Dr. Charity Dean left Santa Barbara 18 months ago to serve as the assistant director at the California Department of Public Health.
Now she is on the front lines fighting COVID-19 for people throughout the state.
Dean served as the public health officer for the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department from 2014 to 2018. Today she’s leading the task force created on Saturday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“I know there’s a lot of fear out there, and there’s a lot of anxiety, but California is absolutely on the right track,” Dean told Noozhawk. “Every day there is good news. There is good progress.”
Dean is on a team that is working to develop COVID-19 testing hubs throughout the state. She is trying to create the hubs in areas where there are the most cases of COVID-19.
“We’re looking at all the different approaches of testing across the state,” Dean said. “How can we create testing hubs that have the capacity to do thousands of tests a day?”
Dean sits on the task force with Blue Shield CEO Paul Markovich and others, and is looking to create 5-7 to hubs that do more than 2,000 tests a day.
The hubs would allow specimens to get routed to the right place and deliver a faster turnaround time.
California has about 17,620 confirmed COVID-19 tests, about 450 deaths, and thousands of people awaiting test results because of a lack of capacity to process the tests. Two people have died in Santa Barbara County.
Health officials have prioritized tests so far to the elderly, people with compromised immune systems, healthcare workers and first responders, but the goal is to expand testing so that officials can get a sense of the true number of people with the virus and address their medical needs.
“Our strategy is by ramping up testing, we can expand the quality of testing,” Dean said.
California has thousands of backlogged tests, which has created concern and fear among patients who want to know their health status.
“Supply chain shortages have impacted the entire state, and we’re working hard to create solutions,” Dean said. “Many of the drive-through testing sites use commercial labs, so the turnaround time has varied as those labs are also impacted by high demand.”
Dean said there are 22 public health systems around the state conducting tests, but they were not initially designed to produce such a high number of tests with a need for a rapid turnaround time. Private labs are also conducting tests throughout the state.
Some communities are doing drive-thru testing. Various entities are scrambling to increase testing, and the state is looking to streamline the process and expand the capacity.
“The way it is happening right now, is that some hospitals have their own lab testing equipment and some don’t,” Dean said.
The task force is gathering data to also send supplies, such as nasal swabs, to the right part of the state to increase testing capacity.
The task force is trying to coordinate all of these resources to increase efficiency at the sites and support the labs that are doing the testing.
“What is happening is unprecedented in the state of California,” Dean said.
Many of the academic and university labs have a high testing capacity. Dean noted that Stanford University has developed a test that would identify people who have developed antibodies to the virus.
Dean said California is at the forefront of fighting the virus.
“Being in California right is now is pretty remarkable,” Dean said. “From day one in January, our government was tracking the virus and was assembling teams. The actions that California is taking came at the right time and led the nation.
“We are tackling the hard problems We are looking to find the hard solutions. We are leveraging every source we can to flatten the curve.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
