Could ‘real repercussions’ of COVID-19 trigger a rollback of Fresno businesses reopening?
A continuing rise in coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths in Fresno County has the potential to trigger a reversal of businesses reopening if the epidemic’s trend continues.
Beyond that, however, the COVID-19 pandemic’s “real repercussions are the ones that our community is already experiencing,” said Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer. “These are people’s lives that are affected. These are people’s relatives who are hospitalized, sometimes who pass away.”
Vohra’s comments to reporters in a Tuesday afternoon briefing came just a couple of hours before the county’s Department of Public Health revealed 187 new cases since Monday in Fresno County, as well as three more deaths.
Since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Fresno County in early March, nearly 3,700 people have tested positive for infection with the virus.
While more than 1,000 of those people have recovered, almost 2,600 cases remain active, and 70 people have died. Of those fatalities, 35 have died in the first 23 days of June – equal to the number of deaths in March, April and May combined.
“These aren’t just numbers on a dashboard,” Vohra said. “Many members of our community are hospitalized, or know someone who’s gotten sick” with the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
Over the past two weeks, Fresno County has averaged more than 98 confirmed new cases each day.
“The real repercussion is that we won’t internalize these lessons as a community and that this pandemic will stretch out much longer than it needs to,” he added.
More patients were hospitalized in Fresno County as of Monday for confirmed cases of COVID-19 than at any time since the pandemic reached the central San Joaquin Valley. The state Department of Public Health reported that the county had 83 people in hospitals on Monday, including 18 in intensive-care units.
While those numbers don’t pose a direct danger now to the county’s capacity of almost 1,230 general acute-care beds and 149 ICU beds in hospitals, they do reduce the availability of beds for patients requiring treatment for a range of other maladies, Vohra said.
“We want to make sure our medical community has the capacity to really take care of patients at their highest level of care as needed,” he said. Increased hospitalizations, in addition to an increase in the percentage of people testing positive for the coronavirus, are the kinds of things that could force county officials to take a second look at businesses that have been allowed to reopen after being closed to prevent the spread of the contagion.
“Once those (hospitalization and positive-test percentage) numbers start to go up, that’s when we really get the first indicators that we’re moving into a more urgent phase with this crisis and we would really have to invoke our surge protocols with our hospitals,” Vohra said. “That’s really what I think would trigger having to pull back on some of our businesses and possibly even locking things back down.”
Vohra said a business rollback would be not be a function of Fresno County being among California counties on the state’s “targeted engagement” list – counties where the percentages of positive tests, rising deaths and growing hospitalizations have prompted state health officials to provide technical expertise and more actively collaborate to find ways of dealing with outbreaks.
“The targeted engagement program has not been framed as a punitive program,” Vohra said when asked Tuesday about consequences or repercussions from being on the list.
Instead, he said, the county is confronting the consequences of residents who see only the numbers, but not the human faces of the cases and, as a result, fail to consider those who are directly affected or more vulnerable to the illness.
Thus, not enough people take seriously the guidance urging residents to wear face masks and observe social distancing when out in public.
“If you have never seen a patient with this disease, it does seem pretty abstract,” he said. “For many members of our community, this just seems like an abstract epidemic that’s far away and these numbers don’t really hit home.”
“We’re hoping that people take time to understand the human element of this pandemic and see how, even though it has disrupted a lot of our lives and inconvenienced a lot of our lives, the safety messages we are promoting are to protect all our our lives … and hopefully get us on a sustainable road to recovery,” he said.
The potential for putting a lid back on the business community to stem the spread of the virus “is something that we do need to think about and something that the community needs to be aware of,” Vohra said. “If we don’t get this right, there is always that possibility that we would need to lock down again.”
This story was originally published June 23, 2020 at 6:42 PM.
