Time to hold the line, not relax COVID-19 rules

Gavin Newsom never seems to learn. A year into the pandemic, with the threat looming of another resurgence, the governor has once again suddenly and illogically relaxed rules for reopening the economy.

His timing is abhorrent. We’re at the beginning of the race to vaccinate the nation before new variants take hold and potentially undermine the fight against the coronavirus. After a rapid national decline since early January, daily cases have leveled off at roughly the same numbers we saw during the peak of the summer surge. We’re nowhere near declaring victory.

“If things open up, if we’re not really cautious, we could end up with a post-springbreak surge the way we saw a post-Christmas surge,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NPR this past week. “We could see much more disease; we could see much more death.”

Alternatively, she said, “If we really hunker down for a couple of more months, we get so many people vaccinated and we get to a really great place by summer.”

How we respond will determine how long the pandemic controls our lives. The more we slow the spread of the virus and the more quickly we vaccinate people, the less risk that a variant will outmaneuver the inoculations and force us back into hard shutdowns.

Which is why decisions by the governors of Texas and Mississippi to end state mask mandates and lift all business restrictions are, as President Joe Biden stated, “Neanderthal thinking” and, as Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “inexplicable.”

Californians can’t control what other state leaders do. But, as we have seen repeatedly over the past year, if we’re not vigilant, what happens there hurts us, too.

Yet, Newsom, in another shift of sheltering rules, on Wednesday announced easing of the daily infection-rate threshold for counties to migrate from the most restrictive purple tier to red, the next one in line. His health secretary, Dr. Mark Ghaly, says they plan to soon also relax the thresholds for the next tiers, which would allow even more activities.

Ghaly says the changes are justified because more people are being vaccinated. That makes no sense. Vaccinations on their own should reduce the infection rates, moving counties closer to the original thresholds. Instead, as counties approach that goal post, Newsom and Ghaly are also moving the goal post closer. More Californians will be infected, and more will die as a result.

At first, the state was a leader in the fight against the coronavirus. Thursday marked the one-year anniversary since Newsom declared on March 4, 2020, a state of emergency to prepare for the spread of COVID-19. Bay Area health officials on March 17 imposed shelter-in-place orders. Newsom followed later that week with a statewide order.

But the governor’s resolve repeatedly weakened, exacerbating a surge over the summer and another during the winter holiday peak. About 520,000 people have died from the virus in the United States; 10% of those deaths were Californians.

It didn’t have to be this bad. Sure, it was tough to stand up against the feckless leadership and dangerous rhetoric emanating from the past presidential administration. But we could have done better had Newsom held the line.

Now we’re at another inflection point. National cases have fallen rapidly since the mid-January peak. And California is currently doing better than most states on a daily percapita basis. But the decline across the country is leveling off as we see the spread of new variants. California won’t be immune.

The quicker we vaccinate people, the more we will slow the spread, the fewer variants we will have to confront. This is a time for vigilance.