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Places of worship will be allowed to hold services and retail stores can allow customers inside starting June 1 in San Mateo County — as long as a health and safety plan that ensures social distancing is in place, according a newly revised health order issued today by San Mateo County Health Officer Dr. Scott Morrow.

Also, beaches may operate as normally, without previous access and activity restrictions, as long as beachgoers follow social distancing and face covering protocols, the county said.

Attendance at religious services and cultural ceremonies is limited to a maximum of 25 percent of building capacity or 100 individuals, whichever is lower, and eating and drinking inside the facilities are prohibited as are after-service gatherings, according to the new order. Safety plans must be in place, such as markings of six-foot increments to ensure social distancing among congregants.

Retail stores providing in-store shopping must have a health and safety plan that identifies the number of shoppers that can be accommodated in a way that allows maintains social distancing.

More detail on the changes to retail stores and religious services can be accessed here.

Guidelines for car parades and protest gatherings are outlined here.

“These modifications seek to increase the immunity of the population slowly and methodically, while minimizing death. We are trying to keep equity in mind and minimizing economic damage, while not overloading the health care system,” said Dr. Morrow. “The virus continues to circulate in our community, and the increase in interactions among people that these modifications allow is likely to spread the virus at a higher rate. The risk of exposure to COVID-19 looms large for all of us. The public and open businesses need to fully do their part to minimize transmission of the virus.”

For more information, visit the San Mateo County Health site here.

Trash piled up, cars parked haphazardly on neighborhood streets, visitors trampled through sensitive habitat, accessed stairs that are under construction and used the lawns as restrooms. They’re the kind of activities that might shut a place down. But in Half Moon Bay, bad behavior by visitors has prompted the city to reopen parking lots and public restrooms at beaches that have been closed during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place period. Their reopening starts Saturday, May 30.

“It is hoped and expected that providing these services will alleviate some of the intensity of the problems during the influx of visitors last weekend,” the city said in a statement Thursday.

The statement added, “Along with the community members, the City of Half Moon Bay found these behaviors to be entirely unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, Pacifica Police Chief Daniel Steidle announced that beach parking will also reopen Saturday “in anticipation of a new San Mateo County Health Officer Health Order expected to be issued” today that will loosen prohibitions related to the beach.

Half Moon Bay officials urged visitors and locals to socially distance and to visit the beaches for activities allowed in the health order, such as running, walking, water sports or other physical activity. Only hours later, however, the San Mateo County health officer announced a newly revised order that allows all normal beach activities beyond exercise.

“The reopening of parking lots and restrooms applies to all beaches within Half Moon Bay, from approximately Cañada Verde Creek in the south, to Pillar Point Harbor in the north,” the city said. “Other coastside jurisdictions are exploring similar actions.”

Photo credit: City of Half Moon Bay

This story has been updated to reflect a newly revised public health order released hours after the publication of this story.

On Tuesday, May 26, The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors voted to extend the county’s moratorium on evictions due to non-payment of rent from May 31 to June 30 for both residential and commercial tenants who have been affected by the hardships of COVID-19.

This extension gives families and tenants “a roadmap to work under during these very difficult situations” and at the least gives people a bit more time to get things back to normal, assuming that the health order cooperates, Supervisor Warren Slocum said.

In order to receive the 90-day extension, tenants will need to provide written documentation demonstrating financial hardship due to COVID-19 or the Shelter-In-Place order to their landlord. If tenants continue to experience hardship and they can prove continued hardship beyond 90 days, they will be given an additional 90 days, for a total six months, per the new extension.

The Board of Supervisors discussed the possibility of extending the evictions ban even longer than June 30 and plan to reevaluate the extension during their meeting on June 23^rd.

Once the emergency ordinance expires, the tenant is required to repay missed rent within 90 days. Those unable to pay the entirety of missed rent within 90 days and can demonstrate continued financial hardship may be granted an additional 30 days repeatedly, up to a total of 180 days, the ordinance states.

For more information on the current San Mateo County eviction ban extension, visit here.

By Jill Singleton

Author’s note: Back in 2002, I began researching a magazine article to commemorate the mid-century polio epidemic, but gave it up until a few weeks ago when I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal, by David M. Oshinsky, author of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning history book: “Polio: An American Crusade.” The book’s first four words: “San Angelo in 1949” dropped my jaw and kickstarted this piece. Sadly, all those quoted are no longer here to object to my errors.

In the late 1940s, American life never looked brighter. Returning veterans were marrying their sweethearts, buying homes, creating that Baby Boom. The economy rocked. New vaccines were limiting viral diseases such as smallpox, diphtheria, yellow fever. Penicillin, though in scarce supply, worked miracles.

