Today, as in most days since the onset of the pandemic, Dr. Teresa Frankovich took questions from local media. Frankovich recently announced her resignation, but will continue to serve until a replacement is found.

Video of today’s media availability above. Rough machine transcription below.

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Good afternoon, we’re here with Humboldt County Health Officer Dr. Teresa Frankovich for the September 4th Media Availability. Thank you for being with us. Thank you. Would you like to start by addressing the community?

Sure. I did just want to mention the holiday is upon us, Labor Day weekend, and I know that that’s, especially in a beautiful area like Humboldt, it’s traditionally a big outdoor and a gathering time. I just want to emphasize to people that we’re in a relatively good place right now and the reason for that is that most of us have been doing a really good job at trying to you know not gather, trying to distance and use facial coverings and all of that, and it’s never more important than when we’re having a lot more activity going on.

So you know, the success for all of us going forward is contingent on all of us still doing our part so i just like to ask people to be sensible and ideally if you’re going out to the beaches, if you’re going to do something, do so with your household unit. If you are going to be with people who are not part of your household, the smaller the group, and I’m talking like four people, six people, not 20 not 30. The smaller the group outdoors, using facial coverings and distancing is the safest way to do it for all of us. So and that being said I hope everyone has a safe holiday.

The North Coast Journal asks, “Regarding the new testing partnership announced this morning, how quickly do you anticipate the new project will be able to turn around samples and report results?”

Well it’s the really exciting thing about having this locally, because we don’t have to ship specimens out of the area, which generally adds at least another day on to the testing turnaround time. So we’re anticipating a turnaround similar to our Humboldt County Public Health Lab of 24 to 72 hours really. So I think it is a high throughput machine that will, with good organization and operation, should be able to do that for our community. So it will work equally well for people who are symptomatic and people who are not and we’re really looking forward to that.

The North Coast Journal asks, “Once the new project is up and running how do you expect Public Health and local providers to triage samples between labs and determine where to send them?”

Well it’s a really good question and you know we are still working out the details on some of that. My sense is that providers will likely either have the option of referring their patients to be tested, because we will be setting up collection sites that are operational throughout the county and also there may be an electronic opportunity for them to actually put in the order on their end at least in some offices and for that order to be seen at the other end and the specimen to be able to be routed that way. So we’ll provide more details as we get closer and see what works.

Also, I just want to point out that you know when we start this, you know we’re going to start with the the basic underpinnings in place and the process will evolve over time as we see what meets the need. I think the most important aspect is that we have excellent capacity with excellent turnaround time so that we can manage cases because the real underpinning of our response and in addition to the community participation and helping, the real underpinning of our success is the fact that we’re able to both test symptomatic people and beyond with what we have currently in place and that our contact tracing team is doing amazing work at reaching out to individuals, identifying cases quickly, getting people isolated and quarantined so we prevent as much spread as possible. 

The Times-Standard asks, “California Governor Gavin Newsom this last week signed into law a ban on flavored tobacco products, including flavored e-cigarettes and candy vapes. What is the science behind smoking as a comorbidity in COVID-19 cases especially among young people a target demographic for those tobacco industry products?”

Well first I’d like to say, I’d like to congratulate Governor Newsom. I think that’s an excellent public health move. We certainly know that children in particular, because of their developing brain and chemistry involved, are become addicted more easily if they begin using nicotine products early in life and it is, the more we can delay that permanently would be great, the more helpful it is to prevent addiction and so obviously these products that tend to really entice younger people in particular, it’s important to have a ban on those to prevent the introduction of that product into their lives.

In terms of COVID, what I would say is there just isn’t a lot of really good data yet about smoking of any type and COVID. It certainly appears that if you are hospitalized with COVID the that it is more likely that you will have more severe disease, there’s more risk of death likely if you are a smoker related to this, but there’s not a lot of you know, really case-controlled studies even on that yet or on are you more likely to become infected and if so are you more likely to be hospitalized?

So there’s a lot we need to learn and when you look at the young population who are less likely to get hospitalized overall the data is even more scarce. So I think it is intuitive that we know chronic lung disease can predispose to more serious COVID disease, we know that tobacco use increases risk for chronic lung disease, and so it feels like it’s not a big leap to me that smoking is going to increase your risk with COVID. But we just need to see the data as it plays out. 

The Times-Standard asks, “What percentage of individuals reached out to through contact tracing never respond? What is the process that happens if people who are potentially exposed to COVID-19 are not cooperative with contact tracers?”

It’s, you know, I guess a testament to our contact tracers and investigators that it is rare to none that we don’t reach someone, I mean we I actually checked in with my nurses recently about this and you know people were having difficulty coming up with an instance where we had not been able to reach someone that we were trying to reach. They’re pretty persistent about this and use all the tools that they have. So we are reaching the individuals that are identified, now it’s another question whether all individuals are identified by the person involved, but we are, I think the fact that we’re doing as well as we are suggests that that we’re getting most of the information needed. In terms of not cooperative with contact tracers you know again we haven’t had to push that limit. We certainly with people who are not cooperating with isolation or quarantine have been able to bring law enforcement into the picture and if we needed some assistance in finding someone I’m sure we would do that as well. But so far we’ve been very fortunate. People overall may not be thrilled about spending time on the phone with us but in general they’ve been cooperative. 

The North Coast News asks, “Many restaurants have reopened for dine-in in Humboldt. What is the guidance on business reopening?”

So for restaurants again the guidance is that they can reopen for indoor service at 50 percent capacity based on where we are in the governor’s framework. There are a whole slew of other guidance points for indoor restaurant service and those are available in the the CDPH OSHA guidance that can be found on our JIC site. So restaurants that have received our certificate have gone through that planning process, developed a plan that we approved and should be posting that at their restaurant that they have gone through that process. And so we’re hopeful that people will adhere to that and certainly if there are concerns about whether any business entity is being compliant with safety measures, then we encourage people to contact the Joint Information Center so that we can follow up on it. 

The North Coast News asks, “With Labor Day weekend here, many areas of California are closing beaches, etc. If Humboldt remains open how concerned are you about people gathering and will there be consequences if they do?”

Well we tend to be a bit more fortunate here in the sense that because we’re a rural area even with some tourism we tend not to be as compact on beaches as some areas of the state that are in urban areas. And so I’m again, as I mentioned at the outset, really asking people to adhere to the recommendations. If you’re outdoors we need to be six feet apart from each other. If there are instances where you cannot be for some reason it’s incredibly important that you are using facial coverings even if you’re outdoors. And I want people to be respectful of each other and take care of their fellow Humboldt residents.