71 infected with coronavirus at Sacramento church

[SolarpunkFan]

The Sacramento Bee

Editor’s note: This story was updated Friday with comments from Bethany Slavic Missionary Church.

One church in Sacramento County is now the epicenter of a major outbreak of coronavirus, and frustrated county officials say church leaders are refusing to listen to their demands to stop fellowship meetings.

Seventy-one members of the Bethany Slavic Missionary Church near Rancho Cordova or people associated with congregation members have been afflicted with the virus, county officials say, making this one of the larger outbreak clusters in the country. One parishioner has died, officials said, and the pastor is sick.

Sacramento health officials say they have made several attempts via phone and in person this week to talk to church leaders, but have been rebuffed. The cases involve residents of Yolo and Placer counties as well.

“They’ve basically told us to leave them alone,” Sacramento County health chief Dr. Peter Beilenson said on Thursday morning. “This is extremely irresponsible and dangerous for the community.”

Beilenson said the church has stopped its weekly main services, but church members have continued to meet in groups in people’s homes for fellowship meetings. Church officials have told a county nurse that those meetings are important in their community.

Beilenson and county officials say they are granting The Sacramento Bee’s request to reveal the name of the church to help warn other community members who associate with church congregants, in hopes that those people will stay away. Officials said they hope that public disclosure will put pressure on church members to stop their gatherings.

“This is a very serious public health matter,” Beilenson said.

Several church members, however, told The Bee they are in fact taking the virus matter seriously.

Bethany Slavic Missionary Church issued a press release Friday saying Sacramento County’s health official comments on Thursday are “believed to be inaccurate and falsely place(s) the emphasis on this church.” The church’s public information office did not respond to requests to speak Friday, but its statement noted that the church closed March 18 and moved all meetings to online sessions.

The county responded with its own statement Friday: “While we know that the church as a whole has ceased to meet and the leadership is hosting online services, we have been told by multiple sources that there are groups that continue to meet in homes, despite the public health order to not gather with anyone outside of household members. These gatherings have been directly linked to the clusters of cases in the community.”

The county also said it does not “condone ridicule, hatred or violence” toward any church or anyone. Its goal, it said, is to “mitigate the spread of COVID-19 among county residents.”

Church administrator Viktor Lyulkin said Thursday that all services had stopped more than two weeks ago, and that he was not aware of any small gatherings among church members in homes.

He also denied rebuffing county health officials.

“They contacted the office and we told them we have no services here,” he said. “It’s many, many calls.

“We’re looking to not spread the coronavirus.”

Church member Daniel Nechitaylo said the congregation initially began limiting meetings to small groups of 10 or fewer, but as far as he knows, those meetings stopped as well as people became aware of the seriousness of the virus. “We took it really seriously,” he said.

Bethany Slavic occupies a sprawling 20-acre plot of land on Jackson Road, just east of Bradshaw Road. Sacramento County property records show its buildings are roughly 150,000 square feet – roughly one-third the size of Sleep Train Arena.

Photographs on the church website show a worship hall packed with hundreds of people. Services are available in English and Russian.

Slavic churches stopped services

Nikolay Bugriyev, head of the Slavic International Pastors Association in Sacramento, which has 103 Slavic churches, said Bethany Slavic and all other churches stopped in-person services two weeks ago.

He and another Slavic community leader told The Bee that Bethany Slavic’s bishop, the Rev. Adam Bondaruk, has been hospitalized with coronavirus, as have other church officials.

But he said all the churches had obeyed orders to halt services.

”They stopped two weeks ago,” he said. “Two weeks ago when the order came, we stopped everywhere.”

Florin Ciuriuc, a Slavic community leader, said the church is the largest Slavic congregation in the United States, with 3,500 members and a total attendance at various services of up to 10,000 when children and friends are counted.

“They have people traveling from all kinds of states, they have visitors from everywhere,” he said.

He added that large churches all stopped having services, but that he has been hearing that some smaller operations may have quietly continued in small offices or homes.

Ciuriuc said he was so concerned he obtained a video of county officials, including Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, ordering residents to shelter in place so he could impress upon some in his community the gravity of the situation.

”Some other pastors from (Bethany Slavic) are in the hospital, this is not a joke,” he said. “This is the most important time in my lifetime as a community leader.

“I feel that I need to be able to stop this religious fanaticism. God can hear me praying where I am right now. I don’t need to go to a place that’s prohibited.”

Ruslan Gurzhiy in a Thursday interview with The Bee said he spent seven years as a volunteer at Bethany Slavic. He said members of the Sacramento Slavic community are “really religious.”

“The only place to gather, for them, is the church,” he said.

