California residents are calling the police on neighbors they hear coughing amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Riverside County police officers have seen their 15th instance of people reporting coughing neighbors to authorities, according to the Desert Sun. The Coachella Valley, Cathedral City, and Palm Springs departments have all been receiving calls from residents concerned their neighbors have the coronavirus because they heard them sneeze or cough.
Authorities are treating each call seriously and often send paramedics to the area if treatment is needed.
California Peace Officers Association President Neil Gallucci, however, warned that sending paramedics to a possibly infected patient’s house after a call from concerned neighbors raises the chances of first responders contracting the virus and spreading it to each other.
“If that happens enough, we worry about calls for service,” Gallucci said. ”We’re prepared to deal with issues that come up, but it’s a concern chiefs worry about.”
California has been a hotbed of the coronavirus outbreak. Johns Hopkins’s coronavirus tracker was reporting 870 confirmed cases in the state, with 16 deaths and zero recoveries as of Thursday morning.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday evening that he had asked the Department of Defense to deploy the Navy’s Mercy hospital ship and two mobile hospitals to California to ready the state for an expected surge in cases.
“If you assume for every individual that’s contracted the virus that they impact two individuals and we have hospitalization rates as high as — in some instances, we model — 20%, that would require a broader surge capacity of our healthcare delivery system, north of 19,500 additional beds,” he said.
