Sonoma Valley groups call for City, County to provide quarantine space

Speaking for “the many people who have no place to quarantine,” the Sonoma Valley Housing Group and Comida para Todos/Food for All have called on the Sonoma City Council and the County Board of Supervisors to “together provide emergency shelter for those infected with COVID-19 . . . and keep everyone safe.”

“We are receiving frantic phone calls from friends and neighbors, wondering where they can go to quarantine and who will feed their children if they do,” co-wrote Dave Ransom of the SVHG and Celeste Winders of CPT. The letter to the Board of Supervisors was shared on Sonomasun.com on August 3.“Some people have been sent home from work after testing positive and abandoned to fend on their own. We have nowhere to refer the sick friends and neighbors who are reaching out to us.”

The letter got a quick reply from Supervisor Board Chair Gorin, who said, according to Ransom, “I absolutely agree on the focus and concern,”  Do you know of a place in the valley that might want to rent our rooms for quarantine? Have you talked with owners of motels/hotels?”

Winders, mother of two working two jobs and delivering food to the hungry in the Springs, replied for CPT: “That sounds like the kind of information that the county leadership would have. . . . It seems that the solution, if hotels are not available, would be to create some mobile housing units placed in the Valley in an accessible location.”

Ransom replied for SVHG: Besides hotels, “another good bet may be to reopen the SDC dormitories. The buildings are sound. The two-to-a-bathroom bedrooms can be shifted to one-to-a-bathroom. There are nursing stations and kitchens in place. They are publicly owned. And, of course, the nearby community is used to such use.”