 You're tuned in to the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm your host, Autumn Labbe Renaud, and today is Tuesday, April 20th. We're sharing local news and resources, focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. The show airs live at noon on Tuesdays and Fridays, and repeats at 5 p.m. both days and at noon on Sundays, and you can also listen online anytime at kdrt.org. My guests today are Rachel McKinney, CEO of Sutter Davis Hospital and David Lichtenhan, chair of the Yolo Interfaith Immigration Network, and we'll get to our first interview in just a few minutes. Earth Day is tomorrow, April 22nd, and our friends at Climate Strike Davis are organizing an Earth Day Sing Out. Davis musicians are urged to consider creating a short video singing a favorite earthy song upload to YouTube and tag with hashtag Earth Day Sing Out Davis. And tomorrow you can tune in right here 95.7 FM or stream at kdrt.org between 5 and 6 p.m. to hear Davis sing. Thank you to DMA and KDRT staffer Diane Kremley for her assistance with that project. The Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance is now accepting senior participants to receive calls and volunteers to make calls during this period of sheltering in place. The Alliance will then match these phone friends for daily social check-ins. Seniors will be matched with volunteers from the same community, and along with socializing, the volunteers will also help ensure that their friend has the food and medicine they need. Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance will also assist with connecting seniors to home delivery services for food and medication, and the phone friends for seniors program will operate until the COVID-19 shelter-in-place guidance is lifted, maybe beyond if seniors have an ongoing desire for the social connections that they'll be creating. You can learn more at YoloHealthyAging.org. And here's a family fun opportunity. Help Me Grow Yolo County offers family dance parties via Zoom every Wednesday at 10.38 Families can join in, get some wiggles out, and move their bodies under the direction of a licensed physical therapist. Help Me Grow Yolo County is a project of the Northern California Children's Therapy Center and receives funding from Yolo First 5 and Yolo County Health and Human Services, and they have a very wide variety of resources for families. They can be reached at helpmegrowyolo.org. And in somewhat sad news but understandable, the City of Davis announced yesterday that it's canceled the annual City Fourth of July festivities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Police Chief Darren Pytel noted that although the current shelter-in-place guidelines are very likely going to be over by the Fourth of July, we have a lot of reason to expect there will be continuing restrictions on large events and crowds through summers. Please know that our city officials and police and fire departments will continuously monitor any guidance provided by the state and county regarding these considerations over the coming months. And it may be that we'll find some way to do smaller gatherings, but as a community, we will not be out at Community Park this Fourth. The city wants to acknowledge the Davis Live Music Collective for coordinating the music lineup each year and the Discovery Christian Church for signing on to create the family fun field. And finally, the Davis Downtown Business Association and the City of Davis are launching the sponsored Gifting Stimulus Program tomorrow, April 22nd. We'll have more on that on Friday's show when their Executive Director, Brett Maraska, will be my guest. But the program aims to infuse $100,000 into its Davis Downtown member businesses. The marketing campaign is designed to support businesses right now and in real time during the shutdown. So whether your business is closed, partially open or fully operating during the shelter in place mandate, every business has the opportunity to benefit from this program, but you have to register. And we'll clarify whether that extends beyond Downtown Davis or just the core area. On Friday, you can learn more at davisdowntown.com. And let's take just a moment for music before our first call. Imagine, if you will, that you run a hospital and found yourself tasked with preparing all your staff for a pandemic. Most of us haven't lived that reality, but our first guest has. Rachel McKinney is CEO of Sutter Davis Hospital and she joins us today. Welcome, Rachel. Thanks, Autumn. Thanks for having me. We're I'm really happy to hear your voice. First, we've we've all heard endless stories about how hospitals are faring and from PPE shortages down the line. So how is the staff at Sutter Davis doing the staff has really been incredible. It's really been an amazing opportunity and a very challenging and complex situation to see the level of expertise and compassion that this team brings every day to their job. As you know, Sutter Health has a long history of caring for patients with complex illnesses, including infectious disease, and the team is is really pulled together, supporting each other, supporting the safety of our patients, our staff, the rest of our teammates. And I have to say, I'm really proud of this team for the creativity and adaptability that they've demonstrated the last few months, I can imagine. So walk us through this a little bit, if you will, when when did you first start to to hear about COVID-19? And then how did you as a hospital begin to prepare for that? Well, I think like everyone else, you know, individually watching from afar with what was happening in China and as a health system, we actually