On Feb. 20, less than one month after California reported its very first case of COVID-19, an individual tested positive for the infection in Humboldt County. The favorable case was the ninth in the state and first for any rural county in the nation. Since that time, county personnel and other regional agencies have teamed up to protect and serve the people of Humboldt in ways that have actually served as a design for other counties around the region and state.
The county is responsible for costs to respond to COVID-19 in both unincorporated locations and cities. Those expenditures go beyond $4.3 million, which includes costs of more than 200 personnel who have been assigned to Public Health and the Emergency Situation Operations Center (EOC). Humboldt County Health Officer Dr. Teresa Frankovich stated, “The Constable and I, along with Public Health Director Michele Stephens, have actually directed this response, and we have actually asked personnel to do the job and done quickly. They have actually stepped up to the plate and worked relentlessly to make that happen. I continue to be enormously impressed by and deeply appreciative of their commitment to this effort and to their neighborhood and their enormous achievements to date.”
As an outcome of these efforts, Humboldt’s rate of case development has remained well below state and national averages, and specific sectors of the economy have been cleared to reopen where in other parts of the state they have not. Humboldt was the very first California county to establish a state-run testing site, and more than 13,000 tests have been administered. Joint Info Center (JIC) staff members at the EOC have actually diverted more than 11,000 non-emergency calls from 9-1-1 and other dispatch systems to protect the emergency situation response infrastructure while providing prompt details to an anxious public and to assist them navigate altering guidelines and policies connected to the virus.
” This is a pandemic with a novel virus. We are actually learning about this virus at the exact same time we are constructing an action to it,” Dr. Frankovich stated. “In Humboldt County, this infection arrived at our doorstep in February. We are a small county with a little health department and lab, but we collected every resource we might muster to build the infrastructure needed to secure the lives of our good friends and neighbors.”
” Because of how rapidly and massively things had unfolded in Wuhan China, we had no concept as a county, state or country, how quickly this would spread out here and what it would look like in a country with our resources. We constructed facilities as if the lives of our families and friends relied on it, since we believe that they do,” Dr. Frankovich stated.
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