CALIFORNIA ENDS COVID EMERGENCY
Last of pandemic provisions expire quietly as virus still circulates
The last remnants of California's COVID-19 state of emergency expired Tuesday with little fanfare from the governor who proclaimed it almost three years ago, gave daily briefings at the height of the pandemic and issued nearly 600 virus-related provisions along the way.
So are Californians ready to move on?
After 100,000 deaths and more than 11 million cases, the Golden State may no longer be under a state of emergency. But with infections once again on the rise and masked faces easy to spot in cafes and stores around the Bay Area, it is clear COVID-19 won't be turned off with the flip of a switch.
As many as half the shoppers, most of the pharmacists and all the checkstand staff at the Safeway supermarket off Oakland's Broadway Avenue on Tuesday wore face coverings that now are optional but once were a flashpoint of division over individual freedom and public health. Among them
was Nancy Olsen, a Piedmont retiree whose health issues make her more vulnerable to illness and worried about ending the emergency.
“I am afraid of getting any avoidable illness,” Olsen said.
Khadija Zanotto, owner of Zanotto's grocery in San Jose's Willow Glen neighborhood, doesn't feel a need to mask up anymore in her store, where about 1 in 10 shoppers wore coverings Tuesday, though she's keeping the plexiglass dividers up at the checkout stands.
“It seems like we returned back to what is going to be normal for the foreseeable future,” Zanotto said. “You can wear masks, you don't have to wear a mask. We're at a point where it seems like the variants out there aren't as dangerous as they
initially were.”
And that's one of the biggest factors behind the state of emergency expiring. With the current omicron variants of the virus and widely available vaccines, COVID-19 isn't killing people as it once did. In the spring of 2020, more than 2,200 a day were dying of COVID-19 across the U.S., a figure that climbed to more than 3,300 a day in February 2021 and hit more than 2,400 a day last February. That figure is now about 340 a day.
Still, the U.S. death rate remains higher than at the pandemic's low point in July 2021, and at the current rate it would kill more than 125,000 over a year, two and a half times the toll of the worst influenza seasons of the last decade.
At this point, more than 9 in 10 Americans have had COVID-19 at least once, and 7 in 10 have at least had the primary vaccine series. But that hasn't stopped the virus from circulating: Wastewater data — perhaps the best gauge of the virus's activity now that most people use home tests and many don't report their infections — suggest the virus is circulating widely in the Bay Area's biggest counties.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a proclamation Tuesday ending the emergency state that California weathered the pandemic with a lower death rate and less economic harm than other states. He first declared the COVID-19 state of emergency March 4, 2020, following the state's first confirmed death from the disease as a cruise ship from Hawaii bearing sick passengers and crew was headed for San Francisco and later became the first to issue a statewide stay-home order.
The emergency declaration gave Newsom sweeping powers to issue mandates and bypass many state laws. Newsom has since issued 74 executive orders with 596 operative provisions. But only 27 provisions still were in effect through midnight Feb. 28, mostly loosening state rules to streamline health care delivery and response.
Public health experts largely agree that California's aggressive action helped save lives — 39 states have higher COVID-19 death rates. “We should be very grateful,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. “We have one of the lowest rates of death in the country.”
But Newsom drew sharp criticism from critics over the course of the pandemic for extended school and business closures, mask and vaccine mandates and maintaining the emergency state longer than most other states.
“Today California's State of Emergency ends after 1,091 days,” Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin, said Tuesday on Twitter. “Rarely in our history has a single person caused so much harm to so many.”
California was among eight states Tuesday that still had statewide COVID-19 states of emergency in effect, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy. Those in Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Georgia, Delaware and Rhode Island expire later in March unless renewed. Illinois' will expire May 11, along with the federal COVID-19 public health emergency. In Texas, the declaration prevents local governments from enforcing mask, vaccine or business-closure mandates.
California's most contentious pandemic policies such as the indoor face mask mandate ended a year ago. Swartzberg said most people will hardly notice the state of emergency's end.
“From a public health perspective, many of the critical changes that were facilitated by the state of emergency have been enshrined into law,” Swartzberg said. “It won't be going back to where we were before the pandemic started.”
With the end of the federal public health emergency May 11, private insurers won't have to cover COVID-19 tests without cost sharing. The administration has said it will ensure vaccines and treatments are accessible and not prohibitively expensive for uninsured Americans but hasn't provided details.
“For those with financial resources, the absence of California's state of emergency will hardly be noticed,” Swartzberg said. “For those without sufficient financial resources, this will impose an additional hardship — a theme that has played out throughout the pandemic.”