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Calaveras Public Health continues to work closely with healthcare providers, hospitals, and its partners to address novel coronavirus. The division is taking action to protect the public and keep the community informed.
If you have health-related questions or concerns, call your healthcare provider. For general questions about COVID-19 or information about community resources, please see the resources tab.
COVID-19 is a new strain of coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans. The COVID-19 is the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, Hubei province, China.
Since December 2019, cases have been identified in a growing number of countries. The Districts surveillance data can be found here.
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are known to cause illnessranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
Public health authorities are learning more every day. We will continue to update as we learn more.
Reported illnesses have ranged frommild symptoms to severe illnessand death for confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases.
Symptoms may appear2-14 days after exposure:
The symptoms that are currently being seen with COVID-19 are cough, fever, headache, new loss of taste or smell, repeated shaking with chills, sore throat, shortness of breath, and muscle pain.To help prevent the spread of germs, you should:
You play an important role in stopping the spread of germs, view resources to share with your family, friends and within your community.
Some people are at higher risk of getting very sick from COVID-19, including older adults and people who have serious chronic medical conditions. If you are in this higher-risk population, the CDC recommends that you:
Learn more at: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/specific-groups/high-risk-complications.html
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has information on how to prepare your home and family for COVID-19. Recommendations include:
If you are the family member or caregiver of someone at higher risk, you should:
Everyone can do their part to help us respond to this emerging public health threat:
If you are a healthcare provider, be on the look-out for:
If you are a healthcare provider or a public health responder caring for a COVID-19 patient, please take care of yourself and follow recommendedinfection control procedures.
If you are a close contact of someone with COVID-19 and develop symptoms of COVID-19, call your healthcare provider and tell them about your symptoms and your exposure.
If you are a resident in a community where person-to-person spread of COVID-19 has been detected and you develop COVID-19 symptoms, call your healthcare provider and tell them about your symptoms.
For people who are ill with COVID-19, but are not sick enough to be hospitalized, please followCDC guidance on how to reduce the risk of spreading your illness to others. People who are mildly ill with COVID-19 are able to isolate at home during their illness.
If you have been in China or another affected area or have been exposed to someone sick with COVID-19 in the last 14 days, you will facesome limitations on your movement and activityfor up to 14 days. Please follow instructions during this time. Your cooperation is integral to the ongoing public health response to try to slow spread of this virus.
Learn more on the CDC website.
Europe had nearly 50 percent more deaths than normal at the peak of the outbreak, according to data compiled by Britains and Frances national statistics agencies, with tens of thousands more people dying the last week of March and the first week of April than in previous years.
As Europe became the center of the pandemic in the late winter and early spring, many countries implemented nationwide lockdowns, which was already killing thousands. Most of the excess deaths were in four big, hard-hit countries Britain, Italy, Spain and France.
In their worst weeks, Belgium, England, France and Spain all had more than twice as many deaths than was usual for the time of year.
England had the second-highest peak mortality after Spain in Europe, and the longest continuous period of excess mortality, according to a report published by Britains Office for National Statistics on Wednesday. Britain had registered over 55,000 confirmed deaths as of mid-July, and is the worst-hit country in Europe.
Although European countries encountered wide discrepancies in their excess deaths, most saw a rise over the course of two deadly weeks, from March 30 to April 12. During the last week of March, the deadliest across Europe with 33,000 excess deaths, Spain alone registered over 12,500 more deaths than would be expected when compared with data from 2016 to 2019, a 155 percent increase, and Italy over 6,500, according to data provided by the French national statistics agency, INSEE. The following week, Belgium recorded over 2,000 excess deaths, an increase of nearly 110 percent compared with data from previous years.
The virus has depleted nursing homes across the continent, infected thousands of health care workers, and revealed how some of the most stable countries in the world were unprepared for a pandemic, although several national security agencies had defined it as one of the most critical threats that their countries could face.
It isn't clear how many cases have been linked to "The Gym" in California, but county health officials say an outbreak is considered three or more cases from different households stemming from a specific location.
"The Gym" did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.
The Pacific Beach gym remained open despite an order to close indoor operations to prevent the spread of the virus. The business was sent a letter July 23 and told to close immediately, but it didn't shut until days later on July 27, county health officials say.
According to San Diego Health Officer Wilma Wooten, any business or entity that violates the order faces a misdemeanor and a fine of $1,000.
County officials say they need to step up contact tracing efforts and crack down on egregious violators. They've issued multiple letters to local businesses, including gyms and restaurants.
