Anticipating a surge in demand following a busy Thanksgiving holiday week, Sonoma County is expanding coronavirus testing, adding a third state-sponsored site in Petaluma as well as a third drive-thru lane at the test location at Sonoma County Fairgrounds.

With the expansion, the county expects to soon nearly double its daily testing capacity at the three public test locations to 1,155 virus tests.

Sonoma County Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase said Monday there was “a huge uptick in testing” even before the holiday, as families and friends planned to get together.

“OptumServe has been completely full, the Windsor location as well as the Santa Rosa fairgrounds location,” she said of the free testing sites provided by the state. “Now we could expect probably to see even more people who want to get a test, because they may have traveled.”

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SACRAMENTO — California is imposing an overnight curfew for nearly all residents as the most populous state tries to head off a surge of coronavirus cases that threatens to overwhelm its health care system, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday.

What officials are calling a limited stay-at-home order requires people who are not on essential errands to stay home from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. starting Saturday. The order will last until Dec. 21 but could be extended if disease trends don’t improve.

The curfew covers 94% of the state’s nearly 40 million residents, including Sonoma County. It’s in place in 41 of the state’s 58 counties that have the most significant increases in virus cases and face the most severe restrictions under California’s four-tier system for reopening the economy.

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SANTA ROSA, Calif. (KGO) — As California continues to reopen its economy, state officials are now implementing ‘the equity metric’ in order to bring down COVID-19 rates in disadvantaged communities, hardest hit by the pandemic.

Sonoma County is the only Bay Area County still in the most restrictive purple tier, and on Tuesday, the county failed the equity metric.

County and community leaders are strategizing about how to help the Latino community, and in turn all of Sonoma County, decrease COVID cases.

KBBF radio in Santa Rosa is on the frontline of the fight. The station, 89.1FM, was the first public bilingual radio station in the country at its founding in 1973. KBBF is volunteer and donation-based, and yet it’s responsible for giving critical information to Sonoma County’s Latino community, which accounts for 54% of the county’s COVID cases.

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The number of Sonoma County residents afflicted with the coronavirus who need hospital care has fallen to the lowest level since early July, the result of an overall infection decline and fewer new cases among vulnerable residents of area senior care homes, local health officials said Monday.

County Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase said during a press briefing the number of fresh virus infections countywide has been declining for more than a week, and that downward trend is leading to fewer hospitalizations.

The county’s elderly nursing home residents have comprised at least 80% of the 114 individuals who have died in six months from the pandemic disease, and now infection-control improvement at senior care sites is helping to curtail virus-related hospitalizations.

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California’s workplace safety agency announced a $32,000 fine against the Santa Rosa Police Department on Tuesday, citing the department’s failure to safeguard its employees from the coronavirus, which afflicted at least nine Santa Rosa officers in the earliest weeks of the pandemic and killed a veteran detective.

Marylou Armer, who died March 31 from the respiratory disease, was exposed at work to a colleague who had known symptoms of COVID-19, Cal/OSHA disclosed for the first time Tuesday.

Armer, 43, was the first known California peace officer to have died from complications of the disease, and her loss marked a heart-wrenching and anxious period for Santa Rosa police, as the department faced a widening outbreak within its sworn ranks through at least mid-April.

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Sonoma County’s public health officer Dr. Sundari Mase claims there are Coronavirus outbreaks at 13 Sonoma County preschools and home-based child care centers that have infected 62 people.

The Press Democrat reports “The infections involve 25 children, mostly age 6 and younger, 27 of their family members and 10 workers at the preschools. None of the individuals diagnosed with the highly contagious infectious disease have needed to be hospitalized, county Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase said.”

Sonoma County population is 493,334. There have been 114 deaths attributable to Coronavirus in Sonoma County.

Sonoma County has conducted 160,418 coronavirus tests, with only 6,998 positives. That means of the 160,418 Sonoma County residents tested, 153,420 tested negative.

Of the 67 available ICU beds in the county, 15 are being used.

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