started tracking this, you know, and in December and January from a system perspective, we have outstanding support and leadership from our Sutter Health emergency management system, which we call SHEMS. And we actually set up SHEMS in response to what was happening in China at the end of January. So a lot of pre-work before we really started to see cases in California. And that work really began and is built on our emergency preparedness work and safety work that we do all the time throughout the year to be prepared for any sort of an emergency and in this situation, a global pandemic. So from a system perspective, it's been almost three months, actually, since we've been preparing for this. And then I would say probably in about middle of February, when we first started to see some of the repatriation of patients off some of the cruise ships and globally that were coming into California really started to ramp up our efforts locally and activating our own local emergency management system at the hospital, bringing our teams together to reevaluate our existing policies around pandemic and epidemic preparedness, our infection control practices, pulling all the right folks together to make sure that we were ready for whatever might come our way. Right. I imagine you're in near constant communication with county health and California Public Health and the CDC. How does that work? Yeah, so I have to say the collaboration and the support that that we've seen from the city, the county, Yolo County, Dr. Chapman under his leadership, the constant communication, the updates that we receive on a weekly basis with with phone calls, communications from California Department of Public Health on new updates and changes that might be coming from state level. Our system is also very closely connected with the work that's happening at the state level, both through the California Hospital Association and work in collaboration with the California Office of Emergency Services under the governor's direction. So, you know, there's there's one of the things that has been really eye-opening about this whole situation is really just the the amount of information that has come our way and the amount of collaboration that so many stakeholders from across the state and nation have pulled together to really make sure that everyone is as coordinated as possible in this type of a situation. So constant communication, constant updates. We are on a lot of phone calls with the you know, key policymakers and others that are helping to lead this effort both at the state and national level. It's a daunting amount of information. I kind of want to know if you have a situation room. We do. We do. And so that is under our local, what we call our command center. And that is the boardroom that we use in the hospital setting. And we have our daily briefings at 9 a.m. with what we've called cold COVID operations leadership team. And that team meets every day at 9 a.m. And then any information that comes out either from the system or from the state or local officials, we evaluate throughout the day. We update our communications and we have an afternoon call at three o'clock with all of our physicians and managers and other clinical leaders to keep them apprised of what's happening that day and new information or new policies or practices that have come out that we need to implement. So that communication has been very consistent daily. Our SHEMS team, as I said, has been working around the clock since the end of January 24-7. They're manning that situation room at the system level as well and keeping us all informed of new information, whether that be from the CDC or the state or federal or others, and making sure that we have the ability to implement that locally. It sounds intense. Now, in Yolo County, we have had some losses and, you know, cases identified, but our numbers are not, thankfully, they're not where they are in other communities. I guess I'm curious about how many patients have ended up at Sutter-Davis. I know you can't disclose a lot of particulars, but that question and also how is the hospital protecting patients and caregivers right now? So, you know, I think you commented about Yolo County and I think the public health office is the best source of information for that. They've probably, as you know, and have other guests on your show have probably shared that they've really put together an amazing dashboard on their Health and Human Services website that is a real-time updated every day at five o'clock with a total of a number of cases, a breakdown by demographics. And so far to date, there have been about 26 patients hospitalized in Yolo County. And as you know, there are two hospitals in Yolo County. And as you said, out of patient privacy, there's not much more detail that I can go into. But from protecting our patients and caregivers, there's just been a tremendous amount that we've built on again from our standard work around infection control. You know, we have obviously implemented and have maintained our protective practices around PPE in accordance with guidance from the CDC and our system leadership. We've also implemented other strategies such as universal masking for all staff and clinicians, as well as patients now in the facility. We've implemented temperature checks at all of our entries into the building to ensure that we're checking visitors, caregivers, vendors, anyone that's coming in the building. We have limited visitors to the building as well, which has certainly been challenging, you know, from a from a patient experience perspective, but we have been able to implement new technology to keep