Sonoma County seeks state waiver to further lift coronavirus shutdown restrictions

Sonoma County Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase said Friday she’s drafting a “reopening plan” that’s tailored for the county and would further loosen coronavirus restrictions upon approval by state health officials.

The plan is a way to continue reopening the county in phases using guidelines outlined in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s statewide plan, Mase said. She did not provide details about her plan, such as whether it would allow dining room use in restaurants.

State health officials have created a program to allow counties less affected by the virus to reopen some businesses and other activities sooner than what the state currently allows.

The option, called a regional variance, requires counties to meet certain coronavirus benchmarks, such as having fewer than one coronavirus case per 10,000 residents and no deaths in the past two weeks. The county does not meet those criteria.

On Tuesday, Sonoma County supervisors asked Mase to draft a waiver from the requirements. On Friday, during her coronavirus daily press briefing, Mase resisted referring to her plan as a request under the governor’s regional variance program.

“I wouldn’t look at it really as seeking a variance,” she said. “Rather, I would look at, from my perspective, as putting together a cohesive, reopening phased plan, as we can, that is very much tailored to our county and running it by the state for their guidance and their thoughts on it.”

Following state guidance on loosening coronavirus restrictions, Mase issued a new health order that went into effect Friday. Under the new directive, everyone can use child care facilities and certain businesses are allowed to reopen, such as pet groomers, dog walking services and car washes.

Mendocino County followed suit, allowing laundromats, dry cleaners, auto repair shops, car washes, landscapers, pet groomers and dog walkers to operate under a new health order that went into effect at 11:59 p.m. Friday.

But Mase acknowledged Sonoma County does not meet the state’s criteria qualifying it for faster reopening and that it’s unlikely the state would grant a variance under the program.

“This is really seen more as a plan that we’re putting forward to get the state’s buy-in as we get ready, now or in the future, for opening,” she said.

Supervisor David Rabbitt said he believes the state’s requirements for a waiver will change as counties make a stronger case for safe reopening of their communities.

“Even the state wants to continually refine it and not have it be absolute,” Rabbitt said. “I don’t know when they’ll change it, whether it will be next week or the week after, but pretty much you can guarantee that it will change. And it should change as more information is brought forward.”

Another state requirement for counties to move forward is having the ability to perform 1.5 coronavirus tests for every 1,000 residents. In Sonoma County, that would be 750 tests.

During Friday’s press briefing, Mase said the county would meet that requirement by Monday, when capacity at the state’s testing sites in Petaluma and Santa Rosa, run by Optumserve, would double to 520 tests a day.

Mase said the county’s expanded drive-thru testing of priority groups, which is conducted in the parking lot of the public health lab on Chanate Road, can handle 250 people a day.

Those two testing programs alone put the county’s capacity at 770 daily tests.

That does not include testing being conducted by commercial laboratories such as Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, as well as testing being done by the area’s large hospitals.

“Some days this last week or so, we’ve hit 600 without Optumserve doubling, so we’ll see what it is next week,” Mase said.

As of Friday, the county had conducted 14,271 coronavirus tests, with only 364 people, or 3%, testing positive. Of the positive cases, 233 were detected by testing residents who had been in contact with someone known to be infected with the virus, a process called contact tracing.

Only 71, or 20%, were cases where the source of the infection could not be determined. The rest of the cases were linked to travel or still under investigation.

This week saw two big spikes in cases - 21 on Tuesday and 14 on Thursday. The majority of them, though, were identified through the county’s contact tracing program. On Friday, the county added 13 more cases to the total.

Mase said that of the 226 COVID-19 cases linked to close contact through Thursday, only about 20, or 9%, were people who had no symptoms.

Even with all the new testing, there has not been a dramatic increase in cases, Mase said. She said that although most new cases continue to be found among close contacts, there have been a few more cases where its unknown where “we don’t know where they got COVID from.”

These are being investigated to determine the source of infection.