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The measures have been taken to prevent transmission of COVID-19. No positive cases have so far been confirmed in Lake County although dozens of tests have been conducted.
Pace’s original order to shelter in place was issued on Wednesday and went into effect on Thursday.
On Sunday, he issued Addendum No. 1 to the Order of the Health Officer No. C20-3, which kept all previous Health Officer Orders in place, but in section 5, parts A to J, ordered a set of listed facilities and activities closed and/or stopped. Section 6 was added regarding lodging restrictions and exceptions.
Following release of Addendum No. 1 to Order of the Health Officer No. C20-3, further clarifications were made, which are reflected in Addendum No. 2.
In Section 6, emphasis has been added, clarifying that “NO Hotel, Motel, vacation rental property, VRBO, recreational vehicle park, campground, timeshare or other similar facilities… shall rent or provide accommodations to any person until such time [Order of the Health Officer No. C20-3] is modified or rescinded,” unless one of the exceptions listed in the Order is determined applicable.
Additionally, changes were made to Section number 7, prohibiting recreational boating activity on all public waterways in the unincorporated areas and cities within the boundaries of Lake County.
Clarifications indicate the order, “applies to all motorized and non-motorized vessels, or any device designed or used to transport a person or persons across water.”
Additionally, language was added to specify that vessels “currently moored or docked do not need to be removed from the lake, but shall not be used for the duration of the order.”
Shown below is a flow chart for lodging businesses.
Also published below are versions of Addendum No. 2 in English and Spanish.
For more information, visit the Lake County Health Services Department’s website, email
Lodging COVID-19 Mitigation Support Flow Chart by LakeCoNews on Scribd
Lake PH Order Shelter in Place 03.23.2020 C20-3 (A2) 03.23.2020 by LakeCoNews on Scribd
Actividades y Reuniones en Persona Para Detener o Ser Cancelado Addenda ... by LakeCoNews on Scribd
“The declaration will supplement our state’s comprehensive COVID-19 surge planning and make vital resources available. We appreciate the quick response and partnership from the White House,” said Newsom.
It was the third Presidential Major Disaster Declaration that President Trump approved on Sunday to help the states hit hardest by COVID-19. He also signed declarations for New York and Washington state.
The Governor’s Office reported that the declaration includes any and all individual assistance programs to assist those affected by the outbreak and lessen the economic impacts of the crisis.
It will provide additional assistance, including but not limited to, mass care and emergency assistance, crisis counseling, disaster case management, disaster unemployment assistance, disaster legal services and Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance.
Also on Sunday, the president announced other measures to assist California, including approving Newsom’s request from Thursday to deploy the USNS Mercy hospital ship to the Port of Los Angeles, where it’s expected to be in place within a week; federal medical stations with 2,000 additional beds for California have been authorized; and the National Guard has been activated.
Californians remain under Newsom’s stay at home order, issued on Thursday evening, meant to stop the spread of the virus, which so far hasn’t been confirmed by testing in Lake County. Earlier that same day, Lake County’s shelter in place order went into effect.
Congressman Mike Thompson, whose Fifth Congressional District includes the southern portion of Lake County, lauded the president’s decision to declare a major disaster in California due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
On Sunday, Thompson wrote to President Trump to ask for the declaration in response to the pandemic, which began on Jan. 20.
“Our state has been hit hard by the Coronavirus pandemic, and we are working together to combat it and support each other,” said Thompson, adding he was pleased to see the president issue the declaration for the state, giving the governor and local leaders further tools and resources to combat this crisis.
“This is a good first step, but we must continue this effort. Know that I will do everything I can to bring back every federal dollar and resource to bear on our work to help our state through this public health emergency. I also want to remind everyone that we must all do our part to reduce the spread of coronavirus. Stay at home, listen to public health officials and together we will get through this,” Thompson said.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
The board will meet beginning at 9 a.m. Tuesday, March 24, in the board chambers on the first floor of the Lake County Courthouse, 255 N. Forbes St., Lakeport.
The meeting can be watched live on Channel 8 and online at https://countyoflake.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx . Accompanying board documents, the agenda and archived board meeting videos also are available at that link.
Those planning to participate in Tuesday’s meeting are asked to contact the county in advance.
Please write the Clerk to the Board of Supervisors at
Additionally, written comments regarding any agenda item may be submitted to
At 9:10 a.m., the board will get an update from Public Health Officer DR. Gary Pace.
