State, local officials’ heavy burden
Despite the Bay Area’s success in stemming its coronavirus outbreak through nationleading distancing measures, local health officials have rightly set a high bar for relaxing the restrictions. The Chronicle reported Sunday that San Francisco and five surrounding counties remain far from their goals for testing and other preconditions for reopening the region.
Unfortunately, some aren’t waiting. A few California jurisdictions and businesses are defying state and local orders and abandoning efforts to slow the contagion’s spread, and Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared ready to accede to a degree. Raucous crowds of protesters have descended on Sacramento and other cities to call for an end to distancing orders while recklessly ignoring them in real time. And the federal government has joined several southern states in letting official guidance and mandates lapse — all with negligible attention to testing and other precautions preoccupying epidemiological experts and Bay Area officials.
Cellphonedata analyses show Americans are broadly increasing their travels away from home, though to varying degrees and at different paces. The Northeast and, to a lesser extent, the West Coast continue to lead the nation in sheltering in place, especially in New York City and the Bay Area, but even those regions were seeing gradually more movement at the end of April, according to analysis by the University of Maryland and the U.S. Department of Transportation. A National Public Radio examination of data provided by SafeGraph found sharper increases in activity in parts of Virginia and Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott allowed retail, restaurants, movie theaters and other businesses to reopen
Friday — even as new infections were still rising in some of the state’s cities.
Newsom on Monday previewed a more limited reopening that would allow lowerrisk commercial activity such as retail for curbside pickup and some manufacturing to resume at the end of the week. The governor also said local jurisdictions, which led the way on sheltering, would be given more leeway to loosen orders or maintain greater restrictions. Despite mounting pressure from north and south, with three rural counties bucking his statewide shelter order and Orange County officials challenging closures of crowded beaches, Newsom insisted that his decisions were based on data.
That is certainly the right principle, but the numbers aren’t uniformly encouraging even in the Bay Area. While new infections have been steady or declining for the past two weeks, San Francisco is performing only half the testing called for and is ahead of the rest of the region. Statewide testing has yet to reach the goal set by Newsom, which is more modest than the Bay Area’s target. The state and region are also still working to ramp up capacity to trace the contacts of infected people, another factor crucial to containing renewed outbreaks.
Despite the vocal few protesting the shelter orders and the many more suffering job losses and other hardships, the mandates retain broad support in California and across the country. That’s because most Americans understand that rushing blindly into a second wave of a deadly disease is not a viable alternative. In the absence of federal leadership, the governor and local officials bear a heavy responsibility to put longterm public safety ahead of ephemeral political considerations.