Sonoma County health officer faces turbulence, success at helm of coronavirus fight

Driving to and from her Santa Rosa office, Dr. Sundari Mase sees shuttered storefronts and struggling businesses and worries about them.

“I wonder how that restaurant is doing, how that hair salon is doing,” said Mase, who happens to be the person responsible for closing those businesses in the first place three months ago. “I wonder if they're going to make it. I do think about that a lot.”

Mase, Sonoma County's health officer, is empathetic, regardless of how some critics describe her. But she is also a highly regarded epidemiologist, a “disease detective,” as county Supervisor James Gore called her, devoted to “following the science.”

The science has led Mase to some difficult, unpopular places. As the county's field general in its fight against the pathogen that has killed four area residents and nearly 120,000 people nationwide, the 53-year-old has issued a series of sweeping orders that have flattened the coronavirus curve here - COVID-19 infections and deaths are low in Sonoma County, compared to its Bay Area neighbors. At the same time, her tough decisions cast tens of thousands out of work.

The whirlwind of uncertainty did take a definitive turn the last couple of weeks when Mase allowed big waves of business sectors to reopen, including hair salons, restaurants for indoor dining, and the county's crown jewel wine industry can serve visitors tastings of favorite vintages without a required side of food. And churches welcomed people back inside for religious services for up to 100.

Her never-a-dull-moment tenure as the county's health officer began on March 10. The very next day, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Mase has been “in response mode” ever since, grinding through 16-hour days drafting policies she knows will make people safer even as they make some of those same people angry.

“I feel really good about everything we've done so far,” Mase said, in an interview this week, “because I know we've prevented hospitalizations and deaths, especially in vulnerable populations.”

At the same time, she went on, “this is probably the most difficult situation in my career.”

A former physician herself, she is accustomed to “helping people make a decision between two bad choices,” she said. “I've done a lot of that.”

She has spent three decades in medicine, most recently at WHO, and the Centers For Disease Control And Prevention before that. But the last three months have been the hardest of her career, she said. “Because doing one thing has a direct, negative impact on the other thing. There's no middle ground.”

For a mild-mannered scientist and mother of three who insists on cooking dinner for her family no matter how late she gets home from work, Mase has become a remarkably polarizing figure in the county. During the county Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, Mase drew high praise, but also came in for criticism that was harsh, and, in some cases, unhinged. One resident called for her to be imprisoned for “crimes against humanity.”

A lightning rod

The health officer serves as a sort of physician for the entire county. While public health officers once toiled in relative obscurity, their oversized role in battling the coronavirus has thrust them into an unfamiliar, and sometimes unwelcome, spotlight.

Orange County Health Officer Dr. Nichole Quick resigned Monday after receiving threats that followed her order for residents to continue wearing face coverings within 6 feet of others in public. Protesters had brought a sign to a public meeting, depicting Quick as a Nazi. Her home address was read aloud in a meeting. The Orange County Sheriff felt the need to provide her with a security detail.

“That's not exactly what they signed up for,” said Dr. Matt Willits, the health officer in neighboring Marin County.

Quick is the most recent example of a public health officer subjected to “a mob mentality that doesn't belong in public comment,” said Kat Deburgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California. Deburgh said Quick is the seventh senior health official in the state to resign during the pandemic.

Recently, Kathy Allard, a town of Sonoma resident, started a petition to have Mase fired. The health officer has neither been transparent, Allard said, nor has she taken into account the economic and mental “devastation” resulting from her public health emergency orders. By Friday, the petition had over 360 signatures.

To be sure, Mase has more supporters than detractors, judging by the interior of her East Bay home, which has taken on the appearance of an impromptu greenhouse.

“For the last two weeks,” said her 16-year-old son, Giri, “we've had flowers piling up all over the house.” In addition to the 20-or-so bouquets sent to her office - she brings them home after work each day - Mase also has received scores of supportive letters. This surge of gratitude and encouragement arrived in the wake of what Gore referred to as “the Sheriff soap opera.”

Taken aback by Essick

Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick sent shock waves from Petaluma to Cloverdale on May 28 by announcing, on Facebook, that his deputies would stop enforcing Mase's public health orders. Feeling ignored and left out of key decisions by supervisors and top county health leaders, Essick declared he could “not in good conscience” enforce orders that were imposing “significant restrictions on our freedoms,” and “crushing our community.”

The sheriff's strident decision not to enforce a law he disagreed with, coupled with his willingness to undermine the county's health department during a pandemic, sowed considerable confusion and incredulity. But he repeated his vow the next day, declaring to a Press Democrat reporter “I am not following this f-----g health order.”

After a weekend of conversations with county supervisors, he backed away from the threat. When the public dustup subsided, the sheriff was confident, he said that the county would be moving to a risk-based approach to reopen business and industry that would “better align” Sonoma County with state guidelines.