In an untimed item, the board will consider a resolution relating to workplace safety, employee leave and remote work in response to COVID-19, and continue its discussion and consideration of accommodations to facilitate electronic access to Board of Supervisors meetings in light of COVID-19.
Also on the agenda as an untimed item, the board will consider an urgency ordinance prohibiting rental housing price gouging and unlawful evictions in the unincorporated areas of the county during a state of emergency.
The full agenda is below.
CONSENT AGENDA
5.1: Approve addition of special meeting to the board’s annual meeting calendar for 2020.
5.2: Approve Application for Proposition 64 Public Health & Safety Grant.
5.3: Sitting as the Lake County Air Quality Management District Board of Directors, request to authorize the air pollution control officer to sign and submit the grant agreement between the district and CARB for the Woodsmoke Reduction Program, operate a woodstove changeout program, and sign all other program documents.
5.4: Adopt proclamation designating March 24, 2020, as National Agriculture Day.
5.5: Second Reading: Adopt Ag Department ordinance for industrial hemp regulations.
5.6: Adopt a resolution authorizing the Public Services director to submit applications to the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, or CalRecycle, for all available grants.
5.7: (a) Waive the competitive bidding process in accordance with County Code Section 2-38.2 because the unique nature of the goods or services precludes competitive bidding for the repair of the elevator located in the Lake County Historic Courthouse Museum; and (b) direct the Public Services director/assistant purchasing agent to sign the agreement with Dream Ride Elevator in the amount of $92,310.
5.8: Adopt proclamation commending Lyle Swartz, Public Works Road superintendent, for his service to the county of Lake.
5.9: Approve the 2020/21 Department of Boating and Waterways Financial Aid Program agreement in the amount of $315,312 to fund the sheriff/marine patrol budget unit 2205, and authorize the sheriff to sign.
5.10: Approve sealed bid 20-08 for the purchase of radio equipment for the St. Helena Communications site and authorize the sheriff/coroner or his designee to issue a purchase order to Dailey Wells Communications.
5.11: Approve the second amendment to lease agreement between the county of Lake and Gary Weiser and Shelly Weiser, for $15,000 per fiscal year from July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2025, for the Office Space Located at 4477 Moss Ave, Unit C, Clearlake, and authorize the chair to sign.
TIMED ITEMS
6.2, 9:06 a.m.: (a) Presentation of proclamation designating March 24, 2020, as National Agriculture Day; and (b) presentation of proclamation commending Public Works Road Superintendent Lyle Swartz for his service to the county of Lake.
6.3, 9:10 a.m.: Consideration of update on COVID-19.
6.4: 9:30 a.m.: Public hearing, appeal to Board of Supervisors, AB 19-03 for Minor Use Permit MUP 18-10 (Sandtner/Frey).
6.5, 10:30 a.m.: Public hearing, continued to April 7, Industrial Hemp Zoning Ordinance Text Amendment (AM 20-01) Categorical Exemption (CE 20-07).
UNTIMED ITEMS
7.2: (a) Consideration of resolution of the county of Lake Board of Supervisors relating to workplace safety, employee leave and remote work in response to COVID-19; and (b) continued discussion and consideration of accommodations to facilitate electronic access to Board of Supervisors (BOS) meetings in light of COVID-19.
7.3: Consideration of an urgency ordinance prohibiting rental housing price gouging and unlawful evictions in the unincorporated areas of the county of Lake during a state of emergency.
CLOSED SESSION
8.1: Conference with labor negotiator: (a) chief negotiator: M. Long; county negotiators: C. Huchingson and P. Samac; and (b) employee organizations: LCDDAA, LCDSA, LCCOA, LCEA, LCSEA and LCSMA.
8.2: Conference with (a) temporary representatives designated to meet with county department heads regarding salary and benefits and (b) unrepresented management employees.
8.3: Conference with legal counsel: Significant exposure to litigation pursuant to Government Code section 54956.9(d)(2), (e)(3) Threat of litigation – city of Clearlake.
8.4: Public employee evaluations title: Interim Community Development director/ Interim Water Resource director/ Public Works director.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
Why don’t we have drugs to treat COVID-19 and how long will it take to develop them?
SARS-CoV-2 – the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19 – is completely new and attacks cells in a novel way. Every virus is different and so are the drugs used to treat them. That’s why there wasn’t a drug ready to tackle the new coronavirus that only emerged a few months ago.
