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As San Diego County issues new rules for wearing face coverings in public, officials are purchasing another 41,000 bandanas to distribute to homeless and vulnerable people in need of protection.
The county’s most recent public health order, which goes into effect Friday night, requires workers at convenience stores, pharmacies, grocery stores and gas stations to wear cloth face coverings to prevent them from spreading the novel coronavirus to customers or each other. All other residents are strongly encouraged to wear face coverings when in public but are not required to do so.
Why this matters
Roughly 900,000 people have contracted the novel coronavirus around the world, including 200,000 in the U.S. and 1,000 in San Diego.
As the virus continues to spread, shortages of protective masks can lead to an increased risk of transmission and endanger healthcare workers.
As evidence grows that high numbers of asymptomatic people with COVID-19 can transmit the virus to others, federal officials have considered changing its guidelines to advise all U.S. citizens to wear face coverings in public, but haven’t yet. On Tuesday, Riverside County health officials recommended residents wear face coverings such as bandanas or other fabric masks in public settings. The state issued similar guidelines Wednesday, and now San Diego County is doing the same.
Director of Medical Operations Rob Sills said the county is actively purchasing cloth coverings such as bandanas. They are being distributed to homeless people staying at the San Diego Convention Center and vulnerable individuals the county has placed in isolated hotel rooms so they don’t contract or transmit the highly contagious virus.
The bandanas are for people who “may not be able to go and purchase these on their own or get them on their own, so that we can give them to non-healthcare workers,” Sills said at a Thursday news conference. “We’re saving our surgical masks and our supply of N95 (respirator masks) for healthcare workers.”
The county emphasized that medical-grade masks should be conserved for healthcare workers, and residents should wear cloth coverings instead, such as scarves or bandanas.
The new bulk order of bandanas adds to the 90,000 the county bought last week from the same Mission Valley supplier, the family-owned screen printing company Planet Apparel. The county and Planet Apparel haven’t settled on a price for the new order, but last time the county paid $97,000.
The new order should be finalized within a day and delivered next week, Planet Apparel co-owner Holly Treviño said midday on Thursday. The county is planning to buy the bandanas in “tubular” form, she added, a version of bandanas that can rest on the chest like a necklace and be pulled up over the face and mouth when needed.
Treviño and her sister, Heather, said that by wearing bandanas on top of masks, they can help increase the lifespan of the masks and conserve the dwindling stockpiles of medical gear at healthcare facilities. The face coverings can also be worn by people who don’t need medical-grade protection.
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About this report
As the coronavirus spreads across the U.S. and in San Diego County, so does uncertainty. To provide you with accurate in-depth reporting on the pandemic, KPBS and inewsource are collaborating in their news coverage.
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“I think that not purchasing or not trying to find masks is essential right now to make sure that our healthcare personnel is taken care of first,” Holly Treviño said.
“Tubular bandanas are a way to protect yourself without using masks,” she added.
After the county’s new face covering rule was announced Thursday, Jersey Mike’s contacted Planet Apparel to get bandanas for all their local sandwich shops, Heather Treviño said, adding that people looking to order bandanas before Friday at 11 a.m. can pick them up Saturday morning at the company’s Mission Valley location.
The 12-year-old business is receiving more bandana orders every day from around the country, Treviño said. The San Diego business has been fielding calls from New York, Georgia, Washington, Florida, North Carolina and Texas. The flood of bandana purchases has provided a lifeline for the local company, which is financially stable even as California unemployment claims reach close to one million.
“We’re just really happy to have a product that is needed at this time,” Treviño said.
County public health officer Wilma Wooten said even with the new rule about face coverings, citizens should still practice social distancing and follow the other guidelines the county has put in place. Because there is little evidence about the effectiveness of cloth coverings to prevent the spread of COVID-19, she added, people should continue to avoid touching their faces and wash their hands regularly.
As of Thursday, San Diego County has seen 966 COVID-19 cases and 16 deaths.
Officials are not providing their reserve of bandanas to healthcare facilities, and are instead focusing on getting medical staff more N95 respirators and surgical masks. Hospitals and clinics have repeatedly told inewsource about dwindling stockpiles and restrictions on the use of protective gear to conserve supply.
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[/box]The county has distributed more than half a million highly protective N95 respirator masks to healthcare providers, county Supervisor Nathan Fletcher said Thursday. It has also doled out more than 200,000 surgical masks, which are less protective than respirators but also used by medical workers treating COVID-19 patients, along with thousands of gloves, gowns, goggles and face shields.
“We continue to fight and get more from every possible place we can,” Fletcher said. “And as we get more, we do everything we can to get folks what they need, and those efforts will certainly continue.”
When asked about whether the county has enough masks at a Tuesday news conference, Sills said the county is doing its best to provide as much protective gear as quickly it can.
“Are we able to fill absolutely every request? No, we’re not,” Sills said. “But we’re doing a very judicial and thoughtful process to get the resources to our first responders, our clinicians, our healthcare workers and those that need it.”
