A10 MONDAY, APRIL 6, 2020 LATIMES.COM
hospitable breeding
grounds for the virus, which
as of Sunday had killed at
least 348 California
residents. Bethany Slavic
Missionary Church in the
Sacramento suburb of Ran-
cho Cordova became the
epicenter of an outbreak
when more than six dozen of
its members tested positive
for COVID-19.
The Pentecostal church
stopped holding large
gatherings on March 18, ac-
cording to its website. But
public health officials last
week worried that church
members were still meeting
in private homes to conduct
services.
“It’s outrageous that this
is happening,” said Dr. Peter
Beilenson, the Sacramento
County public health direc-
tor. “Obviously there is free-
dom of religion, but when it’s
impacting public health as
this is, we have to enforce so-
cial distancing.”
In his resignation letter,
McCoy detailed the church’s
efforts to keep its members
safe. Though the church can
seat 400 people, congregants
who wished to take Com-
munion on Sunday after-
noon would cycle through 10
at a time over a two-hour pe-
riod after a morning
livestreamed service.
Those who didn’t want to
step inside the church drove
up behind it to take Com-
munion. Youth director Eli-
jah Swartz, 22, served plas-
tic cups of wine and bread
from a wooden plate atta-
ched to a long pole. After
each visit, he cleaned the
plate with a Clorox wipe. He
wore a mask and plastic
gloves.
“They were taking a lot of
precautions to make sure
everybody was safe,” said
Robyn Freeman, 39, a Tustin
resident who went to take
Communion with her
mother, who lives in West-
lake Village. She said the
criticism of the church was
unnecessary, noting that
there were signs inside ad-
vising congregants not to
hug or touch one another.
She was grateful for the
opportunity to pray.
“I just prayed for our
world, just that this epidem-
ic, this pandemic, would
cease soon,” she said.
Noel Hazard, 63, showed
up to express his displeasure
with the event, which wor-
ried him because it was at-
tended by members of his
own community. “They shop
at the same stores we do, the
same pharmacies, go to the
same gas stations,” he said.
“There is a risk.”
Thousand Oaks Mayor
Al Adam said McCoy, who
has served on the council
since 2015, was a “voice of
strength and healing” after
the city endured back-to-
back tragedies: the shooting
at the Borderline Bar & Grill
and the Woolsey fire.
“He recognizes the fact
that he has a calling here
that is in conflict with his du-
ties as a City Council mem-
ber, so to his credit he re-
signed,” Adam said. “I think
it was the right thing to do.”
Cross Culture Christian
Center, a small evangelical
church in Lodi, also contin-
ued to hold services despite
stay-at-home orders. The
pastor intended to convene
Sunday, despite San
Joaquin County health offi-
cials ordering the building
closed.
“We’re going to meet as
often as we can meet, and we
do believe that this right is
protected by the 1st Amend-
ment and should be consid-
ered essential,” the church’s
pastor, Jon Duncan, said in
an interview with Fox 40
News last week.
But on Sunday, Duncan
was greeted by police offi-
cers in the parking lot about
an hour before he planned to
hold an in-person service.
Duncan’s church leases
space in Bethel Open Bible
Church, which stopped
hosting in-person services
March 15. Bethel changed
the locks on the building to
prevent Duncan and his con-
gregants from entering, Lodi
Police Lt. Michael Manettitold The Times.
On March 25, Lodi police
officers came to one of Dun-
can’s Wednesday services
and told the pastor about
county and state orders
against public meetings.
In response, the church
retained a lawyer from the
Escondido-based National
Center for Law & Policy, a
conservative Christian non-
profit law center.
Attorney Dean R. Broyles
sent a six-page cease-and-
desist letter to the city of
Lodi, saying officers had
“disrupted a peaceful and
lawful worship service” and
demanding that the city re-
spect the church’s 1st
Amendment rights.
“The church intends to
meet this Sunday, and all fu-
ture Wednesdays and Sun-
days in the future,” the
March 27 letter said, notingthat the church has imple-
mented social distancing
measures and has asked the
elderly, sick and those with
compromised immune sys-
tems to stay at home.