As a systems biologist who studies how cells are affected by viruses during infections, I’m especially interested in the second question. Finding points of vulnerability and developing a drug to treat a disease typically takes years. But the new coronavirus isn’t giving the world that kind of time. With most of the world on lockdown and the looming threat of millions of deaths, researchers need to find an effective drug much faster.
This situation has presented my colleagues and me with the challenge and opportunity of a lifetime: to help solve this huge public health and economic crisis posed by the global pandemic of SARS-CoV-2.
Facing this crisis, we assembled a team here at the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) at the University of California, San Francisco, to discover how the virus attacks cells. But instead of trying to create a new drug based on this information, we are first looking to see if there are any drugs available today that can disrupt these pathways and fight the coronavirus.
The team of 22 labs, that we named the QCRG, is working at breakneck speed – literally around the clock and in shifts – seven days a week. I imagine this is what it felt like to be in wartime efforts like the Enigma code-breaking group during World War II, and our team is similarly hoping to disarm our enemy by understanding its inner workings.
A stealthy opponent
Compared with human cells, viruses are small and can’t reproduce on their own. The coronavirus has about 30 proteins, whereas a human cell has more than 20,000.
To get around this limited set of tools, the virus cleverly turns the human body against itself. The pathways into a human cell are normally locked to outside invaders, but the coronavirus uses its own proteins like keys to open these “locks” and enter a person’s cells.
Once inside, the virus binds to proteins the cell normally uses for its own functions, essentially hijacking the cell and turning it into a coronavirus factory. As the resources and mechanics of infected cells get retooled to produce thousands and thousands of viruses, the cells start dying.
Lung cells are particularly vulnerable to this because they express high amounts of the “lock” protein SARS-CoV-2 uses for entry. A large number of a person’s lung cells dying causes the respiratory symptoms associated with COVID-19.
There are two ways to fight back. First, drugs could attack the virus’s own proteins, preventing them from doing jobs like entering the cell or copying their genetic material once they are inside. This is how remdesivir – a drug currently in clinical trials for COVID-19 – works.
A problem with this approach is that viruses mutate and change over time. In the future, the coronavirus could evolve in ways that render a drug like remdesivir useless. This arms race between drugs and viruses is why you need a new flu shot every year.
Alternatively, a drug can work by blocking a viral protein from interacting with a human protein it needs. This approach – essentially protecting the host machinery – has a big advantage over disabling the virus itself, because the human cell doesn’t change as fast. Once you find a good drug, it should keep working. This is the approach that our team is taking. And it may also work against other emergent viruses.
Learning the enemy’s plans
The first thing our group needed to do was identify every part of the cellular factory that the coronavirus relies on to reproduce. We needed to find out what proteins the virus was hijacking.
To do this, a team in my lab went on a molecular fishing expedition inside human cells. Instead of a worm on a hook, they used viral proteins with tiny chemical tags attached to them - termed a “bait.” We put these baits into lab-grown human cells and then pulled them out to see what we caught. Anything that stuck was a human protein that the virus hijacks during infection.
By March 2, we had a partial list of the human proteins that the coronavirus needs to thrive. These were the first clues we could use. A team member sent a message to our group, “First iteration, just 3 baits … next 5 baits coming.” The fight was on.
Counterattack
Once we had this list of molecular targets the virus needs to survive, members of the team raced to identify known compounds that might bind to these targets and prevent the virus from using them to replicate. If a compound can prevent the virus from copying itself in a person’s body, the infection stops. But you can’t simply interfere with cellular processes at will without potentially causing harm to the body. Our team needed to be sure the compounds we identified would be safe and nontoxic for people.
The traditional way to do this would involve years of pre-clinical studies and clinical trials costing millions of dollars. But there is a fast and basically free way around this: looking to the 20,000 FDA-approved drugs that have already been safety-tested. Maybe there is a drug in this large list that can fight the coronavirus.
Our chemists used a massive database to match the approved drugs and proteins they interact with to the proteins on our list. They found 10 candidate drugs last week. For example, one of the hits was a cancer drug called JQ1. While we cannot predict how this drug might affect the virus, it has a good chance of doing something. Through testing, we will know if that something helps patients.