Fitness centers have struggled with how to keep clients safe while working out indoors.
"We will continue to take every necessary precaution to ensure the safety of our community, and we have taken a number of steps across all of our locations, which include enhanced cleanliness and sanitization policies and procedures, extensive training for staff, physical distancing measures, reducing physical touch points in the club with touchless check-in, and more," according to statement from McCall Gosselin, senior vice president of communications for Planet Fitness.
But before aerosols can get far, they must travel through the air thats near: meaning that they are a hazard at close range, too. And all the more so because, just like the smoke from a cigarette, aerosols are most concentrated near the infected person (or smoker) and become diluted in the air as they drift away.
A peer-reviewed study by scientists at the University of Hong Kong and Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, China, published in the journal Building and Environment in June concluded, The smaller the exhaled droplets, the more important the short-range airborne route.
So what does this all mean exactly, practically?
Can you walk into an empty room and contract the virus if an infected person, now gone, was there before you? Perhaps, but probably only if the room is small and stuffy.
Can the virus waft up and down buildings via air ducts or pipes? Maybe, though that hasnt been established.
More likely, the research suggests, aerosols matter in extremely mundane scenarios.
Consider the case of a restaurant in Guangzhou, southern China, at the beginning of the year, in which one diner infected with SARS-CoV-2 at one table spread the virus to a total of nine people seated at their table and two other tables.
Yuguo Li, a professor of engineering at the University of Hong Kong, and colleagues analyzed video footage from the restaurant and in a preprint (not peer reviewed) published in April found no evidence of close contact between the diners.
Droplets cant account for transmission in this case, at least not among the people at the tables other than the infected persons: The droplets would have fallen to the floor before reaching those tables.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage around the world, some of the largest outbreaks are in countries that fall into one particular economic category. They're not rich. They're not poor. They're middle income.
In fact, of the countries reporting the most cases globally, 6 of 7 are middle-income nations.
And they're not just any middle-income countries. They're some of the most influential players in the global south. Brazil, India, Mexico, Peru, Russia and South Africa are not only major emerging market economies, they're regional political powers.
Middle-income countries are defined by the World Bank as having annual per capita income between $1,000 and $12,000. The U.S., by comparison (the one high-income country in the top 7), has an average annual income of $66,000.
In mid-July, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called the pandemic the "gravest crisis in the history of our democracy" as he reimposed strict lockdown measures.
South Africa has now reported nearly a half-million cases of the coronavirus. Health officials project cases to continue to rise at least into September. And the impact of the pandemic goes far beyond the number of sick or dead. South Africa's borders remain closed. Nonessential workplaces remain shut. The country's official unemployment rate, which had been in the mid-20% range, was pushed above 30% by the pandemic.
Indeed, the strain on countries in the middle-income category is tremendous. And the number of people affected is huge. According to the World Bank, 75% of the world's population live in middle-income countries.
Collectively over the past decade, these countries have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Amanda Glassman, the executive vice president of the Center for Global Development, says these countries have a lot to lose in this pandemic.
"Most of their populations in this group would fall back into poverty given a shock like this one," she says.
For instance, Brazil's economy is expected to shrink by as much as 6.5% this year because of the coronavirus crisis. Brazil has the second-highest number of cases after the U.S. Nearly 100,000 people have died. The president and several of his top ministers have been infected. And as the pandemic continues to spread, more and more Brazilians are losing work.
"Even a country like Brazil that was so wealthy, 90% of the country earned less than $10 a day," Glassman says.
"I'm worried that we're setting back the process of economic and social development that has gone so quickly over the past decade," she says. "And it will take us many years to catch back up."
The entrepreneurial spirit that made countries like India, Brazil and South Africa dynamic emerging markets also put them at greater risk of having large outbreaks. These are places with a lot of "hustle," as Glassman puts it. Their economies were global. Business travelers and tourists jetted in and out. They have decent domestic transportation networks offering the coronavirus or other pathogens easy avenues to spread. They have health systems capable of detecting the disease.
"In India, for example, they're doing a lot of testing," says Jonathon Keymer, an intelligence analyst at the global risk management firm WorldAware. "In Russia, they're doing a lot of testing. The more people you test, the more confirmed cases you're going to have."
Keymer specializes in Russia and the former Soviet bloc countries for WorldAware and has also been modeling the impact of COVID-19 in these nations.
