. We have the struggling businesses, and we’re all hurting, but the vaccine is hanging out there just beyond reach.”

For a long time, she said, “everyone was trying so hard to tread water, and there was no rescue ship coming, and finally I can see the life ring. I can see the raft. I can start swimming.”