Fallbrook man assists state with fight against coronavirus

A Fallbrookian is helping with the state of California’s efforts to increase coronavirus testing and get the outbreak under control.

Rick Greenwood, an epidemiology and environmental health sciences adjunct professor at UCLA, is a part of a new coronavirus testing task force announced by Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this month.

Greenwood, who splits his time between UCLA and his avocado farm in Fallbrook, is tasked with acting as a liaison between the state and its 29 county and city public health labs.

The task force, according to the state’s website, is a public-private working group with stakeholders across the state to boost California’s coronavirus testing capacity.

Greenwood said the task force is working to implement both rapid coronavirus testing and antibody testing, as well as drastically increase testing capacity.

“There’s two kinds of tests; there’s the PCR test that looks for the virus and then there’s the antibody test which they’re just starting to roll out now for if somebody has been previously infected and has immunity,” Greenwood said. “The governor right now is trying to get to the stage where there will be 50,000 tests a day.”

Greenwood said the task force is trying to find both additional testing locations and collection areas to supplement existing capacity.

“There’s a number of different subcomponents of the task force working on various issues,” Greenwood said, “and in particular because California is such a big state. In Northern California especially there’s a lot of rural counties, and they don’t have the infrastructure, and the project is how they can get infrastructure for testing, and then also working with the private laboratories to increase their capacity.”

One of the reasons testing got off to such a slow start in California, Greenwood said, is because of the limited capacity of the 29 public health laboratories. Eleven additional public health laboratories have closed over the years for budgetary reasons, he said, contributing to the capacity issue.

“Labs just weren’t set up to start doing mass testing, so the task force is working with suppliers and state testing,” Greenwood said.

Once enough testing is in place, health officials will be able to get a better understanding of how much the coronavirus has really spread in the population

“Obviously we’re looking at clusters, nursing homes trying to test and who needs to be quarantined, but at the same time we want to do a broader area of people if in fact the virus has been around,” Greenwood said.

The antibody test, in particular, will help state officials determine how safe it is to loosen social distancing restrictions.

“If we find that a lot of people have been infected, but didn’t have the disease (currently), but they’re immune,” Greenwood said, “that’s gonna change how we open stores and businesses. That’s called herd immunity.”

Will Fritz can be reached by email at [email protected].