He says some middle-income countries globally look worse than others in this pandemic simply because they are open, dynamic societies and their case numbers are being reported. But that's not true everywhere.
He points out that both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, two middle-income former Soviet states, have reintroduced nationwide lockdowns in the past couple of weeks despite reported case numbers remaining relatively low.
"And then in Turkmenistan, which is a much more difficult place to get information about, they've closed the borders and I don't think they've officially got a single case of COVID," Keymer says. "But you can bet your bottom dollar that they've got COVID."
The World Health Organization has raised alarms about Turkmenistan despite its continued insistence that it has no cases.
But on paper at least Turkmenistan looks like it has far less of a COVID-19 problem than Peru, which has tested aggressively and openly reported results. Peru has a testing rate of roughly 70,000 tests per 1 million people a rate more than five times the global average.
Tanzania is another middle-income country reporting remarkably few infections. The east African nation actually hasn't officially reported any cases to WHO since April, when the president declared that the virus had been driven out of his country by prayer.
Even with the marked differences in middle income countries everything from governance to public sentiment to economic structure there are certain commonalities. It is clear that middle-income countries face similar risks as wealthier nations for coronavirus outbreaks but have far fewer resources to deal with them.
Interestingly, the relative wealth of a middle-income country appears to have little to do with how many infections it has.
Deborah Barros Leal Farias, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, says the experience of middle-income countries shows that a nation's economic status doesn't determine its success in battling this pandemic. "If you take the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden, they are also having horrible numbers," Farias says. "And then you can take a country like Vietnam or Thailand and they're having phenomenal numbers."
She says the real issue in keeping case counts down even more than resources appears to be leadership.
Of the four countries with the most cases globally the U.S. and three middle-income nations: Brazil, India and Russia all have right-wing leaders who espouse populist or anti-science views.
In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro downplayed the seriousness of the disease as tens of thousands of Brazilians died from COVID. Even when he tested positive for it himself, Bolsonaro continued to tout the anti-malarial drug hydrochloroquine as a cure despite studies showing it wasn't effective against the virus.
Ester Sabino, a virologist at the University of Sao Paulo, says Brazil never had a cohesive national plan for how to address the outbreak and she says Bolsonaro has been a distraction.
"In April and May, the main discussion [in Brazil] was whether we should or should not use chloroquine instead of saying how do we stop this," Sabino says. "There was not a good plan. That's my opinion. A lot of time was spent on things that were not the key things for the control of the disease."
Research by Sabino and her colleagues shows there were more than 100 different introductions of the virus into Brazil in the early days of the pandemic, mostly from travelers who had been in Europe. Then the virus spread to every corner of the vast country.
Lockdowns managed to slow the initial explosive spread, but Sabino says there needs to be more focus to contain the ongoing outbreak.
"There is no magic. There is no free lunch. If you want to control epidemic, it's hard," she says. "And you have to work a lot. We can't think about politics."
And that appears to hold true regardless of whether a country is rich, poor or somewhere in the middle.
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U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, has tested positive for the new coronavirus, he said in an interview with East Texas Now where he speculated that he may have caught the virus from wearing his mask.
Gohmert, who spends ample time on the U.S. House floor without a mask, was one of several Texas officials scheduled to fly to West Texas this afternoon with President Donald Trump. He took one test, which tested positive, then took a second test during a pre-screen at the White House which also tested positive.
I cant help but wonder ... if I injected the virus into my mask when I was moving, he said in an interview.
Medical experts and doctors overwhelmingly recommend wearing masks as a way to reduce spread of COVID-19. Recent research suggests that masks could protect the wearer from severe symptoms of COVID-19 or from catching the virus entirely.
Gohmert, 66, was one of several lawmakers who participated in a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee that also took place Tuesday. He walked around the hearing room and outside without wearing a mask. News of his diagnosis was first reported by Politico and later confirmed by ABC News.
Im fine. I feel fine. Totally asymptomatic, he said. If I hadnt been going with the president, since I dont feel badly, I would never have known.
Gohmert said he received guidance from the doctors at the White House and the attending physician at the Capitol that he only needed to self-quarantine for 10 days. He said he will drive back to his East Texas home and that his staff is all getting tested for the virus.
Like Dorothy said, theres no place like home, Gohmert said.
According to CNN, U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, was seated next to Gohmert on a flight from Texas on Sunday evening. She is also self-quarantining, according to her office.
The Republican lawmaker has been known for speaking at length with Capitol colleagues while not adhering to social distancing guidelines. Last month, he told CNN that he was not wearing a mask because he was getting tested regularly for the virus.