Facing the threat of global border shutdowns, we immediately shipped boxes of these 10 drugs to three of the few labs in the world working with live coronavirus samples: two at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Mount Sinai in New York. By March 13, the drugs were being tested in cells to see if they prevent the virus from reproducing.
Dispatches from the battlefield
Our team will soon learn from our collaborators at Mt. Sinai and the Pasteur Institute whether any of these first 10 drugs work against SARS-CoV-2 infections. Meanwhile, the team has continued fishing with viral baits, finding hundreds of additional human proteins that the coronavirus co-opts. We will be publishing the results in the online repository BioRxiv soon.
The good news is that so far, our team has found 50 existing drugs that bind the human proteins we’ve identified. This large number makes me hopeful that we’ll be able to find a drug to treat COVID-19. If we find an approved drug that even slows down the virus’s progression, doctors should be able to start getting it to patients quickly and save lives.
[You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help. Read our newsletter.]
Nevan Krogan, Professor and Director of Quantitative Biosciences Institute, University of California, San Francisco
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
So far, nearly 19 million households have responded, officials reported.
The California response rate so far is 19 percent. For Lake County, the response rate is 11.6 percent.
In an effort to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, 2020 Census field operations are suspended until April 1.
The Census Bureau is taking this step to help protect the health and safety of the American public, Census Bureau employees, and everyone going through the hiring process for temporary census taker positions.
In late May, census takers around the nation will begin visiting households that have not yet responded to the 2020 Census to help complete the count.
As the Census Bureau continues to monitor the evolving COVID-19 outbreak, it will adjust census taker and survey operations as necessary in order to follow the guidance of federal, state and local health authorities.
The public is strongly encouraged to respond to the 2020 Census online using a desktop computer, laptop, smartphone, or tablet, and can also respond by phone or mail.
Everyone should respond to the 2020 Census as soon as they receive their invitation – and when they’re finished, they can make sure their friends, families and social networks know about the importance of responding.
It has never been easier to respond to the census, and the 2020 Census will count everyone accurately.
For all other Census Bureau household and economic surveys separate from the 2020 Decennial Census, bureau personnel will begin using phone calls instead of in-person visits. In the limited number of instances where an in-person visit is necessary, they are working closely with public health authorities to ensure each visit is accomplished safely.
Take the Census at http://2020Census.gov .
Respondents can also respond by calling the number provided in their invitation or by mail once they have received a paper form.
Public Health officer closes waterways, lodging facilities to decrease risk of COVID-19 transmission
Pace said Sunday that there are no confirmed cases in Lake County so far, but his updated order came hours after Napa County confirmed its first two cases of the illness, caused by the novel coronavirus.
The updated order also followed by several hours Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request to President Donald Trump for a Presidential Major Disaster Declaration.
“We are moving into a new phase of preparation for the outbreak, which demands we take major steps towards limitation of social contact to prevent transmission,” Pace said.
Citing the spread of COVID-19 infections across the region, Pace reported that, “Despite concerns, and restrictions placed last week, significant recreational activity that increases the risk of transmission was observed this weekend in local parks, hotels and on Clear Lake.”
Based on those factors, Pace issued an addendum to Health Order c20-3, which he issued on Wednesday and which ordered residents countywide to shelter in place.
The Sunday addendum to the original Public Health order goes into effect at 11 a.m. Monday, March 23, and will remain in effect until 11:59 pm. Friday, April 10.
Pace said the addendum immediately mandates the closure of Lake County waterways, including Clear Lake, Blue Lakes, Highland Springs Reservoir, Cache Creek, Lake Pillsbury, Indian Valley Reservoir and any other public, navigable waterway to any recreational boating activity.
In addition, he’s ordering the cessation of lodging in motels, hotels, campgrounds, RV parks, and vacation rentals – such as AirBNBs – except for medical staff, COVID-19 emergency workers, construction workers of critical infrastructure and permanent residents who have resided on-site since prior to March 9.
Anyone claiming exemption – other than first responders and medical staff – will need written approval from the Lake County Health Services Department, Pace said.
Pace said the addendum also imposes further restrictions on activity on the lake and on travel and lodging for people coming from outside of Lake County.
Violation of the order is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine, jail time or both.
Community members wanting more information can visit the Lake County Health Services Department’s website, email
Email Elizabeth Larson at
Lake County, Calif., Public Order c20-3 Addendum (a1) 03.22.20 by LakeCoNews on Scribd