City Manager Briefs City Council on Latest COVID-19 Cases

City Manager Luke Serpa gives updates on the current Covid-19 cases to city council on Monday, Oct. 5, 2020. (Jorge Rodriguez/Clovis Roundup)

City Manager Luke Serpa gave an update on the latest Covid-19 cases in Clovis at the city council meeting on October 5.

Serpa reported that positive cases in the city are on a down trend, but still well above the numbers before Memorial Day weekend. Serpa also mentioned that the county has moved to the red tier, but the data shows that there is an upward trend of cases within the last week.

As of Monday in the city of Clovis there were two COVID-19 related deaths in the past week. Serpa also mentioned that within the last week hospitalizations due to the virus have increased significantly, but hopes it will drop down by next week.

As of last week the positivity rate in the county of Fresno was 4.9 percent and the number of new cases was 6.2 per every 100,000 population.

Serpa also mentioned the state has added a new California Equity Metric which takes into account the cities in the county with the high number of infected. This will make it so that the less represented communities in the county don’t get overlooked.

“Clovis is one of the areas that is more fortunate, but it all comes down to social economic demographics,” Serpa said. “There is a number of factors that go into determining the rating per census tract so we’ll see how that affects the count.”

Councilmember Flores commented that due to the equity standard the county might not be able to go down a tier. Flores said that there are some cities in the county with a high number of percentages that can keep the county from moving tiers.

“Until those cities are equal to us at 1.6 percent we won’t move down and we might go back up,” Flores said.

Bessinger mentioned that in future workshops there might be a discussion on ways for Clovis to be good neighbors and help other communities keep their infection numbers down.

Jorge Rodriguez has a passion for journalism and wants to bring the community information and great stories. After high school Jorge joined the U.S. Army and while in active duty he was deployed twice to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. While in college he worked for the Fresno City College Rampage and the Fresno State Collegian newspapers. He graduated from Fresno State in 2019 with a degree in print journalism.