But not all was well. Each summer, a wave of parental terror would spread across the country— with the recurrence of poliomyelitis, or polio, the scourge also known as infantile paralysis.

“People used to dread summer,” recalled my father’s later medical partner, Charles Ross, M.D., who was a pediatric resident in Buffalo, New York, during the worst polio years.

Pools closed. Children stayed indoors. Movie houses, bowling alleys and churches shut their doors. Nobody knew how polio spread. Some thought it may have been carried by flies, mosquitos or tainted water. Some towns sprayed DDT daily. Handles were removed from drinking faucets. Privies were outlawed and public restrooms were closed. Some people didn’t trust the air in their tires. Nobody talked to strangers.

Unlike Covid-19, which attacks the elderly and infirm, polio preyed mostly upon the young. Like Covid-19, there was no known cure or prevention.

Hardest hit were small and isolated towns, including the one where I was born, San Angelo, Texas.

This story was originally published in the May edition of Climate Magazine. To view the magazine online, click on this link.

The Plague of Polio

In 1949, San Angelo, population 45,000, had the highest per capita incidence in one of the nation’s worst polio years. My sister was born at the height of the plague and at the time, my father, Jack W. Singleton, M.D., was the only pediatrician around.

“Parents were besides themselves,” Dr. Ross remembered. What made polio so terrifying was that, although 72 percent of cases were asymptomatic and 24 percent of the infections presented in mild form, “when it hit hard people became essentially helpless.” Mostly, people feared their children becoming permanently paralyzed and requiring one-on-one care for their entire lives.

Only a few anecdotes of the polio epidemics survive in my family. My oldest brother remembered my father, hearing that four pediatric iron lungs had been sent to the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston, called and said he was coming to get one, that day. With my brother (then about six) riding shotgun, he drove the 850-mile round-trip from West Texas to the Gulf Coast in our 1948 Plymouth coupe.

“I still don’t know how we wrestled that thing in the back of the car,” my brother said. What, I now wonder, were my father’s thoughts returning with the precious cargo? That summer half of San Angelo’s 160 hospital beds had polio sufferers. There would now be eight iron lungs. Would this be enough?

In 1949, “close to 40,000 cases were reported in the United States, one for every 3,775 people. San Angelo saw 420 cases, one for every 124 inhabitants, of whom 84 were permanently paralyzed and 28 died,” according to Oshinsky’s “Polio: An American Crusade.”

Like Covid-19, polio presented as a mild flu-like illness with low-grade fever, headache, sore throat, stiff neck, muscle weakness and stomachache. Most people didn’t even see a doctor and recovered in four to five days. A few patients would develop meningitis and one out of 200, mild paralysis. Often, those who recovered were left permanently weakened with undeveloped limbs and sometimes curved spines.

“(Those paralyzed) would lose the use of their legs first, then their arms. And if it was really severe, chest muscles and they went into respirators … and stayed all their lives,” Dr. Ross recalled. “Those that died, died fairly quickly of respiratory failure; usually they gave out in the first 24 hours. As medical people, we hated polio, because there was not a hell of a lot you could do.”

Nationwide, 20 percent of those paralyzed died. In San Angelo, it was more than 33 percent.

A Call for Help

San Angelo’s plight was so extreme, calls for help were answered from across the country. Stanford University sent a team of research doctors, as did Columbia, and my father’s alma mater in Chicago. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (an organization started by Franklin Delano Roosevelt — himself a polio victim — and later known as the March of Dimes), served as a clearinghouse for much of the medical assistance. The Red Cross marshalled equipment and materiel while the Army Air Corps at nearby Goodfellow Field flew in blankets, medication, beds, respirators and other equipment.

The town’s black and Hispanic communities were hardest hit. Unusual for that time and place, polio wards were racially integrated at Shannon Memorial Hospital, an up-to-date, regional medical center, and free care was given all who needed it. Scores of townspeople volunteered day and night to care for the sick, especially when thunderstorms knocked out power and iron lungs had to be hand-pumped for hours on end.

My father worked around the clock, days at a time. At one point, my mother, Pat, recalled telling him: “Jack, you haven’t seen your own children for two weeks. You need to eat dinner at home tonight, then go back to the hospital.”

Extremely contagious, polio was transmitted through both the fecal/oral route and airborne droplets. Unlike Covid-19, polio was not new to the world. Egyptian hieroglyphics depict people with polio leg. Why this endemic virus became epidemic in the 20th century was a mystery unraveled when three strains were identified and epidemiologists linked transmission to factors as unrelated as modern sanitation and population mobility.

Polio Shots

Thanks to enormous, competing research efforts, polio largely disappeared after 1955 when vaccines were introduced. The first was a killed-virus developed by Jonas Salk. Boomer kids got a series of three Salk injections and annual boosters that left characteristic round scars on the upper arm. Then in the early 1960s, Albert Sabin’s attenuated live vaccine arrived in a sugar cube with a little red dot.

By the late 1990s, these vaccines, and a global eradication campaign funded by the March of Dimes, Rotary International, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Health Organization, confined the disease to three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

Our family left San Angelo in early 1953, when my father was recalled into the Navy during the Korean War. We came to California in 1954, and he practiced for 30 years in the East Bay. There were four of us kids in the family (Michael, Bill, Anne and me.) Before he died in 1995, my father left us an oral history, saying:

“I have loved my profession and I was lucky to be in it during the time of the greatest advancement in the history of medicine: the control or eradication of most infectious disease …. organ transplants … chemotherapy … heart surgery … (that) has saved countless lives. As I look back, I realize how fortunate I have been.”

Dr. Ralph Chase, a pediatrician who took over my dad’s San Angelo practice in 1953, wrote a local history of the epidemic, concluding with its greatest lesson:

“One should not look upon treatment but on prevention of disease as the most important mission of the physician and other health-care professional.”

Looking through the lens of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s humbling to think how a tiny half-beast, a rudimentary, incomplete life form can bring our country, and the world, to a standstill. It’s not the first time, and probably won’t be the last.

Jill Singleton, a longtime Bay Area resident, spent nearly 25 years as Cargill’s public relations representative in the Bay Area, following stints as a government official and newspaper reporter.

The DMV office at 425 N. Amphlett Blvd. in San Mateo is among 46 DMV offices across the state set to reopen on Thursday. The DMV initially reopened 25 offices earlier this month.

The reopened offices, temporarily closed since March, will be open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with the exception of opening at 9 a.m. Wednesday.

Also operating as of Thursday will be DMV offices in South San Francisco, Daly City, Santa Clara and San Francisco.

All locations will assist customers with a current appointment at the specific office, and transactions will be limited to those requiring an in-person visit. DMV encourages customers to use its expanded online services.

The offices will deploy new measures to promote safety in the COVID-19 era. Employees are expected to maintain physical distancing while serving customers, among other protocols. Transactions that can be accomplished in person include:

• Paying registration for a vehicle impounded because of registration-related issues
• Reinstating a suspended or revoked driver license
• Applying for a reduced-fee or no-fee identification card
• Processing commercial driver license transactions
• Applying for a disabled person parking placards (this can also be done by mail using the REG 195 form)
• Adding an ambulance certificate or firefighter endorsement to a driver license
• Verifying a transit training document to drive a transit bus
• Processing DMV Express customers for REAL ID transactions, if time and space allow

The DMV also announced additional extensions to noncommercial driver licenses and permits for drivers without a suspended license. Drivers over age 70 with a noncommercial license that expires in June or July will receive a 120 day extension. If your license expired in March, April, or May, licenses will be valid until July 31.  Drivers younger than 69 with a noncommercial license that expires between March and July will receive an extension until July 31. Driver license permits expiring in July or August will be extended six months or 24 months from the date of the application, depending on which is earlier. All commercial licenses, endorsements, and learners permits that expire between March and June will remain valid until June 30.

Click here to renew your license online.

Photo: California Dept. of Motor Vehicles Director Steve Goron chats with employees at the San Jose Driver License Processing Center. (Credit: DMV)

Since opening in March, the public donation drop-off station near the Maple Street Correctional Center in Redwood City collected over 200,000 gloves, 5,000 individual N95 masks and KN95 masks, 1,650 face coverings and nearly 13,000 surgical masks to support COVID-19 frontliners. Opened to respond to a shortage of personal protective equipment, or PPE, the donation site has now closed as donations have tapered, “likely because residents had donated all available items,” according to the county.

“Closing the drop-off site allows staff to be redirected to higher priorities,” the county said in a statement Tuesday.

The county thanked the community for the generosity, saying the smaller individual donations augmented large-scale donations by private and government entities and county-bought PPE, according to the statement.

“The outpouring of compassion and charity shown by San Mateo County residents is inspiring and a true testament that we are a county of people who take care of each other,” said Parks Director Nicholas Calderon, who managed the drop-off site. “To see residents take the time to gather items, drive to the site and hand them over with a smile was heartwarming.”

Still have PPE to donate? You can do so by contacting the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) watch officer at (650) 779-9375.

Photo credit: San Mateo County