On Monday, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that California will be launching yet another a new effort in hopes of stopping the spread of COVID-19 in the Central Valley -- but this time, it's a new effort to the tune of $52 million.
According to Newsom, California is seeing an average of 9,859 new coronavirus cases each day, yet the infection rates and hospitalizations are especially high in the Central Valley... So he decided that the state will use $52 million, of the $199 million federal grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to hire more health care workers and to increase testing protocols in that area.
“What more evidence do you need than that about how deadly this disease can be,” Newsom said during a news briefing on Monday. “Please, let’s wake up to that reality.”
Newsom also announced that he had compiled a "watchlist" of counties that he said are high-risk for the virus. The list included the counties of Fresno, Kings, Kern, Merced and Stanislaus, among others.
According to Dr. George Rutherford, a UC San Francisco epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert, the only way to lower the risk of these areas is to create more places for people to isolate and quarantine.
“It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure that people are being bused out to work, pretty tightly packed in, and then go back to dense housing at night either with multigenerational housing or lots of roommates,” Rutherford said. “That’s the newer pattern of transmission that we’re seeing now, and we have to identify the people infected and isolate them.”
So... Will Newsom's new pledge of $52 million help?
Guess we'll just have to wait and see...
Read the full story on The Mercury News.