Virtual Board of Directors’ Meeting Scheduled for Saturday. The August Board of Directors’ Meeting is scheduled for Saturday, August 22, 2020, commencing at 9 a.m. via Zoom. All CAPS Members are welcome to attend the open-door session. All attendees must pre-register for the open-door session here. In order to allow for an efficient use of time, live member comments will not be accommodated. Instead, the CAPS Board of Directors is collecting member comments ahead of the meeting. You can submit your comments here. In order to ensure the most successful and productive meeting possible, attendees will be expected to abide by the Virtual Meeting Participant Expectations.

Worksite Meetings Before August 22nd Board of Directors’ Meeting. In advance of the Board of Directors’ Meeting, the CAPS Board of Directors will be hosting virtual “worksite” meetings to allow members a forum to hear from and ask questions of Board Members. The meeting will begin with a presentation by the Board covering recent events and the effects of the novel coronavirus (including bargaining for the Legislatively-required employee compensation reductions), and end with a Question and Answer session.

Due to scheduling considerations for members, and software limitations which allow a maximum of 1,000 attendees, multiple worksite meetings have been held this week, leading up to the Board of Directors’ Meeting. Worksite meetings for Districts 1 and 5 were held yesterday, and District 2 and 4 will be held today at noon. A worksite meeting for District 3 members will be held tomorrow, Friday, August 21st, at noon. Registration for this meeting is still open. If you are not a District 3 member but have missed the other worksite meetings, your registration will be considered if there are available spots to accommodate you.

Sign up here for the District 3 meeting. Attendees of the Virtual Worksite Meetings will be expected to abide by the Virtual Meeting Participant Expectations, as well.

News Briefs.  

Amid pressures of pandemic, Newsom quickly accepts health officer’s resignation – Gov. Gavin Newsom today refused to say the sudden resignation of his top public health officer was because of a series of technical glitches that led to a statewide underreporting of coronavirus cases, except to acknowledge the department was aware of the issue days before informing the governor and his executive team. Though Newsom wouldn’t cite the data glitch as the sole reason for Sunday’s resignation of Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the state Department of Public Health, the governor said it was appropriate for him to accept her resignation. The speed of the episode highlights the enormous pressure Newsom is under to steer the state through the pandemic. 

This Contact Tracer Is Fighting Two Contagions: The Virus and Fear – California Connected, the state’s program to track and contain the COVID-19 spread, has cost upwards of $30 million.  It includes a new online academy run by the University of California to train county and state employees as disease investigators, and a public education campaign to reassure Californians that their information is confidential.  The state enrolled 10,000 trainees by early July.  But California Connected has only contained the pandemic at the margins.  A fearful public has not cooperated when contacted, and the virus has outpaced testing capacities that often deliver results too late to be helpful.