A lesson we don’t have to relearn

California’s rushed spring reopening turned a relative oasis of calm in the nation’s coronavirus outbreak into a viral storm. Now the first faint signs that the surge is abating are reviving a familiar and misguided clamor to return once again to business as usual.

State officials reported some evidence of a stabilizing or slowing outbreak in recent days, with newly confirmed infections having fallen from a peak near 10,000 a day in July to about 7,500 a day over the past week. The rate of tests yielding positive results has also declined, from a height of more than 8% last month to 6.3% over the past week. Confirmed and suspected COVID19 hospitalizations have dropped from more than 8,000 patients a month ago to less than 6,400.

Three populous counties, Santa Cruz, Placer and San Diego, came off the state’s watch list for coronavirus spread over the past week, and Gov. Gavin Newsom said San Francisco could follow as soon as Thursday.

In addition to bars, indoor dining, movie theaters and other businesses shuttered statewide, the listed counties are required to close gyms, nonessential offices and salons, among other activities. But a San Francisco salon owner led a movement to reopen such businesses in defiance of the orders this week, and San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer complained that the state hasn’t provided guidelines for resuming prohibited activities in counties released from monitoring. “The lack of a consistent process for these businesses, with logical, datadriven triggers, exacerbates an increasingly difficult economic situation and undermines the credibility of and compliance with the state’s public health order,” Faulconer wrote in a letter to Newsom.

The governor said the guidelines are forthcoming, promising that the shutdowns are “not a permanent state.” But resuming highrisk activities is not likely to go better than it did two months ago until infection rates are under control and state and local governments have the capacity to test for and trace the new outbreaks that will inevitably emerge.

By most measures, the state is in worse shape now than it was for its first abortive return to normalcy. New infections are still being confirmed at more than double the pace seen in May, and the share of tests detecting the virus is higher by half. Officials just finished fixing a data breakdown that left the state in the dark about the true extent of the outbreak. And recent fluctuations in the number of hospitalizations prompted Newsom to sound a note of caution about whether the downward trend will continue.

The 120,000 tests a day being carried out represent a dramatic improvement from the first months of the pandemic but remain well below the number experts believe would be needed to suppress the spread. Moreover, barriers to access and delays in results render too much of the state’s testing useless in slowing spread.

“We started here as really ground zero for COVID in the United States and, six months in, we’re still fighting,” Santa Clara County’s health officer, Sara Cody, said Tuesday at the opening of a drivethrough site designed to conduct up to 1,000 tests a day at the fairgrounds in San Jose. “The reason that we are still fighting is that we have not had the tools to get us out. One of the most important tools to get us out is testing — testing, testing, testing.”

Since a San Jose woman became the first known U.S. fatality from coronavirus complications in February, more than 170,000 have followed, including more than 11,000 in California and 1,000 in the Bay Area. Until our capacity to detect the virus outpaces its ability to spread, every resumption of mass commerce and contact will compound that daunting toll.