KPBS health reporter Tarryn Mento contributed to this story.
Related:
- ‘Irresponsible’ mask restrictions endanger medical staff as COVID-19 spreads, workers say
- The struggle in San Diego to get COVID-19 safety gear for healthcare clinics
- County purchases 90,000 bandanas as fears of mask shortages escalate
- How the coronavirus might worsen California’s nurse shortage
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| All Staff Percentages are based on 15 total survey responses. The numbers include full-time and part-time staff, full-time fellows and full-time and part-time interns. | Newsroom Percentages are based on 15 completed survey responses to this question. | Business Percentages are based on 15 completed survey responses to this question. | |||
| Gender Identity | Gender Identity | Gender Identity | |||
| Women | 80% | Women | 82% | Women | 75% |
| Men | 20% | Men | 18% | Men | 25% |
| Sexual Orientation | Sexual Orientation | Sexual Orientation | |||
| Straight | 87% | Straight | 82% | Straight | 100% |
| LGBTQ-identifying | 7% | LGBTQ-identifying | 7% | ||
| Not specified | 7% | Not specified | 7% | ||
| Speak a language beyond English at home | 33% | Speak a language beyond English at home | 18% | Speak a language beyond English at home | 75% |
| Race/Ethnicity | Race/Ethnicity | Race/Ethnicity | |||
| White | 67% | White | 73% | White | 50% |
| Hispanic or Latinx | 20% | Two or more races | 18% | Hispanic or Latinx | 50% |
| Two or more races | 13% | Hispanic or Latinx | 9% | ||
| Age | Age | Age | |||
| 20-29 | 40% | 20-29 | 45% | 20-29 | 25% |
| 30-39 | 47% | 30-39 | 45% | 30-39 | 50% |
| 60 or older | 13% | 60 or older | 9% | 60 or older | 25% |
* The percentages in the charts have been rounded and may not add up to 100.
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Lorie Hearn is the chief executive officer, editor and founder of inewsource. She founded inewsource in the summer of 2009, following a successful reporting and editing career in newspapers. She retired from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she had been a reporter, Metro Editor and finally the senior editor for Metro and Watchdog Journalism. In addition to department oversight, Hearn personally managed a four-person watchdog team, composed of two data specialists and two investigative reporters. Hearn was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University in 1994-95. She focused on juvenile justice and drug control policy, a natural course to follow her years as a courts and legal affairs reporter at the San Diego Union and then the Union-Tribune.
Hearn became Metro Editor in 1999 and oversaw regional and city news coverage, which included the city of San Diego’s financial debacle and near bankruptcy. Reporters and editors on Metro during her tenure were part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham and led to his imprisonment.
Hearn began her journalism career as a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, a small daily outside of Philadelphia, shortly after graduating from the University of Delaware. During the decades following, she moved through countless beats at five newspapers on both coasts.
High-profile coverage included the historic state Supreme Court election in 1986, when three sitting justices were ousted from the bench, and the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. That gas chamber execution was the first time the death penalty was carried out in California in 25 years.
In her nine years as Metro Editor at the Union-Tribune, Hearn made watchdog reporting a priority. Her reporters produced award-winning investigations covering large and small local governments. The depth and breadth of their public service work was most evident in coverage of the wildfires of 2003 and then 2007, when more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes.
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Laura Wingard is the managing editor at inewsource. She has been an editor in San Diego since 2002, working at The San Diego Union-Tribune, KPBS and now inewsource. At the Union-Tribune, she served in a variety of roles including as enterprise editor, government editor, public safety and legal affairs editor, and metro editor. She directed the newspaper’s award-winning coverage of the October 2007 wildfires and the 2010 disappearance of Poway teenager Chelsea King. She also oversaw reporting on San Diego’s pension crisis.
For two years, Wingard was news and digital editor at KPBS, overseeing a team of four multimedia reporters and two web producers. She also was the KPBS liaison with inewsource and collaborated with inewsource chief executive officer and editor Lorie Hearn on investigative work by both news organizations.
Wingard also worked at the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the city editor and as an award-winning reporter covering the environment and politics. She also was the assistant managing editor for metro at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside. She earned her bachelor’s degree at California State University, Fullerton, with a double major in communications/journalism and political science.
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His cross-platform reporting for inewsource has earned more than 50 awards since 2012, including back-to-back national medals from Investigative Reporters and Editors, two national Edward R. Murrow awards, a Meyer “Mike” Berger award from New York City’s Columbia Journalism School, the Sol Price Award for Responsible Journalism, San Diego SPJ’s First Amendment Award, and a national Emmy nomination.
In 2017, Racino was selected by the Institute for Nonprofit News as one of 10 “Emerging Leaders” in U.S. nonprofit journalism.
Racino has worked as a reporter and database analyst for News21; as a photographer, videographer and reporter for the Columbia Missourian; as a project coordinator for the National Freedom of Information Coalition and as a videographer and editor for Verizon Fios1 TV in New York. He received his master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 2012.
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