I dont have the coronavirus, turns out as of yesterday Ive never had it, he said in June. But if I get it, youll never see me without a mask.
Gohmert also raised eyebrows in March after returning to the Capitol despite potential exposure to the virus at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Though he said at the time he was cleared by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention physician to resume Capitol business, other lawmakers who attended the conference, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, opted to self-quarantine.
Several other members of Congress have tested positive for the deadly respiratory virus. Kentucky Republican Rand Paul tested positive for the virus in March and later recovered. Florida Republican Reps. Neal Dunn and Mario Diaz-Balart have also contracted the virus.
Texas, however, has recently become a hotspot for the coronavirus, with the state having some of the highest case counts in the nation. The governor previously issued a statewide mask mandate.
In a tweet Wednesday morning, U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, who chaired Tuesdays hearing, wished Gohmert a full & speedy recovery.
When individuals refuse to take the necessary precautions it puts everyone at risk, he wrote. Ive regularly instructed all Members to wear their masks and hope this is a lesson by all my colleagues.
Disclosure: Politico has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Congress has approved roughly $2.5 trillion since March to rescue an economy battered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
And it doesn't look like it will be nearlyenough.
Lawmakers are working on a fifth round of stimulus relief that could dwarf the four previous rounds of assistance combined.
The Democratic-led House has passed the HEROES Act, a roughly$3.4 trillion bill that would provide a second round of direct payments to millions of Americans, provide nearly $1 trillion to revenue-strapped states and local governments, and provide billions forhousing and food assistance.
The Republican-controlled Senate has introduced its counter-proposal, the HEALS Act, a $1.1 trillion package that also includes direct payments but no federal aid for housing, food or state and local governments. It has yet to pass the chamber.
'These 2 bills arent mateable': Republicans, Democrats at odds on a coronavirus stimulus deal as pressure builds
Here are some of the key similarities and differences between the two proposals.
The Democratic bill proposes extending the currentbenefit of $600 per week(which ends July 31) through December, a federal bonus on top of what states pay. The Republican plan proposes cutting that amount to $200 through September and then limiting the maximum benefit (state and federal combined) to 70% of an applicants pay moving forward.
Both bills would provide another stimulus check to millions of Americans under the same rules as the CARES Act: $1,200 for individuals earning up to $75,000 (phasing out at $99,000); and $2,400 for married couples earning up to $150,000 (phasing out at $198,000). The Democratic bill would be more generous for dependents ($1,200 for each dependent up to three versus $500 for each dependent in the GOP bill).
Democrats propose nearly$1 trillion in direct aid to help states, counties and cities whose budgets have been decimated by the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. The Republican bill has no such aidthough it does provide states and local governments more flexibility in how they use aid provided in earlier stimulus bills.
The Democrats' proposalprovides roughly $200 billion in housing assistance to help renters and homeowners affected by coronavirus avoid eviction/foreclosure. The GOP bill includesno such aid.
The Democrats provide about $60 billion to reopen schools, compared to $70 billion in the GOP bill. Each also provides about $30 billion to assist colleges.But the Democratic bill says thenearly $1 trillion in aid for stateand local governments could be usedfor education as well. The GOP bill does not and says that a portion of the education aid must go to help private schools reopen as well.
Democrats are proposing roughly $380 billion on ways to combat the coronavirus.Most of that would beused on two priorities: $100 billion to reimbursehospitals and other health care providers for pandemic-related costs, and $98 billion to assist laid-off workers pay for the health coverage they lost because of the economic steps taken to control the pandemic. The Republican plan sets aside$111 billion, much of it to help federal agencies and private companies develop vaccines and therapeutic remedies ($50 billion) or to help medical providers cover costs ($25 billion).
Senate Republicans release info on $1 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package
The new GOP plan includes another check for Americans and continued help for the unemployed.
USA TODAY
There's a big gulf on COVID-19 testing and contact tracing as well with Democrats proposing $75 billion and Republicans $16 billion.
The Democrats provide $290 billion in business assistance but largely in tax credits to companies that keep employees on the payroll and in tax breaks for pandemic-related expenses. The Democraticplan also includes a number of other priorities, including $190 billion in "hazard pay" for essential workers nationwide, $35 billion for food assistance to poor families, and $3.6 billion to help states run their elections in November. The GOP proposal does not include money for those but it does provide $158 billion in grants and loans to help small businesses stay afloat.
