'Winter has Come'

Ian Hoffman The face was fresh but the message was familiar: Humboldt County's COVID-19 case count is spiking at an increasingly rapid rate and may spiral out of control if residents don't begin wearing facial coverings fastidiously when out in public. Hours before he would be unanimously voted in as Humboldt County's new health officer, replacing Teresa Frankovich who stepped back into a part-time, supporting role with Public Health earlier this month, Ian Hoffman addressed the board of supervisors for the first time and struck a similar note to his predecessor's increasingly dire warnings. Humboldt County, he said, had kept the virus at bay for months through compliance with health orders and aggressive testing and contact tracing efforts that quickly identified and isolated case clusters, which were long driven by travel. But the current spike, which had seen 239 cases confirmed through the first eight days of December on the heels of a record-shattering November, as the