 You're tuned into the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Autumn LaBea Renaud and today is Tuesday, July 14th. I have been on the air four months today with this show. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. My guests today are Jenny Tan, who is the Public Information Officer for Yolo County, and Emily Henderson, Artistic Director for ACME Theater Company, and we'll get to our first interview shortly. Beginning with this episode, I'm consciously incorporating something I've been kind of haphazardly doing and that's using the short second interview to highlight and lift up a local arts and culture organization or individual. This is a sector that's been forced to largely shut down during COVID and we'll take a look at their interesting pivots and pursuits. Today a bit of KDRT news. We have welcome back to the airwaves Gary Chu with Third Streaming, Praise Time with Preacher, and Sound So Sweet with Wayne Hagen, all of which you can hear live later today. And don't forget to cap off your Tuesday evening with Dawn Shore on Jazz After Dark at 8 p.m. On Thursdays, Silver Nine Volt Heart with DJ Rodriguez and Live Track Switch and Mucannon are both live again. On Fridays, Peter Pastore is back on the air with listening lyrics live at four and on Sunday mornings DJ Dirk rides again with Twang Thang. Also check out recent interviews from Bill Buchanan on Davisville including his segment on Crime and Spy Jazz with Derek Bang and hats off to the other producers who've been doing this from home since the early days of the pandemic. And finally a couple of new things, new teen programmer Rohan is live Fridays at five with Time Out Radio and Doctors on Cannabis is new Thursdays at 4.30. And I would like to highlight the work that Allison B is doing on May Rocky Radio. Pairing up with Dima Tamimi who is both a community advocate and a non-profit leader, Allison is passing the mic to local black and indigenous people of color. Featured this week is Anush Trajorian whom I've interviewed about the Apoyolo Project coordinated through YOLO Interfaith Immigration Network. May Rocky Radio airs just after this show so please check it out. And you can learn more about your favorite shows and see a full schedule at KDRT.org. You can in fact find all things K-Dirt there including ways to support this community station. And folks we can't do this work without community support so thanks for checking that out and supporting as you can. Alright if you have been downtown lately you may have noticed some big changes. For one this past weekend members of Davis Phoenix Coalition brought the community together to chalk a large Black Lives Matter mural on 2nd Street. And 2nd Street has kind of quickly become the nexus of change in the downtown. I'm not sure how new state public health orders are going to affect that but working with the city, the Downtown Business Association is spearheading the Open Air Davis initiative which permits many businesses to modify or expand their service capacity by offering the use of space on sidewalks, parking spaces and even streets. Open Air Davis consists of two major street conversions as well as dozens of locations that are popping up organically and that's just kind of where business owners are putting their focus on outdoor seating and accommodations because I think the handwriting is on the wall with this. Inside is bad, outside is good. Some businesses are building new patios, some are setting up additional seating and others are simply doing a refresh on existing outdoor areas. The initiative began recently with the closure of G Street between 2nd and 3rd. An expansion of the program this last week included the closure of 2nd Street between E and F and this is close to vehicular traffic and the public is invited to experience these open spaces every Friday morning through Sunday night through the end of the summer. You can go to downtowndavisdowntown.com for more info and we are going to take a moment for music. Oh, we are going to take our first call. All right, when the pandemic started and I started this radio program, I asked Yolo County Supervisor Don Saylor to connect me with someone in public health and that led me to Ms. Jenny Tan who serves as the public information officer for the county and who's been incredibly helpful over the past four months of doing this show. So I'm very pleased to welcome her as my guest today. Hi there Jenny. Hi, how are you? I'm doing okay. How are you? You've had a busy few days, few months. It feels like it's been nonstop for the last five months and every day there's something new that pops up and you know, you got to get work on that. Right, right. And we're going to talk about a lot of that today but I think many people maybe have gotten to know you a little bit from your daily live videos on the county's Facebook page and I'll tell you from doing this show. It's just a really weird thing to read off death's statistics, right? It is hard. So how did you end up doing the daily video? How did that come about? So at the beginning I would probably say like end of March, Patrick Blackbox is our county administrator. He really felt that we needed to be a little bit more transparent about the information we were providing. And so he was like, you know, some of the other counties, they do like this daily video. What do you think about doing something like that? And I said, sure, I think that'd be a great idea, however, who's going to do it? And they said, well, you and I said, okay. So that's kind of how it got started and you know, we were kind of worried at the beginning, well, would we have enough content to have something to talk about every day? And I have to tell you, there is always something to talk about and you know, we are about to hit, I think, 75 episodes next week. So it's really amazing that we have been able to do it for so long and we have an audience that kind of tunes in every day and there's lots of conversations that kind of happen around the daily briefings every day. And so we're really appreciative to our audience and to the residents for tuning in and really finding the information that we talk about helpful. Great. Yeah, I know I was worried about having enough