Sonoma County’s COVID-19 public health emergency to be lifted

Sonoma County’s public health emergency will end Feb. 28, almost three years to the day that it was put in place on March 2, 2020, amid growing uncertainty about a little understood virus that would throw the world into a state of extended upheaval that is still shaking out.

The ending of the state of emergency will coincides with the Feb. 28 expiration of California’s emergency and come just over two months before President Joe Biden has said he will end the national emergency declaration.

“The end of the emergency does not suggest that we have eliminated COVID-19 but rather that we are nearing the endemic phase of the virus that has altered so much of our lives for the past three years,” county health officer Sundari Mase said in a statement. “The variants of COVID-19 in circulation today are not as severe as those of the early days of the pandemic. Armed with widely available vaccines and much more knowledge about the virus, we no longer have to treat COVID-19 as an emergency.”

The announcement came quietly this week after months of the county’s Department of Health Services winding down measures it had taken to combat COVID-19’s spread, marking an official turn into a new stage of response to the virus by public health agencies and government as a whole. The county in June started to shed temporary county health workers, and officials started to describe the virus as something that while ever-present could be managed without an emergency response.

For Sonoma County residents, two signal changes will take place as the emergency order expires. Two community vaccination clinics, in Roseland and Rohnert Park, will close — a development announced at the start of February. Also, people who are insured through Medi-Cal with a renewal date of June and later will need to complete a reevaluation of their benefits. During the pandemic emergency, state residents were automatically re-enrolled.

Officials said that because a gradual stepping down of services has been taking place for months, the post-public health emergency changes will be minimal.

“It's just really an acknowledgment that we are heading into the next phase of this, that it is no longer to be treated as an emergency,” Matt Brown, a county spokesperson, said Saturday.

He pointed to the various rules instituted or promulgated since March 2020 — from masking and vaccination mandates to social distancing and capacity limits in businesses — as examples of COVID-era responses that have fallen away or been lifted.

The public health emergency “is really just the last thing that is still in place,” Brown said.

He acknowledged that the Department of Health Services will be “stepping away” from partnerships it had formed with nonprofit community service and health care providers to set up clinics and distribute resources and “returning to its core public health education role.”

Front line and community health care workers and advocates have raised concerns that the end of the emergency, in particular the closure of clinics, will put vulnerable residents who were disproportionately impacted by the virus at continued and greater risk.

Marisol Angeles, a health and outreach worker with Mujeres Unidas, a community organizing group, said the Latino community she works with stands to lose because of the end of the emergency and the clinics’ closing.

For example, Angeles said, speaking in Spanish, for many people, the clinics made it easier to show up without appointments early in the day or later after work. They will now have to make appointments, wait longer for available time slots that match their working schedules, and subsequently have less access to COVID tests and vaccines, she said.

Also, said Dr. Jenny Fish, a physician with Santa Rosa Community Health Center who helped start HPEACE, or Health Professionals for Equality and Community Empowerment, funding tied to the public health emergency that supports work with vulnerable communities will likely go away.

And the end of automatic Medi-Cal enrollments will push people further out of the health care system, she said, because “those systems are so hard for people to navigate and have access to.”

“We have to certainly educate people about that,” Brown said, “so they don’t lapse in their coverage because at this point, with potentially more out-of-pocket costs for things like COVID vaccines and tests, we want everybody who can to get insured so they’ll have those costs minimized.”

He added that the county’s health services department will continue staffing at least three resource tables in Roseland through the spring, providing information, directing people to services, and potentially dispensing test kits as long as supplies last.

The closure of the vaccination clinics will be noticed, he acknowledged, “but besides that, there’s not a whole lot that’s going to change in people’s lives. But we do want to acknowledge that it’s no longer going to be treated as an emergency. But it’ll still be with us, it doesn’t mean COVID is ending on February 28. It’ll still be out in the community.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay