Newsom defends reopening rules even as COVID cases rise
SACRAMENTO — As COVID-19 cases in California continue to climb, and the death toll tops 5,000, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday defended his administration’s decision to allow counties to ease the stay-at-home order and other restrictions.
Newsom said COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state remain stable weeks after restrictions started to be modified, during a period that included the busy Memorial Day weekend, and maintained that the safeguards in place continue to effectively slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The governor said requiring residents to remain isolated would threaten their overall wellbeing, including physical and mental health and finances. More than 5.5 million Californians have applied for unemployment benefits during the pandemic.
“When you have people that are struggling and suffering with severe mental health and brain health issues, when people are not attending to their physical and emotional needs, those social determinants of health also must be considered,” Newsom said during a COVID-19 briefing Monday in Sacramento. “We have to recognize you can’t be in a permanent state where people are locked away — for months and months and months and months on end — to see lives and livelihoods completely destroyed, without considering the health impact of those decisions as well.”
Newsom in mid-March issued the nation’s first stay-at-home order, arguing at the time that the restrictions were necessary to slow the spread of the virus. The Democratic governor acknowledged the economic and public health consequences of a continued shutdown on Monday as he sought to justify his decision to allow businesses to open across California while deaths and confirmed cases are on the rise.
The governor said the willingness of Californians to heed that order ensured that the state’s hospital system would have enough capacity to care for those stricken with the virus. The shutdown period also allowed the state to procure enough ventilators and protective gear for health care workers should there be a surge in COVID-19 cases.
“We never made the case that the stay-at-home order was a permanent state. We wanted to buy time. We wanted to mitigate a peak and a spike,” Newsom said. “We ultimately wanted to save lives and prepare for a pandemic that needs to take its course until, ultimately, we have immunity, until we have a vaccine.”
Newsom has made it clear that adherence to the reopening standards is the responsibility of the counties — not the state — repeating his oft-used catchphrase “localism is determinative.”
“We put up guidelines, but guidelines don’t mean go,” Newsom said. “We put up guidelines that create a framework of how we believe we can reopen the economy safely, but we don’t prescribe when. We maintain because of the size, scope and scale of the state of California, that those decisions should be made with a local lens.”
Still, it was the Newsom administration that established the variance process in May, requiring counties to prove to the state that COVID-19 hospitalizations had stabilized and to ensure that medical centers, nursing homes and other essential services had adequate protective equipment and were prepared to accommodate and care for a surge in patients affected by the virus.
Thus far, the Newsom administration has allowed 52 of the state’s 58 counties to accelerate the reopening of their economies, including Los Angeles County, California’s biggest COVID-19 hot spot, with more than 2,900 confirmed deaths out of the roughly 5,083 reported statewide.
Despite those figures, L.A. County last week took another step toward easing stay-at-home rules, allowing gyms, fitness facilities, museums, swimming pools and hotels for leisure travel to reopen. Music, film and television production were also allowed to resume.
Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of California’s Health and Human Services Agency, said the Newsom administration is assisting 13 counties that have exceeded criteria set by the state to address the pandemic, including thresholds for hospitalizations and positive COVID-19 tests.