content for this show at the beginning too. And it really hasn't been a problem. So I asked you to come on the show because a big part of your job is really taking complex public health directives and boiling them down into easily understood nuggets. For example, last week, you and I had some back and forth on email. It was announced we were at capacity for staffed ICU beds in Yolo County, but by the time I reached out to you, that situation had already begun to shift. So if you would, let's start there. What is the situation with hospital capacity in Yolo County? So last week when we got on to the state's county monitoring list, we had no capacity. We had exceeded two of the metrics that the state had in their county monitoring list. One was for elevated disease transmission, the second was for hospital capacity. And so by the time that we got on the list, we had 0% and that was what the state had mentioned. However, as soon as we were already dipping into that metric that we were going to exceed, we were working with the hospitals, the hospitals themselves were trying to get additional capacity. And so I think by the end of that day, even though we had sent out that press release earlier, the work was already being done to improve that. And so I think by the end of that day or early the next morning, the hospitals had opened up another wing. There were more beds that were available, so we were already on top of that. And we do have hospital capacity now. We have ICU beds. I think something that kind of gets lost is that ICU beds are not only for COVID-19 patients. They're also for regular people who are coming in for emergencies or may need the bed for other medical issues. And so we need to have more than what is available for our COVID patients. So the hospitals have done an amazing job and we do have some available. So people shouldn't be worried about needing to go to the hospital if they have an emergency. But so many things happen behind the scenes that I think a lot of people don't know about or don't realize, but we are definitely working to ensure that, at least with our hospitals, other capacity. Sure. And there are two in the county, correct? We have Sutter and Davis and we have Dignity Health in Woodland. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We are still on the states county data monitoring list and we've been there since July 8th and that refers to the uptick in the number of cases. So what are we theorizing is driving that uptick right now? Is it people gathering? Do we know? The uptick could be due to a couple of different reasons. One that we've seen in just through our contact tracing efforts is from gatherings. So whether that's social gatherings or family gatherings, there have definitely been an uptick and people are spreading COVID that way. Another is through religious services, we've seen some cases kind of come up from there from employer or from work. So people are also picking it there. What it essentially boils down to is that people are probably not social distancing as well as they should be. People may not be wearing face coverings as well as they should be. You know, when I go out off of work and I'm in public or I'm, you know, driving, sometimes I don't see people wear face coverings or when I go into a restaurant, maybe it's people are covering their mouth but not their nose, you know, when your face covering needs to cover both. So we've definitely seen an uptick kind of across the board, across sectors and across different kinds of gatherings. And so our messaging has kind of evolved a little bit over time over the last four months, but people do still need to social distance or physical distance by at least six feet, wear the face covering, even if they are hanging out with family or at least with people outside of their household. And then if they don't need to go out to really stay at home as much as possible. Yeah. So the day after California officials revealed that the number of deaths related to coronavirus in the state had passed 7,000 and that was, that was the day before yesterday. Then yesterday, Governor Newsom said that there had been 8,358 new cases reported in the state in just 24 hours. So as we, as you know, many businesses that had reopened are required to close again. Some of those are being closed statewide and some additional ones are impacting counties that are on the state's watch list. So I'm hoping we can kind of quickly go through those so that everyone is on the same page. What is on that list? What's closing down or has closed down? So as of yesterday, based on the state of California's announcement and the office of data health order, those counties that are on the watch list, which Yolo County is on, will have to close effective immediately gyms and fitness centers, personal care services, which includes nail salons, skincare, cosmetology, electrolysis, body waxing, body art tattoo and piercing shop. It also includes hair salons and barber shops, places of worship, offices for non-essential sectors, and indoor malls. I do want to say that those industries will need to be closed unless they can somehow be modified to operate either outside or have pickup service or pickup of whatever that may be. So for places of worship, for example, outdoor services or outdoor drive-through services would still be okay. It's just that indoor part that would need to be closed. So that was in effect yesterday. Okay. Do you think it's conceivable we might be looking at a full return to shelter-in-place orders? That's perhaps an unfair question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. You know, every day is very different. We don't know what the governor or the state of California is going to say, and we're kind of on the edge of our seats, just like the rest of the public. Do I think it will go back? I think depending on the numbers, if we continue to see this rise in increases, if the public continues to kind of not social distance or not wear a face covering, that the governor is going to keep rolling back on things that are already open. So he's already rolled back on, I think, 10, 12 different items so far. So we're almost to the point where it was in shelter-in-place. So I'm hoping not, but is it possible? Absolutely. What day of the week is that, right? I know. Yeah. What's going on today? All right. Well, let's talk about masks a little bit. And specifically, just before the show, I was talking with a friend about those posts we see on Nextdoor about people complaining about businesses that are not enforcing. And today there was a post about a Davis business that was telling customers that masks are their optional, basically. So we don't want people calling 911 for these sorts of things. And I'm not sure what's changed since the last time I talked to someone about this. What's the best way to report that info into whom? And I'm saying things may have changed, because since the last time I asked that question, contact tracing has been deployed throughout the county. So I want to talk about that a little bit too. So who do we report to? And then we'll talk about contact tracing. So we actually have a portal or a link that people can actually turn in stories of kindness, submit questions, and also report issues. So if you go to our Roadmap to Recovery page, which has all of our new additions to the health order and any kind of new actions that have been taken locally in your closures, at the very bottom of the page there's going to be this blue button. It's kind of teal in color. It says Shelter in Place Feedback Portal. If you click there, it'll take you to sort of like a survey where you can input in what your concern is. If there's a restaurant or a business that you feel is not complying, it is anonymous. And then you can input that information, and then it gets sent to Yellow County staff that we have monitoring that portal every day. And then we will send it on to the appropriate division or department, whether that might be code enforcement or our environmental health staff that work with the restaurants, that information will be turned in and we'll be able to work on it. Okay, that's great to know about because folks complaining on Nextdoor is not particularly effective. I'm just going to say that. And it is really good to know that there's an easy way to do that. All right, we have just a couple minutes left, and I do want to talk about contact tracing. So if you think you've been exposed to the virus, imagine there's a process. What should you do? So if someone thinks they have been exposed, we definitely recommend that they get tested. We have many free local testing sites available. We have our OptumServe site in West Sacramento, which is by appointment only. Our Ellica Health Center site in West Sacramento is for those that don't have insurance or those that have MediCal. We also have a few clinics that we're hosting, I think, this week in different areas. You can also get tested through your healthcare provider. There's a lot of different options for people who want to get tested. Once you get your test results back, or even if you don't get your test results back, but you feel sick or you think you might have been exposed to someone but are asymptomatic or are not showing symptoms, then we do recommend that you quarantine or isolate yourself, especially if you have family in the home or maybe you're caring for someone who's at high risk and you just don't want to, you know, maybe get them infected. Then we definitely recommend that they isolate and quarantine themselves. There is a number that people can call where they can reach out to our public health staff. If you go on to our Roadmap to Recovery page, there is a button for Business Toolkit. You can go on there and then there's an exposure toolkit flyer that has a number on there that you can call, and someone will reply to you once they get your message and then they'll tell you what other things you may need to do. If you get tested and you are positive, our public health team will call you and this is really important. Please don't hang up on them, or if you get a voicemail, please call them back because that contact tracing part that Steph is really important in letting us know how far something has spread and also to help contact maybe people that you have been in touch with to let them know because maybe they have someone that they're also caring for or maybe a high-risk category. And so it is really important to answer the questions and to be a part of that process. I did want to mention really quickly that they're having some contact tracing scams out there. So it is important to know that our contact tracing staff from Yolo County will never ask you about your immigration status, will never ask you for your bank account information or for money or for your social security number. So if anybody called asking for those things, they are most likely a scam and you should not respond to those questions. Amazing what people will try to take advantage of in a time of crisis, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. All right. Let's mention that for all the info you've given, all those buttons to push and numbers to call, if you go to YoloCounty.org and I've announced this pretty much every show, all the COVID-19 information is right there at the top of the page on the right-hand side, the roadmap to recovery, and the dashboards for the statistics which are updated daily, I believe, correct? Yes. Yeah. Thank you, Tan. Thank you so much for joining us and for all the work you do to get good and timely information out to everyone. We were relying on you and we appreciate you. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. All right. Take care. We'll take a moment for music before we get to our next caller. Okay. My next guest is the longtime artistic director for the innovative and youth-led ACME Theater Company here in Davis, California. Welcome, Emily Henderson. Thank you so much for having me. Good to hear your voice. How you doing? Oh, it's a roller coaster, but doing well. Well, ACME is pretty well-known in these parts, but I mentioned it to a couple of people who said ACME Theater, what's that? So tell us what it is. So ACME is celebrating its 40th anniversary this season. It's a youth-led theater company. We have 12 young people who are elected each year to serve as the leaders and they train their youth replacements and it gets passed down year after year. Now, in a normal year, I'm a longtime ACME supporter and a tender, and in a normal year, you would have kicked off a vibrant summer season with theater in the park on Memorial Day weekend. Really missed it this year, just, you know. So tell us how you've pivoted during this time and what you're doing this summer instead. I know you have a lot coming up. Yeah, so we decided to move entirely into an online Zoom theater world because we wanted to have the ability to be inclusive to everybody regardless of what was going on in their particular household and what the COVID-19 situation evolved into over the course of the summer. So we usually do in the summer a big production where everybody gets cast and we wanted to keep that aspect, but instead of doing one big show, we're doing a show a week because trying to do a Zoom call with 40 people, we all know, is pretty miserable. So we've got a production every Saturday and we have, you know, six, 10, 12, 15 students who work starting on Monday on that show culminating on Saturday. So are the shows being done? I mean, I have to tune in now, obviously, but are the shows being done kind of in a live read style or are they memorizing lines over the course of a week? It varies from actor to actor on how much memorization they are able to do. So we're calling them Zoom reading. Each performance has technical elements. So we have lighting, sound, costumes, props that are all pulled together and then some of the students are reading and some of the students are more off-book. So walk us through what's on tap for the rest of the summer. I know Dear Harvey is the first one coming up but then there are a couple more after that. Right. So this Saturday, we've got our two family friendly shows. So this Saturday is The Boy Who Cried Dragon, which is a comedic retelling of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. And then we've got this really beautiful coming-of-age adventure story that's called This Girl Laughed, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing. So that's this Saturday, July 18th, 1 to 2 and 1 to 7. Then next weekend, we're doing a summertime ghost story. It's called The K of G and it takes place a hot, sticky summer in Ohio with a group of teenagers dealing with a loss of their friends. And then we'll wrap it up on August 1st with Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman, which is an adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a bunch of Greek mythology about people or places that are in transformation. So are these free? Are you asking for donations? What's the scoop? They are free. We do ask, everyone has to register to be an audience member. So you go to our website, www.acmetheaterwithanre.net and you sign up and we will send you a password that will let you go to a secret page on our website where you can see the show. And, yeah, we're partnering with different nonprofits every week that we want to support. It's a hard time. We want to support other folks in our community. So we have a donate button for Acme and then we have a donate button for the nonprofit partner of the week and we encourage people to give as they are able. Great. And are you also offering workshops? I remember summers long ago dragging at least one of my kids to Acme camps over at, they were taught over at Cesar Chavez Elementary. So what do you have going on in the workshop realm this summer? Yeah. So we have day-long workshops this week. There's one this afternoon for age 11 to 13-year-olds starting at one o'clock. It's probably too late for people to squeeze that in today. And then on this Thursday, we have another workshop for ages 7 to 11. And these workshops are in preparation for the show that's coming this weekend. So students will get to work with the Acme actors and get a little sneak preview, see some of the costumes and props and get a chance to read some of the scenes that then they can come and see performed on Saturday. You are someone who has worked with youth in this way for a very long time. I guess I want to do a little check-in. How are the Acme youth doing? I mean, they're weathering this incredible experience here and their experience of it is going to be different than an adult's, for example. They still have to contend with, will school be starting? Will it not? What am I doing in my life, et cetera? How are the Acme kids doing? Yeah. It's a hard time. I think everybody is doing the best they can, but definitely struggling. Throughout the spring, we started doing a weekly Zoom cabaret where people would get a theme and they would have 24 hours to create a poem or music or any kind of creative expression. And so I felt like that was a really helpful kind of weekly check-in to see kind of where people are at and like listening to people's poems about, you know, how long the days feel now and how hard it can be to not see your friends and people were calling. I didn't know when I saw my best friend on Fifth Period that Friday that that would be the last time I would see her and I haven't seen her in months. It's hard on all of us, but I think particularly for young people, time moves at a different pace. We all feel like we've been here for centuries. I know. But I think for them, it really has on some level. Yeah, that social enrichment is extra important at their age. All right, well, sending out good thoughts to all of you. I promise to tune in for some of the summer offerings on Zoom and thank you for, you know, keeping it going. Thank you, Autumn, for keeping us all connected with your radio show. All right, take good care, Emily. Bye. That was Emily Henderson of Acme Theatre Company, AcmeTheatre.net We're here with an RE and they are fabulous, so you can check that out if you are so inspired. We're getting down to the end of the time. I want to give one last thing that the Yolo County Library is going strong with Pickup Service and they're expanding their hours. So go to YoloCountyLibrary.org and you can get all the information there about what you can access even as the library is still basically shut down. We thank them for their service. Thanks for tuning in. From the KDRT Studio, I'm Autumn Labé-Renault and this has been the COVID-19 Community Report.