patients connected to their loved ones while they've been in the hospital, such as use of iPads and Skype and video conferencing through FaceTime and other things to keep keep them connected, but also still keep them safe. From the clinic setting or that, you know, the outpatient setting, we've really ramped up our video visits and our telehealth capabilities to keep our clinicians safe in the clinic by reducing the number of visitors coming to the clinic, but also ensuring that we can still provide that health care to patients that might not be urgent or emergent situations, but still have the ability to see their physician via video visits. We have, again, as a part of our emergency preparedness implemented strategies for grouping patients that might have COVID or might be evaluated for COVID in a certain location to make sure that we minimize the exposure to other patients as well as to caregivers and then have actually set up our surge tent outside the hospital in the event that we do have a surge of respiratory illness patients. We can treat and triage those folks in the tent without having to bring them into the emergency department. So a lot of strategies, again, I think building on our experience treating for treating infectious disease patients as well as continuing to collaborate with the local and state and federal partners to ensure that we deploy those resources to keep everybody safe. I'm glad you brought up the issue about continuity of care, because I literally had someone say to me the other day, I think I need an x-ray, but the hospital is the last place I want to go right now. I'm basically afraid to go. And I think what you're telling us is, A, there's lots of ways to get information and possible diagnosis or at least advice using telemedicine, using services provided at a distance, and B, you've done everything humanly possible to make the hospital as safe as possible for the broadest number of people. Yeah, and that's actually one thing I'm glad you brought up, because I really want to emphasize to the community that we are still here. We want to make sure people know that if you're having an emergency or urgent or concerning health situation that we don't want you to stay away. We want you to come and get the treatment that you need. We have a website that we've set up and a 1-800-TOL-FREE line for both Sutter patients and non-Sutter patients. That is available, but our website is a tremendous amount of information about what to look for, what should you do if you think you're sick, access to the telemedicine. We have a medical symptom checker on our SutterHealth.org website. You can access the video visits. And again, as the only emergency department in Davis, we want to make sure that people know that we are here. We're safe. We're taking as many precautions as are needed to keep our staff and our patients safe, even if you come for a non-COVID related illness. I really want to make sure that the community knows that we're still here for you. Great. Well, you have given us a lens into something, as I said at the top of the interview, that most of us will never experience and gratefully so. And I want to thank you for your work and for sharing some. I know you're a busy woman, so thank you for sharing some of your time today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. All right. Take care. All right. And Rachel mentioned the Yolo County Yolo Public Health dashboard, which you can find. It's right on the front page at YoloCounty.org. I've referred to it many times on the show and we have had a number of guests from the county talking about the county's efforts in public health. Speaking of county-wide efforts, I want to remind listeners once again about the Yolo Community Foundation's partnership that was launched last week. They're working with Yolo County and the cities of Davis, West Sacramento, Winters and Woodland to create the new COVID-19 non-profit relief initiative. These local jurisdictions are providing staff and funding to support the initiative's three components, a community-wide campaign to encourage direct contributions, a relief fund to provide direct grants and some technical assistance as well. Well, Yolo County's non-profits and folks, I am a person sitting here. I run a non-profit. I can tell you we are all struggling with greater demand resulting from COVID-19. It's caused us to change up our services. We can't offer some things. We can't fulfill some things. It is stressful. The fund aims to present some funding opportunities critical for our survival and it's just information about the activities and needs of Yolo County non-profits and as well as links to the donation pages. There's a wealth of information there at YoloCF.org. That's for Yolo Community Foundation and there's a button for this whole COVID-19 relief project. I think one more thing and then we're going to take a brief break for music before we come back with David Lichtenhan of Yolo Interfaith Immigration Network and that is that if you haven't filled out your census yet, you still have time. In fact, if you haven't filled it out yet, you're going to be getting mail. The government actually requires that you fill it out, so that's important. But more importantly than that, it helps bring resources to our region, our state, our county. It's really important. It took me less than 10 minutes to fill out mine, so just just do it. All right, a little bit of music will be back in a few. Well, if you're finding navigating information around COVID-19 difficult, imagine being an immigrant far from loved ones and perhaps unable to access information in your own language. Enter the Yolo