Consider canceling Thanksgiving. Get tested regularly for COVID-19, health officials advise
Fresno area families should start planning now how to have a safe Thanksgiving holiday, whether that means doing it over Zoom, testing for COVID-19 and quarantining before and after travel, having it outdoors like the original Thanksgiving or canceling it altogether, Fresno County health officials advised.
The advice from Fresno County Interim Health Officer Dr. Rais Vohra came Friday afternoon after earlier in the morning California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a travel advisory for the holiday. Newsom, along with governors from Oregon and Washington, advised against out-of-state travel and asked anyone arriving from other areas of the country or internationally to quarantine for two weeks.
Vohra took it a step further, saying talking about precautions the week of the holiday is too late.
“The last thing that you want to do is to have a Thanksgiving holiday turn into a coronavirus cluster,” he said. “Avoid traveling if you at all can. … Consider doing it over Zoom, consider or doing it remotely. Consider just canceling Thanksgiving and just letting your relatives know let’s hope for next year, or sometime in the spring after everyone has a vaccine.”
If you do have Thanksgiving with relatives, Vohra recommended trying to make it as “authentic as possible,” like the first Thanksgiving by having it outdoors and limiting it to two or three households.
Coronavirus testing options
Three or four new OptumServe coronavirus testing sites will be added in Fresno County, Vohra said, possibly in Reedley, Selma and on Butler Avenue in Fresno. The locations are not yet confirmed. Vohra said county officials are considering requesting a fourth new site, possibly in Mendota.
Testing is one key metric that will likely cause Fresno to slide back next week into the purple Tier 1 in the state’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy.
Besides a surge in positive cases, Fresno also is behind the state median for testing volume.
Vohra said Fresno has the resources to increase testing volumes.
“We just need everyone to really take time out of their day to go ahead and get registered,” he said. “…Getting tested should no longer be a foreign concept. It should be a pretty routine, kind of boring concept at this point. We just need more people to be doing it.”
Ideally, essential workers and public servants should get tested every two weeks.
Most primary care doctors in the county now offer COVID-19 testing, and the county already has three OptumServe sites plus community testing events multiple times a week.
For more information about coronavirus testing, visit the county’s testing web page.
This story was originally published November 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM.