USE STICK, NOT CARROT, TO COMPEL MASK USE

With California, Texas and the U.S. each reporting record single-day numbers of new cases of the coronavirus recently, it’s become obvious that blue states, red states and the federal government alike are failing to meet the challenges of the pandemic. Three months after lockdowns of nonessential businesses and schools in many states had “broken the curve” of rising infections, The New York Times reported Thursday that there were as many people hospitalized nationally for the coronavirus as during its previous peak in April.

While President Donald Trump finally wore a mask last week, he continues to leave decisions on how best to contain the pandemic up to the states. And the grim fact for California is that Gov. Gavin Newsom — after getting off to a strong start with his first-in-the-nation lockdown order on March 19 — has since made mistakes. On April 14, Newsom said the lockdown would stay in place until the state had the capacity to test anyone with symptoms of the coronavirus and to contact trace where infected people had gone. But as the Los Angeles Times reported, he began to reopen the state three weeks later without having come close to such capacity.

And in a decision the state will long regret, Newsom let bars reopen June 12 — a decision he reversed a month later as new infections exploded.

These mistakes led to last week’s painful announcement from state Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly. He said the state had given up on contact tracing for the worst possible reason: With virus infections soaring past the 400,000 mark, California has “too many ... cases to realistically investigate and trace each.” This was a factor in the call by the California Public Interest

Research Group for Newsom to reinstate a full lockdown and start from scratch in the pandemic fight.

That may soon be necessary. But while California has the most cases of any state, it also has significantly fewer per capita than the national average, so another alternative is to vigorously enforce the mask and social distancing rules that worked so well in Germany, Taiwan and South Korea. Health and safety officials should work together to start citing and fining the people who don’t wear masks and the businesses that flout lifesaving pandemic protocols.

San Diego County officials said last week they’re creating a “Safe Reopening Compliance Team,” among other measures, to increase mask use and social distancing. “This is going to be the carrot approach, not the stick approach,” said Supervisor Greg Cox, “but we still have the stick and other tools available to us, and we will use them if necessary.”

That’s not good enough. Get the stick out now. Beating this pandemic requires unity. People and businesses reply to incentives. Let’s give them one.