He also pointed out a major sanitary concern related to the church: Bethany Slavic’s special, monthly Pentecostal services involving mass sharing of church wine.

“There are 3,000 people drinking from a couple of chalices. They drink from one chalice — all hundreds of people.”

Another California church defies order

A church in Lodi is in a similar standoff with authorities, sending the city a “cease and desist” letter after police officers entered the church during a Wednesday evening service March 25.

A lawyer for Cross Culture Christian Center said the First Amendment protects the church’s right to hold services.

“The state simply does not have the jurisdiction to unilaterally shut down all church services indefinitely as Governor Gavin Newsom has done,” said attorney Dean Broyles of the National Center for Law & Policy, a San Diego organization devoted to religious freedom issues. “Under the U.S. Constitution, that important decision belongs to the discretion of the church alone.”

In the cease and desist letter, Broyles said the Lodi church “intends to continue to meet this Sunday and all future Wednesdays and Sundays.” He told The Bee that about 30 congregants were in attendance when police officers showed up. He said no church members have contracted COVID-19 “to our knowledge.”

Broyles added that Cross Culture put in place “recommended health and safety measures,” including social distancing, and advised its elderly and sick congregants to watch services on Facebook Live.

“With the health and safety standards we have put in place, we are a much lower risk of coronavirus spread than Walmart with its narrow aisles and everyone touching everything,” said Pastor Jon Duncan in a statement released by Broyles’ organization.

City spokesman Jeff Hood said officers followed up on their visit to the church this week by posting a “notice of public nuisance” on the church’s main entrance. The notice included references to the shutdown orders issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom and San Joaquin County.

Hood added that city officials have been huddling with the San Joaquin County counsel and district attorney “to ensure that the church complies with the order.” He wouldn’t elaborate on possible enforcement steps.

A constitutional law scholar at the McGeorge School of Law, Leslie Jacobs, said the state has broad powers to halt any large gatherings in an emergency like this. As far the churches are concerned, “the only right is to be treated equally, like everybody else,” she said. The fact all large gatherings have been prohibited gives the churches little room to maneuver legally, she said.

Jacobs said the government’s authority could wane as the crisis eases. “What happens if less of a spread (of the virus) is going on? Is it still permissible to prohibit services? This is an ongoing situation,” she said.
Clusters of coronavirus

The virus is highly contagious and a person can be carrying it for anywhere from two to 12 days before symptoms set in, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The virus cases at the church represent 22 percent of known coronavirus cases in the county. The county has reported 341 cases and nine deaths as of Wednesday.

County health officials said this week that one-third of coronavirus cases in Sacramento are tied to religious organizations.

The cluster of cases at the church is among the largest tied to a single group in the nation.

More than 100 people in the city of New Rochelle, outside New York City, were infected. Many of the cases were tied to an attorney and a synagogue he attended.

In Washington State, 45 people have coronavirus and two have died after members were infected at a choir practice. About 20 people who attended a funeral in Albany, Georgia, were infected – and now nearly 500 people in the county have the virus. And several people who attended a Los Angeles-area birthday party at a golf club last month have the virus.

Closer to home, five members of the Faith Presbyterian Church in the Greenhaven neighborhood of Sacramento were infected. Two have died. But church officials note that they halted in-person church services after March 8 and fully shut down their buildings on March 12, one full week before Sacramento County officials issued a shelter-in-place order.

I'd post a surprised Pikachu image if I could be bothered.

[Solauren]

Shutting a place like that should be fairly easy.

Just figure out what crimes they are committing (if any), arrest them on those grounds, and then close the church as a possible biohazard.
If they are not committing any crimes, order them closed based on public health, and if they stay open, THEN arrest them.

[Ralin]

Reminds me of a church Wong posted about on Facebook awhile back: https://www.bamapolitics.com/51007/boaz ... o-service/

Our top priority is not primarily the safety and health of our members, but that they advance in faith and godliness even on occasions at the expense of their safety and well-being.

Yeah

Shutting a place like that should be fairly easy.

Just figure out what crimes they are committing (if any), arrest them on those grounds, and then close the church as a possible biohazard.
If they are not committing any crimes, order them closed based on public health, and if they stay open, THEN arrest them.

If people turn out in the streets to protest over their ~religious freedom~ being violated or to physically block the police from arresting their pastors, that's also a possible biohazard.

[Solauren]

That's why you arrest them as well.

Also, you point out that nothing is preventing the pastors from having online/virtual meetings, which would also let them 'spread the word of god to those that would not be able to hear it'

[LadyTevar]

This is not SLAM, this is more News&Politics. Off to the right forum you go!