Interfaith Immigration Network, also known as YIN. They're stepping up to help get some resources out to immigrants in our communities. And here to tell us more about their new project is YIN's board chair, David Lichtenhan. Welcome, David. Thank you, Autumn. It's great to be here. I really appreciate that being able to do this. You bet. Good to hear your voice. First, let's tell our listeners just a little bit about YIN. Okay, YIN was put together by a wonderful group of people back in 2008. Before 2010, we became a full-fledged non-profit and we've had many, many different programs from being in the juvenile hall with ORR kids, which was stopped last year and then working with immigrants across Yolo County. That's what we serve. And so it's a lot of different programs that we help the kids in the migrant centers every summer. We may or may not be able to do it this summer because of the coronavirus, but we're still trying. Yeah. Well, we're here today to have you talk about a specific project before we do that. Let me say two things. The first is that last week, Governor Gavin Newsom announced $125 million in disaster relief assistance to provide financial support to undocumented immigrants impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. But that's about $500 per individual or 1,000 per household. It's not a lot. The second is we're going to talk about your project. I'm in a frame. This is I always do it. You are a nonprofit. You obviously need financial support for your project, but we don't do a direct ask for donations here on noncommercial radio. So we will refer everyone to your website. So now that I've said that, what is the project that you have developed and tell us specifically how it's going to impact immigrant families here in Yolo County? Sure, Autumn. Well, I want to make sure that we understand this is a community-wide project that started Anoush Dajorian and many other great people and advocates for our community put this together. We got involved because we do serve do serve and advocate for the undocumented. So we've started this with focusing on paying rent and utilities because they're not eligible in general. These the migrants who lose their jobs from the coronavirus can't they don't get any kind of relief from the state or the federal government other than what Governor Newsom has announced with the 500 per adult or a thousand cats per household. So we are developing and have already implemented for two different families, paying their rent and utilities and it's just wonderful to get feedback from them how grateful they are. Never met any family that wasn't grateful for our support. So it's really important part of part of the issue is generally people don't raise their hand up and say I'm undocumented. Well, they're afraid, right? There's a lot of fear. Yeah, absolutely. So we are wondering in fact how these folks are going to actually get the five hundred dollars per person or her thousand dollars per family because they're not going to raise their hand. Now with the resources that we have beautiful people we have in the schools and with Emina Jackson and Hiram we're getting families from mostly from the schools and then other families that we're associated or associated with already that have lost their jobs because of the virus and we're starting to help them. It does take resources and it's just something we have to do. This is a kind of a project that is our sole program right now to make sure our folks get taken care of. All right, and this project is called and help me with this, Apayolo? Yeah, Apayolo. So Apayolo is support and of course our Yolo County. So support Yolo and this is supporting our families that are immigrants and lost their jobs. It's an interesting combination of words and we feel that it does resonate. We have actually asked people that we know in the community that are actually, we do know that are undocumented and they thought that was a very significant name for the program. So my understanding, in addition to financial support there's other volunteer needs, other ways to get involved or what are you specifically in need of or looking for? Looking for bilingual especially that can communicate with the families that we are connected with. It's especially when they're really afraid and we won't have those of us who can really connect, be a part of this network that can talk with these people once we get their names and numbers which we have been and find out what the real needs there are and it's not just rent and utilities that we're focused on but many other people are focusing on making sure their food's secure that they have enough to eat and other necessities of life. We had one member out in the community deliver toilet paper to one family because they ran out and had no way to get more. So things like that, lots of different areas that we're looking for support and then having volunteers come in and we do make sure that the volunteers are caring and can really think about wanting to support these folks. Yeah, so I know folks can get more information at yinyolo.org and that's Y-I-N-YOLO.org. The project itself is called APA YOLO and it's the capital A-P-O, capital Y-O-L-O, there's a sign up link at the YIN website. And let's give a shout out to the great Anush Jajorian you mentioned who I believe is coordinating this project and does so much for our community. So I wanna thank you. Absolutely right, thank you. She has been great, thank you. I wanna thank you for coming on and sharing the project and I'll circle back with you at some point so we can find out how it's going. Great, thank you. All right, thank you, David. You too.