Cambria joins SLO County list of cities with 5 or more coronavirus cases
When the San Luis Obispo County Public Health Department added 20 new cases of coronavirus to its running tally on June 24, Cambria joined the list of communities that have five or more COVID-19 patients.
Before that, the number of cases confirmed in the small town since the county began tracking COVID-19 hadn’t yet reached the community-reporting benchmark of five.
Until then, any Cambria cases were included in the “other” category, combined with other areas that had accumulated fewer than five confirmed cases each.
The June 24 count was the third time in seven days in which the county’s confirmed cases had increased by 20 or more in a single day.
As of June 26, the total number of people who had tested positive for COVID-19 since March was 508, according to ReadySLO.org.
Of those, 381 were deemed recovered, which the federal Centers for Disease Control defines as “at least three days (72 hours) of no fever (without the use of fever-reducing medications); improvement in respiratory symptoms (e.g., cough, shortness of breath); and, at least 10 days since symptoms first appeared.”
San Luis Obispo County likely has many more cases that haven’t yet been documented by testing, local diagnosis or hospital admission.
Some cases may be asymptomatic, meaning the people have the virus but are not sick, or presymptomatic, meaning the people have the virus but aren’t yet experiencing symptoms of being ill. All can be vectors for spreading the disease.
County public health officer Dr. Penny Borenstein said in a June 22 news release that the county had anticipated a rise in cases.
“As expected, SLO County’s COVID-19 positivity rate is increasing as we expand testing and continue to open for business,” Borenstein said in the release.
Michele Shoresman, a spokeswoman for the health department, said the county has a low positivity rate, with about 2% of the tests conducted here proving positive for COVID-19.
Recent testing clinics in Cambria could have contributed to that community’s new case count.
Shoresman said in a June 26 phone interview that the people who got tested June 1, 2, 24 or 25 in Cambria likely included many area residents, but noted that people from other areas could have been tested there, too.
Likewise, Cambrians can and have been tested in other locations.
SLO County public health officer talks cases, masks
In a Q&A interview with The Tribune, Borenstein said that, “for me, more meaningful than the number of cases is the number of people in the hospital, the number of people in critical care and ultimately the number of fatalities.”
“What we look for in contact tracing is close contact,” she told the Tribune. “That, by definition, is someone who has had a minimum of 15 minutes of exposure within 6-foot distancing.”
About leisure travel, Borenstein said, “I think the narrative has turned somewhat toward if you are not going to comply with that directive, please do it in these ways: Stay closer to home, don’t travel in large groups, use all of the mitigating measures like physical distancing, avoiding crowds, using face coverings, do not travel when you’re sick. ...
“I think there’s sort of a tacit acknowledgment that though it is still part of the state directive that only essential travel should be engaged in, that if individuals choose to go against that they additionally be asked to do all the right things in their travel patterns.”
And about masks? “Mask wearing has, unfortunately, become the symbol of what side are you on,” Borenstein said. “I wish it weren’t so. It makes no sense to me that there are political positions related to a piece of cloth over your face.”
She thinks that “it is critically important that we be as undivided as we can be during a period that is anxiety provoking, fear provoking, with widespread opinions on how we should be addressing the issues before us.”
“At the end of the day, why it is so challenging is there are simply no good answers, and so we need to all just keep doing our best,” Borenstein said.
Borenstein would rather have both sides understand that wearing a mask “is an important tool in the tool box for mitigating disease spread. It is not the be-all-and-end-all.”
While people shouldn’t panic when someone walking by isn’t wearing a mask, she said, “there is a whole other swath of our society who thinks it’s a weakness or it is not necessary or it is a political statement, and that is equally untrue.
“It is a medical countermeasure to an awful disease, and it should be part of how we should be moving as a community to do all the things we want to do in life — to be out and about, to have socialization, to have entertainment, to have financial stability.
“But we can’t have perfection. There are many people who can’t wear a mask by virtue of age or medical condition or mental health or even panic disorders. … What we want to do is have as many people as possible use face coverings in as many settings where they are potentially putting others at risk, as often as possible and for as long a period of time as possible.”
Borenstein said she supports businesses that require mask wearing. “It is the law of the land.”
For the county’s most recent case counts, details of which communities have the most confirmed cases and information about availability of testing, go to www.sanluisobispo.com or www.ReadySLO.org.
