COVID-19 is hammering the Central Valley. Can Newsom’s ‘strike team’ make a difference?

Can $52 million a few dozen experts help California’s Central Valley gain control over the COVID-19 pandemic?

As the Valley’s surging infection rate has drawn national attention, Gov. Gavin Newsom is dispatching three of his coronavirus “strike teams” to the region to help local officials track COVID clusters, inspect workplaces, quarantine the sick and ramp up testing.

Each team, consisting of about a dozen experts on health, housing, public outreach, agriculture and other fields, will try to contain an alarming spread through the region. Much of their work will focus on the San Joaquin Valley, where agricultural fields and crowded food-processing plants have become fertile ground for the virus.

“If you asked me today what our biggest area of concern in a state as large as ours, it is indeed the Central Valley,” Newsom said recently in announcing the deployment. “We need to do more for our agricultural and farmworkers.”

Besides personnel, the state is earmarking $52 million in federal money to improve testing and contact tracing in the Valley. It’s also spending $6 million in private donations to buy food and other basics for low-income Valley residents whose livelihoods have been threatened by the pandemic.

Newsom’s self-proclaimed “laser-like focus” on the Valley comes as the region has drawn scrutiny from federal officials. Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump administration’s coronavirus response chief, last week cited the Valley as one of the nation’s most worrisome hot spots.

But can the strike teams really contain the virus’ spread? One infectious-disease expert says the additional boots on the ground will surely help – but ultimately it’s up to Valley residents to take the necessary precautions.

“The commandos themselves don’t really fight the virus,” said Andrew Noymer, an expert on population health and disease prevention at UC Irvine. What’s needed is “action on the part of everyone to mask, and physically distant,” he said.

Fighting COVID-19 in the Valley could be a tall order. Many farm workers live in crowded, dorm-like buildings. Packing plants have emerged as coronavirus clusters in parts of rural California. Many of the people most at risk do not speak English and are traditionally hard for government to reach.

Infection rates have spiked compared with the rest of California. Fresno County is experiencing 435 cases for every 100,000 residents; in Tulare it’s 472 and in Merced it’s 564. The statewide average: 269.

Newsom’s strike teams first sent to Imperial

To a certain extent, the notion of coronavirus strike teams dovetails with Newsom’s fondness for instant action to meet any problem.

The governor created strike teams to fan out across California and inspect businesses over the busy July 4 weekend. He formed a strike team of tech experts in late July to wrestle with the backlog of furloughed workers who’ve overwhelmed the Employment Development Department.

Imperial County’s “positivity rate” – that is, the percentage of tests that come back positive – surged past 20% in July.

And in Imperial County, one of the poorest counties in California and the hardest-hit area in the early months of the pandemic, Newsom has dispatched multiple squads, including an ambulance strike team, a National Guard contingent and a California Medical Assistance Team – a collection of medical professionals from the state Medical Emergency Services Authority.

“This response model is much greater than any one strike team,” said Christopher Herring, manager of the county’s Emergency Medical Services Agency, in an emailed statement.

The need was urgent. Imperial, which borders Mexico and Arizona, was struggling with horrific infection and mortality rates; at one point in May the rural county’s two hospitals stopped admitting COVID-19 patients. The county’s “positivity rate” – that is, the percentage of tests that come back positive – surged past 20% in July.

Even after Newsom called on Imperial to dial back the reopening of its economy, businesses were resistant, said Luis Flores of the Imperial Valley Equity and Justice Coalition, an advocacy group.

In the past few weeks, however, businesses have become a lot more compliant, Flores said. The county’s contingent of contact tracers has mushroomed, he said. Imperial’s positivity rate, while still about twice the statewide average, has fallen to 11%. The state helped reroute some of Imperial’s burgeoning patient loads to less-crowded hospitals in other counties.

Flores gives the state much of the credit.

“We had the sense that the state had to do this,” he said. “The state pushed the county.”

Yet some experts believe the state could have done more. Luis Olmedo, head of an advocacy group called Comite Civite del Valle, said the state task forces communicated mainly with county officials and skipped nonprofit groups like his that have the ability to reach out to Latino communities.

