8 California counties are latest coronavirus hotspots

As coronavirus cases spike in California’s vast Central Valley, the state will send strike teams and tens of millions of dollars to eight counties to speed up testing, help infected people quarantine and assist overwhelmed health care workers, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday, July 27.

The state is aiming for every infected person to transmit the virus to fewer than one other person, but in several Central Valley counties the spread is happening more often, said Dr. Mark Ghaly, head of the California Health and Human Services Agency.

“We have a great deal of work to do to get transmission rates down here in the Central Valley,” Ghaly said.

Ghaly and the governor spoke at an almond company in Stockton, a city that’s driving the increase in cases in San Joaquin County. The eight counties targeted by state officials are Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Merced, San Joaquin, Tulare and Stanislaus counties. All have test positivity rates between roughly 11% and 18%, which is above the state’s goal of 8%.

In Kern County, cases increased by more than 161% over a two-week period, the highest of any of the eight counties, according to state data.

The focus on the Central Valley comes after months of attention largely on Los Angeles, home to a quarter of the state’s population and a coronavirus hot spot, and the San Francisco Bay Area, which implemented some of the nation’s strictest shut down measures. In the early weeks of the pandemic, rural California wasn’t hit as hard as more urban areas.

The Monday announcement came days after Newsom pledged to do more to help California’s Latinos, who are the majority of workers in many essential jobs in the heavily agricultural Central Valley.

Newsom said the state will send three regional “strike teams” into the Central Valley, modeled after an approach to rising infections in Imperial County earlier this year. The teams of state workers will assist local public health, community and medical organizations to improve testing, contact tracing, public education and hospital surge planning.

Specifically, the teams will assess outbreaks in factories, nursing homes, high-density housing and agricultural settings.

The $52 million is part of a half-billion dollar federal investment to help the state tackle the virus. A total of about $286 million will go to local governments.