Half of COVID-19 cases in Santa Barbara County linked to private gatherings

Recent contact tracing investigations reveal that private gatherings are the major driver of COVID-19 infections in Santa Barbara County.

“For the people who are open to disclosing where they have been in the weeks prior to infection, we see that there is a significant amount of family and friend gatherings,” Dr. Henning Ansorg, the county’s public health officer, told Noozhawk.

On Nov. 13, 50% of those infected with the coronavirus disclosed that they went to a friend or family gathering, Ansorg said. The other 50% of infections were attributed to travel, work, visiting a casino, sports or Halloween parties, he added.

Over the last six months, friend and family gatherings also attributed to 50% of COVID-19 infections, according to Ansorg.

“That’s a huge amount,” he said. “Family or friend get-togethers are a big player in the infection chain. We have a lot in our control to wear a mask, maintain a six-foot social distance, and avoid getting together.

“The more people who listen to this guidance and remind themselves, the better it is for everybody.”

Ansorg did note that even these numbers could be skewed downward because many people don’t want to disclose all of their interactions.

Other drivers of infection come from restaurant, bar, travel and work exposures, Ansorg said.

“Some people think that they’re safe at work so they relax their habits, but people have to remember that their coworkers go home too,” he added. “Unfortunately, normalizing socially is a significant factor.”

There have been very few school infections, according to Ansorg, and the ones that have occurred have happened when students interact outside of school.

According to the Public Health Department, as of Wednesday, 35% of the county’s confirmed cases came from close contact transmission, meaning that those individuals contracted the virus from a contact close to them. Another 23 percent of the cases are from community transmissions in which there is an inability to relate confirmed cases through chains of transmission.

Ansorg said holiday travel will definitely have an impact on the county’s infection rate. He said he hopes people will take the state travel advisory to heart.

With the goal of mitigating the spread of the coronavirus and helping users respond to a high-risk exposure more quickly, the University of California system partnered with the state to adopt California COVID Notify, a new, voluntary smartphone exposure notification system.

UC Santa Barbara is among five UC campuses that adopted the pilot program. Launched on Nov. 16, the program uses Google/Apple exposure notification technology on smartphones to log close interactions with other users’ Bluetooth-enabled devices when the phones come within six feet of each other for 15 or more minutes a day.

If a user tests positive, they can enter a code that will generate anonymous alerts to other users based on their phone’s exposure log.

A goal of the program is to determine whether using this smartphone technology will encourage users to respond to exposures more quickly by self-isolating and receiving additional resources, according to UCSB spokeswoman Andrea Estrada.

“This new COVID-19 tracking app has the potential to greatly enhance our efforts to identify close contacts of confirmed COVID-19 cases,” said Dr. Mary Ferris, UCSB’s COVID-19 clinical adviser.

“Besides being extremely accurate about the contacts, it also provides confidentiality in the notifications, which is a barrier we have encountered frequently when trying to identify close contacts.”

UCSB students can turn on exposure notifications in the settings on their iPhone with the iOS 14.2 software. Android users can download the California COVID Notify app to participate in the new system.