As Newsom sends strike teams to the Central Valley, another area with a large Latino population, Olmedo offers this advice: “Bring in the community organizations, the nonprofits …. They know where the gaps in service are. Do a truly bottom-up approach.”

Can teams make a difference in the Valley?

The limitations of a state strike team have already occurred to Hernan Hernandez, executive director of the California Farmworker Foundation, an organization based in Kern County.

Hernandez was among a group of Valley officials who met in Fresno last week with a “scoping team” sent by Newsom’s administration – a sort of advance team gathering information on the weakest links in the Valley’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The meeting left Hernandez wondering whether the strike teams will be able to get to the bottom of the Valley’s COVID-19 problems. A big hurdle, he said in an interview, is that many farmworkers don’t trust government and have little experience dealing with bureaucracies.

Like Olmeda in Imperial, he’s convinced that in order to be successful in agricultural communities, the state strike teams will have to go beyond local government contacts and make better use of community-based organizations.

Others are more optimistic about the strike teams’ arrival.

Sara Bosse, Madera County’s public health director, said a state-county collaboration can tackle seemingly arcane issues that can have enormous repercussions.

Example: When meeting with the scoping team last week, Bosse noted that although restaurants in Madera County are allowed to serve meals outdoors, one of the main streets in Madera is technically a state highway – and the state doesn’t allow outdoor dining.

“To do outdoor dining, you need CHP approval,” she said. “Small things seem like they should be easy, but are complicated.”

Easing coronavirus pressure on Valley hospitals

Even before the strike teams arrived, the state has been working with Valley officials to ease pressures on the region’s health care establishment.

For example, Newsom’s administration worked with the federal government to deploy nearly 200 doctors and nurses from Travis Air Force Base and other federal facilities to improve staffing levels at hospitals in San Joaquin County.

“The Department of Defense teams allowed Lodi Memorial and Dameron Hospital to expand the ICU and enhance patient treatment,” said Dan Burch, the county’s emergency medical services administrator. “They’ve also been able to expand the number of hospital beds and medical surge.”

“We need all the help we can get.”

AssemblymEMBER Joaquin Arambula, D-Fresno

Meanwhile, the state worked with the Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission to offer temporary quarantine housing at hotels and motels for more than 1,000 farmworkers who’ve been infected with COVID-19.

The housing has served as a critical resource given that many Valley farmworkers work and live in tight quarters, which heightens the likelihood that the disease could spread widely.

The housing program, which will cost about $2 million, is expected to begin as early as next week, said Emilia Reyes, the opportunities commission’s chief executive. Her organization will work with the county to provide meals and transportation – as well as testing programs at agricultural job sites.

For Reyes, the state assistance feels personal. “My family, my father, still lives in Mendota. He has two of my brothers living with them. One has his girlfriend and baby, and my tia and tio came from Mexico to work the season,” she said.

“And we had a scare too. We had a family member that was exposed to COVID-19. And to get all of them tested and quarantined was a challenge within itself.”

Should Newsom have acted sooner?

State Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula, D-Fresno, applauded Newsom for sending the strike teams to the Valley. “We need all the help we can get,” the assemblyman said.

But some Valley Republicans say they’ve been pleading with Newsom for help since as early as March, when the pandemic first struck.

“Dude, we asked for resources, for people to be embedded early on,” said Assemblyman Devon Mathis, R-Visalia. “Here we are months later and our people are hurting.”

Mathis’ criticism echoes the long-standing Valley complaint that politicians from California’s coast treat the region like an afterthought. Newsom is a former mayor of San Francisco.

Newsom has pushed back on those complaints, saying he’s made a point of reaching out to the Valley. Still, the pandemic has created points of friction between Newsom and some Valley communities, as when leaders of Atwater in Merced County and Coalinga in Fresno County refused to follow the governor’s directives on shuttering portions of the economy.

In late July Newsom’s administration said it was cutting off hundreds of thousands of dollars in emergency coronavirus funding to those two cities as punishment for their defiance.

The Sacramento Bee Capitol Bureau’s Kim Bojórquez contributed to this story.

This article is part of the California Divide project, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequality and economic survival in California.