Santa Cruz County vs. COVID-19

California has less than half as many known cases of COVID-19, as a percentage of the population, than the rest of the United States, and around one-fourth as many deaths from the virus. In Santa Cruz County, the numbers are even lower, with just 115 known cases and two deaths from coronavirus, out of a population of about 275,000, as of April 24. The county’s rate of 7.3 deaths per million people is lower than any state in America, in fact.

Here are some of the things officials in Santa Cruz County have done to keep the rate of COVID-19 so low.

1. Issued an early shelter-in-place order

As did their colleagues in neighboring Santa Clara County and five other Bay Area counties, public health officials in Santa Cruz County issued a shelter-in-place order on March 16, three days before Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a stay-at-home order for the entire state. (By contrast, President Donald Trump has yet to issue a national shelter-in-place or stay-at-home order, though he declared a national emergency on March 13.)

Through taking early action, when there were only 11 known cases of coronavirus in Santa Cruz County, officials helped prevent the kind of exponential spread of the respiratory illness that’s gone on in other parts of the country, and helped prevent local hospital systems from becoming overrun.

2. Assembled a response team that took early action

According to the Health Service Agency website, this team consists of Santa Cruz County Health Officer Dr. Gail Newel, agency director Mimi Hall, and EMS Medical Director Dr. David Ghilarducci.

Even before the shelter-in-place order, Newel “declared a local health emergency on March 4, before there were any confirmed cases locally, and the county activated its emergency operations center to bolster response efforts,” according to a March 10 report in Good Times. Hall explained that the goal was to slow COVID-19’s trajectory in Santa Cruz County.

“We know that the disease needs people to spread,” Hall told  Good Times reporter Alisha Green. “So if we lessen the amount of time that people spend amongst each other and the number of people together at one time, what we can do is slow the disease curve in our community.”

Santa Cruz County officials revised their original shelter-in-place order on March 31 and extended it to May 3, as did other Bay Area counties. Since then, local officials have taken a cautious approach, with the county opting to reopen its wharf, beaches, parks, and open spaces on April 16, though social distancing requirements remained in place.

“This is going to be a slow, long process,” Newel said in a KTVU report. “And restrictions are going to need to be lifted very carefully and very slowly, a little bit at a time.”

As part of the ongoing caution, Santa Cruz County officials introduced an order April 23 related to having masks worn in public, according to KSBW.

For more information, visit the Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency’s web portal devoted to COVID-19.