Fifth COVID-19 case identified in Lake County resident
- Elizabeth Larson
- Posted On
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Test results over the weekend have confirmed a fifth Lake County resident has contracted COVID-19.
Public Health Officer Dr. Gary Pace reported on Monday afternoon in a video and a written statement about the fifth case of COVID-19 in Lake County, the illness caused by the coronavirus.
“The most recent case in Lake County is another one where the contact was made with an infected person outside of the county, so we still don’t have any signs of community transmission that we’ve been able to pick up,” he said.
Lake County’s five cases have all been confirmed over the last eight days, as Lake County News has reported.
Pace said that, to date, all of Lake County’s confirmed COVID-19 cases have been “rooted in initial contact with a known out-of-county case, with secondary infections only confirmed within households with a known positive case.”
Pace said all five patients are doing fine, are recovering at home and complying with Public Health’s directives on home isolation.
He has continued to decline to release more information about the patients, including age, gender and community of residence.
However, Pace said that, with there now being five confirmed cases in Lake County, “the public should consider every public place as a place that one could be exposed.”
As of early Monday evening, California’s cases have topped 24,000, with more than 700 deaths, according to information provided by Public Health agencies across the state.
“We’re starting to see a little bit of a rise in our county,” Pace said, explaining that health officials were expecting “a huge explosion” of cases in the Bay Area, Sonoma County and in Lake County.
“A month or so ago, we were really starting to prepare for some really difficult times,” he said.
However, so far, that hasn’t happened, with Pace attributing that to the community observing his shelter in place order, which went into effect March 19 and has been extended to May 3. “It seems to be helping out quite a bit.”
Pace added that he believed a lot of lives have been saved by compliance with Public Health directives.
He said Bay Area nursing facilities have had increasing issues with the virus. That hasn’t been the case so far in Lake County, where none of the cases are in such facilities.
Pace said Lake County’s nursing homes are doing a great job of preparing for the virus. They’ve stopped allowing visitors, are no longer having group dining activities and staffers are all starting to wear masks while at work. He said his agency is appreciative of the work they’re doing.
He said Public Health wants the community to get better at protecting the most vulnerable.
As such, he continued to urge people to wear masks while in public, especially when they are around older people or those with underlying medical conditions.
Pace said he is not yet ordering people to wear masks, although, “That may come at a later point but we’re not doing that at this point.”
He said the goal is to have a gradual spread of the infection through the community – not to try to stop it entirely.
That, Pace said, will keep the virus at a rate the local hospitals can manage while protecting the community’s vulnerable members.
All of the measures put in place so far are meant to accomplish those goals, Pace said.
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