On Friday, police officers
posted a notice from county
health officials on the
church building. The letter,
addressed to the pastor of
Bethel Open Bible Church,
said Cross Culture Christian
Center was continuing to
hold services at the facility
and ordered it and its park-
ing lot closed.
Violation of the emer-
gency order, the letter said,
was a misdemeanor punish-
able by fine or impris-
onment.
In an interview with The
Times, Broyles said that he
plans to send a letter Mon-
day to Gov. Gavin Newsom
and San Joaquin County of-
ficials asking that they fol-
low the lead of some other
states and declare houses of
worship as essential services
exemptfrom stay-at-home
orders.
Broyles said he is also
planning a federal civil
rights lawsuit “based on the
fact that the governor and
the county are violating my
client’s 1st Amendment
rights.”
The church, which has 60
to 80 attendees on a regular
Sunday, believes that the
Bible calls for churches to
meet together, in person.
And as of Sunday, Broyles
said, no congregants had
gotten sick.
“There’s a lot of things
the Bible commands us to
do, like love one another,
serve one another, encour-
age one another,” Broyles
said. “And those are difficult
to do, if not impossible, if
you’re not together.”
On Sunday, officers
spoke to Duncan on the side-
walk as congregants at-
tempted to pull into the
parking lot. Duncan spoke
briefly with the people in
each car and gave them
printed copies of Scripture,
Manetti said.
For every pastor who has
flouted stay-at-home or-
ders, there have been many
others who have adapted by
streaming services online.
President Trump
tweeted over the weekend
that he would be “tuning in”
Sunday to listen online to
Greg Laurie, a Southern
California megachurch pas-
tor.
And so, from his empty
Riverside campus at Har-
vest Christian Fellowship, a
church of 15,000 people that
would normally be bustling
Sunday, Laurie filmed a
greeting for “a very special
guest to our service today.”
“Thank you for talking
about the importance of the
church in your press confer-
ences,” Laurie said to
Trump. “I know you had
mentioned earlier that it
was your hope that maybe
we would be meeting in per-
son on Easter, and unfortu-
nately that has not worked
out. But the amazing thing is
we’re able to reach a lot of
people now online.”
Laurie called for people
to watch church services at
home, citing the Bible verse
Matthew 18:20: “For where
two or three are gathered
unto my name, there I am in
their midst.”Some pastors defy stay-at-home rules
ELIJAH SWARTZ,22, the youth director at Godspeak Calvary Chapel, serves Communion wine and bread
via a wooden plate to those congregants not wanting to enter the church. The plate is cleaned with Clorox.Photographs byCarolyn ColeLos Angeles Times[Pulpit,from A1]
PEOPLE practice social distancing while waiting to take Communion at Godspeak Calvary. Nearby, in the
parking lot, protesters honked their horns, disturbed that the church was flouting stay-at-home orders.ON SATURDAY, Pastor Rob McCoy resigned from
the Thousand Oaks City Council, saying he planned
to violate orders that deem churches nonessential.WASHINGTON — As
the first alarms sounded in
early January that an out-
break of a novel coronavirus
in China might ignite a glob-
al pandemic, the Trump ad-
ministration squandered
nearly two months that
could have been used to bol-
ster the federal stockpile of
critically needed medical
supplies and equipment.
Areview of federal pur-
chasing contracts by the As-
sociated Press shows that
federal agencies largely
waited until mid-March to
begin placing bulk orders of
N95 respirator masks, me-
chanical ventilators and
other equipment needed by
front-line healthcare work-
ers.
By that time, hospitals in
several states were treating
thousands of infected pa-
tients without adequate
equipment and were plead-
ing for shipments from the
Strategic National Stock-
pile. That federal cache of
supplies was created more
than 20 years ago to help
bridge gaps in the medical
and pharmaceutical supply
chains during a national
emergency.
Now, three months into
the crisis, that stockpile is
nearly drained, just as the
numbers of patients needing
critical care is surging. Some
state and local officials re-
port receiving broken venti-
lators and decade-old rotted
masks.
“We basically wasted two
months,” Kathleen Sebelius,
who served as secretary of
the Department of Health
and Human Services during
the Obama administration,
told AP.
