During Gov. Gavin Newsom’s regular noontime daily briefing, Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency, announced that the state will:
- Stand up an online training academy for an estimated 10,000 state workers who will be repurposed as “contact tracers,” tracking down and eliciting data from those infected with the virus about whom they may have contacted while infectious. The online academy, with county health officials’ help, will offer “a simple way for them (tracers) to gain the skills and the knowledge of how to do this new job well.”
- Create a publicly accessible online data dashboard to track the spread of the pandemic. “We will be working to ensure that we get all that contact tracing information in an easy-to-follow dashboard that tells us how many people are we contact-tracing today, how many folks have we contact-traced in the past, and where are our trends heading,” Ghaly said, “so we can continue to manage not just our workforce needs, but also understanding what our testing capacity might need to move to.”
- More generally, use “data management systems and tools” to gather and analyze data from public and private sources as well as consumer data to quantify the virus’s reach. “We know, and many of you have maybe heard, about tools that help us understand who is moving where,” Ghaly said. “When we think about the data tools that we’re going to use first, it really flows into two main areas: First, we want to look not just at testing, but leading indicators. Where are we seeing, for example, a really big surge in the number of people calling in with cold- and flu-like symptoms? Where are we seeing the (rising) number of over-the-counter medications for cold and flu?” And secondly, “How do we look to that data to inform us and identify communities that might be experiencing a surge?”
“We have a governmental group called GovOps,” the governor said. “They’ve been doing surveys of state workers to see if they’re willing to do different work and help support our tracing and tracking efforts. The good news is we believe we have the capacity to build an army of tracers beginning with a goal of 10,000 … building off the local infrastructure.”
Newsom also announced that the state is moving toward resumption of “scheduled surgeries” – not cosmetic procedures, but non-emergency therapeutic and restorative surgeries such as tumor removals and heart valve replacements. That’s at least partly due to the fact that the rising curve of hospitalizations in the state has flattened and remains within what Ghaly called “a zone of stability.”
Newsom made clear that was not prepared to answer the question on everyone’s mind: When can we stop sheltering in place and resume the lives we had led before the pandemic struck?
“There’s no light switch, and there is no date,” he said, likening the resumption to a dimmer rather than an on/off switch. “We’ll look every day at the data, at the dashboard.”
