COVID-19 Cases Rise by 137 in Santa Barbara County with Gatherings Still a ‘Significant’ Source | Coronavirus Crisis

Santa Barbara County reported 137 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Friday, on a day when Gov. Gavin Newsom also announced that all schools within counties — including Santa Barbara County — on the state’s COVID-19 watch list would begin the new school year with remote learning only.

“Every geographic area of Santa Barbara County is experiencing positive COVID-19 cases,” Gregg Hart, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, said at Friday’s press conference. “We need to do more, and quickly, to stop the spread of the virus.”

Hart said the numbers of cases and hospitalizations continue to rise, and the county has been on the state monitoring list for 32 consecutive days.

He introduced a new catchphrase to help educate people about the pandemic, calling it the “three Cs”: closed spaces, crowded spaces and close contact.

“There is no way to tell whether someone has COVID-19, other than a test, which only indicates the condition of the person at that specific moment,” Hart said. “The fact the spread of the virus is invisible makes stopping community spread and containing the virus very challenging.

“Every contact between people creates some risk, but different contacts pose different degrees of risk.”

Cases in Santa Barbara County, largely fueled by patients in the Santa Maria Valley, have exploded since Memorial Day weekend, when Santa Barbara opened nine blocks of State Street to pedestrians, bicyclists and skateboarders, and there was a series of other gradual business reopenings allowed by Gov. Newsom.

Before that, the county had largely flattened the curve, but after the openings, cases began to rise significantly. Now, Newsom has ordered another round of closures, including the mandate of no in-person classes for K-12, whether public, private or charter schools.

Of Friday’s new cases, 69 were in Santa Maria, 19 in Santa Barbara and 18 in Lompoc. To date, 32 people in the county have died from the virus, and there are 394 active COVID-19 cases.

Since the pandemic began, 4,759 people in the county have contracted the virus, with nearly 80 percent in the North County, mainly in the Santa Maria Valley and at the Lompoc Federal Prison Complex.

Dr. Van Do-Reynoso, the county’s public health director, said Friday that 81 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 symptoms, including 27 in intensive care units.

Santa Barbara County’s COVID-19 case level is 10 times higher than the state’s acceptable threshold of 25 cases per 100,000 people, she noted. The positive-test rate is 9.6 percent, which also exceeds the state’s acceptable threshold of 8 percent.

Do-Reynoso said the county is “steady in its hospitalization rate, and we are meeting the state’s threshold for available ICU beds and ventilators.”

She added that in the past seven days, the county had interviewed 526 people with COVID-19 and that “gatherings continue to be a significant issue” in terms of causing infections.

She said 12 percent of the people reported attending a large gathering in the past 14 days. Those gatherings include work, bars, grocery stores, gyms, lake gatherings locally and out of the county, beach gatherings out of the county, barbecues, funerals and birthday parties.

Since March 15, the Public Health Department has handled 352 COVID-19 complaints, most of which related to food facilities.

Each establishment has received a phone call, and some have received a site visit. The county has issued four notices of violation and one notice of intent to suspend a permit.

Newsom’s state enforcement team also has visited Santa Barbara, Reynoso said, and has taken enforcement actions for employees not wearing masks or wearing them improperly; businesses not enforcing physical-distancing requirements; and businesses “exercising privileges indoors when they should be closed.”

“As your public health director, I am worried about our increasing case rates and test positivity rates,” Do-Reynoso said. “Both of these will ultimately have an impact on our hospitalization rates. Because we continue to be on the monitoring list, I anticipate further modifications from the governor.”

— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.