Counties strive to protect their most vulnerable residents
Vulnerable populations like farmworkers and people in care facilities still need help keeping COVID-19 out of their communities.
Care facility residents and farmworkers are vulnerable in different ways. While farmworkers are more likely to be younger and healthier, they are also less likely to speak English, which means many of the educational materials about the disease are inaccessible to them. Care facility residents, on the other hand, are likely to be older and more medically fragile, which means they’re more likely to have severe consequences as a result of getting sick. One thing they have in common is some degree of communal living, which can allow the virus to spread rapidly in a nursing home or a farmworker housing complex.
To address these issues, county governments developed ways to monitor and reach vulnerable communities.
The Ventura County Farmworker Resource Program has been working for months to help reach farms and farmworkers, including a partnership with Backpack Medicine, a nonprofit dedicated to helping homeless people access medical care. The partnership with Backpack Medicine has ended, but that’s because the Farmworker Resource Program is creating its own program in association with the Ventura County Medical Center.
The new program, Valuing and Cultivating Healthcare in the Ag Industry, is doing what the partnership with Backpack Medicine did: sending doctors into the fields to speak with farmworkers. During the visits, doctors teach farmworkers about COVID-19 and how they can avoid spreading the disease. Doctors also discuss common COVID-19 myths with the farmworkers, like the idea that the disease is just a nasty variant of the regular flu.
In order to meet farmworkers directly in the fields, the program works with the county Agricultural Commissioner’s Office. The Agricultural Commissioner’s Office connects the Farmworker Resource Program with the larger farms in the area, helping the program reach thousands of people at once.
“The county is really making sure at this point that we have a very solid outreach,” said Talia Barrera, the administrative manager of the Ventura County Farmworker Resource Program.
What the county learns from working with people in the field, it passes on to others. Every week, about 40 people from Monterey, Santa Cruz and Ventura counties get on a call and discuss what they’re doing and what they’ve learned, including tips on more effective outreach, contact tracing and how to connect resources.
Santa Barbara County is reporting the number of positive cases in each extended, skilled nursing and transitional care facility in the region and breaks down the numbers by who is sick—the health care worker or the resident—and if people have died, how many.
At some facilities, outbreaks have been limited to health care workers, including Alto Lucero Transitional Care, Samarkand Skilled Nursing Facility, Santa Maria Post Acute and Villa Maria Post Acute. At others, like the Buena Vista Care Center, Lompoc Comprehensive Care Center and Valle Verde Health Facility, there have been at least 11 health care workers and 11 residents sickened, and multiple residents have died at both Country Oaks Care Center and Marian Extended Care.
The county is investigating all but three of the care centers. Two not currently under investigation are Country Oaks, where an outbreak has been contained, and Santa Maria Post Acute. Both of those organizations were cleared earlier in the month.
One organization, Mission Terrace Santa Barbara, has been successful at keeping COVID-19 out of its facility so far. Neither health care workers or residents have gotten sick, and because of that the county didn’t open an investigation into the facility.
San Luis Obispo County is also investigating its care centers, where four of the county’s seven deaths have occurred. According to public health department spokeswoman Michelle Shoresman, the county has had 12 outbreaks at congregate care facilities. To date, six of those outbreaks have been resolved and six are still under investigation.
“Testing, isolating and monitoring all staff and residents in these facilities until the outbreak ‘clears’ can be challenging,” said Shoresman, in an emailed statement. “However, all our local care facilities have been extremely cooperative and have done their best to contain outbreaks as quickly as possible.”
— Contact Amber Hair at [email protected]