For her part, Mase was surprised and confused by the Essick's broadside. “I was taken aback,” she said. “I didn't know where all this was coming from.”

Addressing complaints that she'd not been transparent with the sheriff, she said, “I have been extremely transparent, with data, with our evidence-based approach, (our) risk-based strategy, the metrics. We have so much stuff on the dashboard,” she said, referring to the wealth of COVID-19 case data on the county's website, “it was a little bit of a surprise to hear that we weren't communicating and weren't transparent. I have no idea what that meant.”

On June 1, Essick and Board of Supervisors Chair Susan Gorin released a joint statement in which the sheriff agreed to enforce Mase's public health orders under a more “transparent and open process.”

While that statement “placated what needed to be placated,” Mase said, “I wasn't really part of the discussion. I didn't even review” the prepared statement by Gorin. “I had no part of that. No input.”

Nor did it change an iota, her approach to the daily battle against the pandemic, Mase said. “Nothing's new, nothing's changed from the public health department's perspective and our approach to COVID.”

While Essick declined to be interviewed for this story, Sgt. Juan Valencia, a spokesman for the department, described his boss as “extremely happy with communication” between the Sheriff's Office and the county health department. “We're working really well together.”

“I think it's behind us,” said Barbie Robinson, the county's director of health services, of the imbroglio with Essick. It was Robinson who hired Mase in March at a yearly salary of $263,000, following the abrupt departure of then-Health Officer Dr. Celeste Philip, who took a job at the CDC. Three months later, Robinson described Mase's performance has “tremendous,” “incredible” and “really great.”

Both Mase and Robinson acknowledged the fight against COVID-19 is nowhere near over. Both are deeply concerned by the high rate of transmission among the county's Latino community. While Latinos make up just 27% of Sonoma County's population, they represent 75% of its 720-plus cases.

“It's really sad to see this kind of disparity,” said Mase, acknowledging “inequities” in the county's health care system. Identifying the chief causes for that imbalance, she pointed to people living in crowded conditions, and “the fact that many of these people have been working all along, while others have been sheltering in place.” Robinson went further, telling the Latino business leaders group Los Cien on Thursday that the coronavirus outbreak is magnifying yearslong socioeconomic disparities endured by Latinos in what she called a “racial pandemic.”

To address the COVID-19 onslaught on Latinos, Mase designed a “large, broad mitigation plan” featuring increased testing - including pop-up testing in Latino communities - and alternate care sites for those who test positive, “so that when they're isolated, they're not going to infect others in their family.”

Five-headed hydra

That run-in with Essick hasn't been her only skirmish with elected officials. While battling infectious diseases was right in her wheelhouse, Mase was a rookie when it came to political maneuvering. “I've never worked with elected officials in this capacity,” she said in the interview. “I'm learning on this job.”

She's learned quickly and well, according to Supervisor Gore, who noted that when Mase took the job three months ago, “she didn't know how to work with us - didn't know we were this five-headed hydra,” a reference to the five-member Board of Supervisors. “She didn't know about the egos and tendencies and personalities of elected officials and business groups.”

Gore recalled a tense few days early in the pandemic, at the end of March, when Mase extended the county's original stay-home order before she'd consulted sufficiently with the supervisors. And they let her know it. “There was a lot of frustration,” Gore said.

Since then, he said, “everything has changed.” Mase is in frequent contact with the supervisors, calling, texting, “checking to see where we are at.”

Supervisor Lynda Hopkins agreed Mase is doing a far better job of communicating with the board. “It's not easy,” Hopkins said. “She'd never been enmeshed in county government before.”

Hopkins rose in Mase's defense at Tuesday's supervisors' meeting when the fusillade of criticism came. Some of the comments directed at the health officer had been “unnecessarily personal,” said Hopkins - “the kinds of attacks you regularly see against women in power, and particularly women of color.”

Mase isn't going there, and politely deflecting when asked for comment on that topic. She doesn't see herself as a victim, she explained, and tries hard “not to look at things through those kind of lenses.”

Even if she did, she wouldn't have much time for it, in the maelstrom of calls and meetings that define her days. “I don't have a lot of time to reflect,” said Mase, “but when I do I think, ‘We're making history here.'?”

Family time

While she still works frequent long days, said her husband, the appellate lawyer Gregory A. Mase, she is able to decompress at home.

Even if it's just an hour or two at the beginning and end of each day she's not working, agreed their daughter, Anjeli, who just graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in neurobiology. “She's really present during that time. When she comes home, she asks us how we're doing. She wants to cook and have a family dinner, and really talk to all of us.”

And, if she feels like it, smell the flowers.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ausmurph88.