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When 12 employees tested positive for COVID-19 at a grocery store in a zip code already identified as a hotspot for the novel coronavirus, one would have expected health officials to immediately require testing of all the workers.
Two weeks later, that still hadn’t happened.
The case of the Cardenas Markets store in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood highlights the dangerously slow response to coronavirus outbreaks by health officials in Alameda County, where hospitalizations have not declined over two months.
It stands in sharp contrast to Santa Clara County health officials, who moved quickly last month to contain a COVID-19 outbreak at a Morgan Hill fish-packing plant. In that county, COVID-19 hospitalizations have sharply declined over the past two months.
As Bay Area counties ease sheltering restrictions, public safety depends on the ability to test for coronavirus and then locate people who have been in contact with those infected.
But more than four months after the virus was first detected in the United States, the nation, state and most Bay Area counties still lack sufficient testing — and enough people to conduct the follow-up contact tracing.
It’s not just a matter of conducting enough tests. It’s also ensuring they’re being properly deployed with rapid follow-up to contain spread of the disease.
State and local governments must quickly move into hot spots, test people and, for every positive test result, trace, notify and test contacts within 48 hours, said Dr. Thomas Tsai at Harvard’s Global Health Institute. “If it takes a week to notify individuals and get them tested, you’ve lost the ability to suppress any new outbreaks.”
Sadly, in Alameda County, it’s been more than two weeks since Oakland City Councilman Noel Gallo on May 22 learned of the Cardenas store outbreak and promptly notified county officials.
Six days later, our reporter David DeBolt posted a story about the outbreak at the busy store in what is by far Alameda County’s worst zip code for coronavirus cases. By then, the company, which operates 45 stores across California, had acknowledged that 12 employees had tested positive for the virus.
Cardenas spokeswoman Marisa Kutansky said then that each infected employee had been asked to quarantine for at least 14 days, as were any other workers that they had been in contact with. But there was no word about testing the entire staff. Kutansky, in an email Thursday, refused to answer my questions about the company’s testing response to the outbreak.
Meanwhile, Alameda County health officials’ response has been pathetic.
In a May 28 email forwarded to Gallo, Neetu Balram, county health department spokeswoman, said the county was working to set up a new testing site in the Fruitvale neighborhood, but lacked sufficient testing capacity to respond to the market outbreak.
“Our resources are prioritized for outbreaks detected at acute care hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and congregate living facilities with vulnerable populations like seniors and people experiencing homelessness,” Balram wrote. She suggested market employees seek testing through their health care providers or at one of the free testing sites in Oakland.
In an interview Thursday, Balram conceded the county has no idea how many employees at the market, which remains open, have been tested or how many have the virus.
She said the county is working with the company to get all workers tested, but that wasn’t expected to happen until this coming week. She said the county lacks authority to compel testing.
That’s not so, said Jeff Smith, a doctor, attorney and chief executive of Santa Clara County. County health officers have authority to require that companies only allow employees who have tested negative to come to work. But the preferred route, Smith said, is swift cooperation from the company.
Which is what happened when Santa Clara County learned around May 17 of coronavirus at Lusamerica Foods, the wholesale fish distributor in Morgan Hill. Health officials visited the site the next day.
The workers there, about 150-200 people, were tested on the following two days and then retested on May 27, Smith said. Combined with the original case, the testing showed that 39 people had the virus; they were all sent home. County contact tracers followed and quarantined those who had been close to the workers.
The difference between how officials handled the cases of Cardenas Markets in Oakland and Lusamerica Foods in Morgan Hill is stark. And it might help explain why Santa Clara County has tamped down the spread of the virus and Alameda County has not.
