Newsom’s caution is still sensible
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s newly released plan to return California to normalcy strikes a fragile balance between offering hope to a lockdownweary state and refraining from rash promises. The governor’s caution is appropriate, and his success in improving the state’s laggard coronavirus testing and tracing capacity will be paramount.
Reflecting the close relationship between crowding and viral spread, Newsom envisioned a sensible progression from the current shelter-in-place order to a second stage in which some public spaces and lowerrisk nonessential workplaces could reopen with precautions to maintain distancing, including offices where remote work is difficult, stores offering curbside pickup and manufacturing. Higherrisk environments such as hair and nail salons, movie theaters and religious gatherings would be allowed in a third stage. The final phase would reintroduce the most risky activities, among them concerts and sporting events.
Newsom was studiously vague on the timing of each stage, saying the next would come in weeks and the one after that in months. The last, he said, would depend on the development of effective treatments for COVID19 or a coronavirus vaccine, which is expected to be a year or more away.
The governor has already called off the remainder of the academic year, but he floated the possibility that schools and child care could reopen in the summer to begin to make up for lost learning and allow more parents to resume other activities. That may be partly because fall and winter are expected to be more conducive to renewed viral spread, which could force schools and workplaces to close again.
Perhaps the most crucial precondition for Newsom’s strategy must be accomplished, as he acknowledged, in the current phase: increasing the ability to test for the virus and trace contacts of those who are positive. With most Californians still vulnerable to infection — and a significant portion thereof to serious illness and death as a result — it’s hard to see how the state could begin even an incremental return to normal activity without being able to rapidly detect and contain new outbreaks.
Newsom has said he aims to triple or quadruple the state’s current 20,000 tests a day, a pace that has increased substantially in recent weeks but is still short of his interim goal for the end of April. He also says the state is raising an “army” of about 10,000 to perform the laborious task of tracing the contacts of infected people to prevent further spread.
Some experts, meanwhile, believe testing capacity needs to be even higher than Newsom’s still remote goal. And a sketchy testing blueprint announced by President Trump this week underscored the White House’s determination to continue its leadfrombehind approach, abdicating most of the job to California and other states.
Newsom is under increasing pressure to join the president’s rush to reopen without putting necessary precautions in place. California’s relative success in slowing the contagion could unravel quickly if the governor made that mistake.