‘Tragic’ July may be ahead if residents ignore COVID-19 mask, distance pleas, doctor warns
The doctor in charge of Fresno County’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic issued one of his most direct pleas to date to residents Tuesday as the novel coronavirus continues to spread throughout the community: “Get a mask and start using it.”
If people don’t take that direction to heart, the county could see a situation that becomes “very tragic” in July based on the substantial increase in the number of confirmed COVID-19 infections, deaths and hospitalizations among residents over the past couple of weeks.
“It’s really time for all of us to get behind the science and do what we know is actually going to help our community,” said Dr. Rais Vohra, the county’s interim health officer, in a media briefing to reporters. Vohra said he expects to issue a public health advisory for all Fresno County residents on a range of steps they can take to reduce the transmission of the virus, including social distancing and using masks when out in public.
“There’s things we’ve learned from the basic science of coronavirus in the last few months,” he said. Wearing a simple cloth mask that covers the nose and mouth, even a bandanna, “just blocks your respiratory droplets from flying all over the room and really catches most of your droplets and will help clean the air around you.”
“The evidence for that is mounting day after day, and at this point I think it’s hard to ignore the really good science that shows that masks work to slow the spread of infection,” he added.
Vohra pointed to an outbreak of COVID-19 among inmates at the Fresno County Jail to illustrate the ease with which the virus can spread. Most of the inmates or jail staff who have tested positive for the virus have only shown mild, if any, symptoms of the disease, such as fever, cough or breathing difficulty.
“Every one of these cases offers a teaching point. … It highlights what we’ve already known about this viral infection, which is that asymptomatic spread in crowded settings, especially indoors, is definitely a thing,” he said. “It’s definitely something that allows this virus to get around and people may not even know they have it.”
That’s a troubling aspect of the disease that Vohra said underscores the need for people to wear masks. The instances of “community spread” — cases in which people don’t know how or where they contracted the virus — in Fresno County aligns with models based on surveys by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “About half of the people know where they got it, but the other half had no idea; they picked it up somewhere in the community.”
Through Tuesday, a total of 5,008 residents have tested positive for the disease in Fresno County since March 6, including 73 who have died. More than 3,100 of those confirmed infections, and 38 of the fatalities, have been reported since June 1.
Over the past two weeks, the average number of new confirmed coronavirus infections in Fresno County was more than 160 per day. Two weeks ago, that average was 60.2 cases per day over the prior 14 days.
The number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 s across Fresno County “is one of the vital signs for our county that is looking concerning,” Vohra said, because it continues to climb.
The state Department of Health Services reported that as of Monday, 170 patients were being treated for confirmed and suspected cases of coronavirus disease in hospitals across the county. That’s almost double the 86 patients in hospitals on June 15. Monday’s figures include 32 whose illnesses were serious enough to require them to be in intensive care units.
“We know just from the biology of this virus that the actual number of hospitalizations and the number of deaths usually trails (confirmed tests) by a couple of weeks,” Vohra said. “This last week of having increasing case counts gives me a lot of indigestion going into the rest of the summer.”
“I think July is going to be very tragic in terms of the number of hospitalizations and the number of fatalities that we see as a result of COVID-19,” he added, “just given the fact that we’ve seen such an uptick in the number of total positive swab results that we’ve gotten.”
The upcoming Fourth of July weekend does little to temper Vohra’s concern. “Large gatherings are going to work against us,” he said.
Vohra urged residents to think about what an ongoing increase in cases, hospitalizations and deaths would affect the county’s path toward reopening more businesses.
“We really opened up a lot of different industries and our numbers just really started surging up,” he said. “So now it’s time to take the lessons of that and see what we can adjust and tweak.”
That, he added, is where relatively minor inconveniences like social distancing, wearing face masks and vigilant hand washing can make a difference. “I’m optimistic that if we make all these very simple steps a daily part of our routine, we can get through this phase of the pandemic,” Vohra said. “Other communities have already done this and now it’s our time. … We’re being challenged, and I know we can rise and meet that challenge.”
This story was originally published June 30, 2020 at 7:45 PM.