HHS did not respond to
questions about why federal
officials waited to order
medical supplies until
stocks were running criti-
cally low. But President
Trump and his appointees
have urged state and local
governments, and hospitals,
to buy their own masks and
breathing machines.
“The notion of the federal
stockpile was it’s supposed
to be our stockpile,” Jared
Kushner, the president’s
son-in-law and advisor, said
Thursday at a White House
briefing. “It’s not supposed
to be state stockpiles that
they then use.”Because of the fractured
federal response to
COVID-19, governors say
they’re now bidding against
federal agencies and one an-
other for scarce supplies,
driving up prices.
“You now literally will
have a company call you up
and say, ‘Well, California just
outbid you,’ ” New York Gov.
Andrew Cuomo said Tues-
day. “It’s like being on EBay
with 50 other states, bidding
on a ventilator.”
For nearly a month,
Trump rebuffed calls from
Cuomo and others to use his
authority under the Defense
Production Act to order
companies to increase pro-
duction of ventilators and
personal protective equip-
ment.
Trump finally relented
last week, saying he will or-
der companies to ramp up
production of critical sup-
plies. By then, the U.S. had
the world’s highest number
of confirmed cases of
COVID-19.
Trump spent January
and February playing down
the threat from the virus. As
the World Health Organiza-
tion on Jan. 30 declared the
outbreak a global publichealth emergency, Trump
assured the American peo-
ple that the virus was “very
well under control.”
On Feb. 24, the White
House sent Congress an ini-
tial $2.5-billion funding
requestto address the co-
ronavirus outbreak. The
next day, the Centers for Dis-
ease Control and Prevention
warned that the virus was
spreading quickly in the U.S.
and predicted that disrup-
tions to daily life could be se-
vere.
At the start of the crisis,
an HHS spokeswoman said
the Strategic National
Stockpile had about 13 mil-
lion N95 respirator masks.
That’s just a fraction of what
hospitals need to protect
their workers.
Federal contracting re-
cords show that HHS placed
a $4.8-million order March 12
for N95 masks from 3M, the
largest U.S.-based manufac-
turer, which had ramped up
production weeks earlier in
response to the pandemic.
HHS followed up with a $173-
million order on March 21,
but those contracts don’t re-
quire 3M to start making de-
liveries to the national stock-
pile until the end of April.On Thursday, Trump
threatened in a tweetto “hit
3M hard” through a Defense
Production Act order, say-
ing the company “will have a
big price to pay!” He gave no
specifics.
HHS declined last week
to say how many N95 masks
it has on hand. But as of
Tuesday, the White House
said more than 11.6 million
had been distributed to
state and local governments
from the national stockpile
—about 90% of what was
available at the start of the
year.
Experts are worried the
U.S. will also soon exhaust
its supply of ventilators.
The White House said
Tuesday that it had already
distributed nearly half the
breathing machines in the
stockpile, which at the be-
ginning of March were 16,660.
An additional 2,425 were out
for maintenance.
It wasn’t untilMarch 27
that Trump finally said he
would use that power to or-
der General Motors to begin
manufacturing ventilators
—work the company had al-
ready announced was
underway.
Cuomo predicted on Fri-day that New York would
run out within days. With
the death rate surging, the
governor vowed to use his
authorityto seize ventila-
tors, masks and protective
gear from private hospitals
that aren’t utilizing them.
Meanwhile, federal
health authorities are lower-
ing standards.
New guidancefrom the
U.S. Food and Drug Admin-
istration allows hospitals to
use emergency ventilators
typically used in ambulan-
ces and anesthesia gas
machines in place of stand-
ard ventilators.
The CDC advised health-
care workers last month to
use homemade masks or
bandannas if they run out of
proper gear. Across the
country, hospitals have is-
sued urgent pleas for volun-
teers who know how to sew.
Trump suggested that
Americans without access
to factory-produced masks
could cover their faces with
scarves.
“A scarf is highly recom-
mended by the profession-
als,” Trump said Wednes-
day. “I think, in a certain
way, a scarf is better. It’s ac-
tually better.”U.S. ‘wasted’ months of pandemic prep time
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