On Monday, Santa Barbara County announced 20 new cases of COVID-19 from over the last three days, none of which came from the federal prison complex in Lompoc.
The new cases now bring the county’s total to 1,669.
Of the total cases, 29 people are recovering in a hospital, with nine in the Intensive Care Unit, while 88 are recovering at home.
To date, there have been 1,523 cases of recovery in the community total.
“That’s about 91% fully recovered, and that is indeed noteworthy,” said Dr. Van Do Reynoso, director of the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department.
There remains 12 deaths in the county, with three of those in Santa Maria and two at the federal prison complex in Lompoc.
The SBPHD encouraged the public to continue to seek out testing, and announced that the state’s testing facility in Lompoc will be transferred to the city of Solvang.
The testing facility will be housed in the Veterans Memorial Hall and will open Friday.
The move comes after state officials told Santa Barbara County that they would move the testing site to another county because the Lompoc facility did not have enough community members utilizing the facility.
“We looked at mid-county localities and Solvang was a community that had challenges in getting to Lompoc, so we partnered up with the city of Solvang and we’ll be there for at least two weeks,” said Dr. Do Reynoso.
As Santa Barbara County continues to reopen under stage two of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “roadmap to recovery”, the health department is launching a “reopening dashboard” today to help the community visualize where the county stands with regards to Gov. Newsom’s reopening criteria.
“One of our goals in creating this dashboard is to ensure that every community member has current information as we move through stage two and ultimately stage four,” said Dr. Do Reynoso.
The dashboard will provide data including:
- A week to week comparison of cases
- Hospitalization and testing metrics
- Testing capacity metrics
- PPE for essential workers
- Containment capacity metrics
- Vulnerable population metrics
“The dashboard was created so that we as a community can share responsibility to monitor the spread of COVID-19 in Santa Barbara County. We each need to do our part in following the reopening guidance from the state, including maintaining our social distancing, wearing face coverings, and practicing good hygiene.”
The dashboard will have updates on daily new cases as well as state required data on trends over the last three, seven, and 14 days.
“We will be able to see the spikes and be able to offer suggestions of why that happened,” said Dr. Do Reynoso.
The new dashboard comes just in time to give Santa Barbara County a clearer picture of how exactly the recent opening of restaurants and retail will impact the COVID-19 situation in the region.
More than 16,000 businesses have self-certified for reopening through the county’s website, according to Santa Barbara Board Chairman Gregg Hart.
“There’s more work to be done to ensure that all businesses are opening safely, but business owners are uniformly very receptive to the many resources to improve safety and customer confidence. Please consider visiting a local restaurant or retail store to show support for local businesses that are trying hard to succeed,” said Mr. Hart.
Finally, Cottage Health issued an update to its numbers from over the weekend and Monday, revealing that it is caring for a total of 229 patients across all campuses.
- 185 are acute care patients; 188 acute care beds remain available.
- In surge planning, capacity is identified for adding 270 acute care beds.
- Of the 185 acute care patients, 12 patients are on ventilators.
65 ventilators remain available (adult, pediatric and neonatal ventilators). - Of the 185 acute care patients, 8 are in isolation with COVID-19 symptoms;
5 are confirmed COVID-19 positive. - Of 8 patients in isolation, 4 patients are in critical care.
email: cwhittle@newspress.com
