Newsom: Measures may last months
Governor asks for 50,000 more hospital beds as state passes 2,000 coronavirus cases
Tough social distancing measures to stamp out the coronavirus’s spread may need to last two or three months in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested on Monday, in a drastic contrast with President Donald Trump, who just minutes earlier had predicted the U.S. economy could reopen for business in weeks, not months.
At the same time, Newsom warned that the state needs to increase by two-thirds its capacity of hospital beds in the face of the pandemic, increasing the total beds available by 50,000 to account for a potential surge in infected cases.
The divergent messages from Washington and Sacramento came as California breached 2,000 coronavirus cases and the U.S. recorded more than 100 coronavirus deaths in a single day for the first time so far.
And as the Bay Area marked one week under shelter-in-place orders Monday, officials and residents braced for changes to come — from efforts to transform a South Bay convention center into a makeshift hospital to more government workers testing positive for the virus.
“If you want to bend the curve, we have got to bend to a deeper understanding and meet this moment head-on,” Newsom said at a news conference. “We have to act differently.”
As of Monday evening, California had reached 2,162 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 39 deaths related to the disease, according to the total cumulative cases as reported by the counties.
Santa Clara County’s total of confirmed cases rose to 321 on Monday, while three new
deaths lifted the total to 13. San Mateo reported 143 cases, San Francisco 131, Alameda 122, Contra Costa 71 and Marin 38. Alameda announced its first death from the disease Monday, lifting the total fatalities in the Bay Area to 17.
As those numbers continued to rise, Newsom announced the state had increased its projection about how many hospital beds would be needed to account for the crisis to 50,000 new beds — a staggering number, considering the state’s 416 hospitals currently have a capacity of about 78,000.
About 30,000 of that capacity can come from existing hospitals, by converting buildings on their campuses or parking lots to hospital tents, or by squeezing more beds into current facilities, Newsom said. The additional 20,000 beds needed to meet the gap will have to come from temporary sites and hotels, in addition to a 1,000-bed U.S. Navy hospital ship that is headed to Los Angeles, Newsom said.
Officials are also working to gather 1 billion medical gloves, 500 million N95 masks and 200 million face shields, the equipment first responders need to protect themselves from the virus. Newsom said California and other states had been unnecessarily competing over available equipment, leading to price jumps.
“People are tripping over themselves to make deals that ultimately raise the cost of these supplies,” he said.
The governor thanked the private sector for chipping in, saying that Tesla founder Elon Musk had delivered on his promise to send 1,000 ventilators to Los Angeles and that 25 providers had told the state they wanted to help 3D-print masks and other equipment.
Newsom spoke just after Trump’s daily news conference, in which the president said he worried that “the cure could be worse than the problem” — suggesting that economic devastation caused by policies forcing Americans to stay home could end up hurting the country more than the virus itself. He said he and federal officials were still
deciding whether or not to continue urging people to socially distance themselves beyond the next week, adding that “I’m not looking at months” to keep those practices in place.
Newsom, however, pointed to China and South Korea’s example fighting the disease to suggest that “We are looking the next eight weeks, on our curve, maybe the next eight to 12 weeks, to address this surge.” He didn’t specify whether Californians could be forced to stay home for that entire period.
Many more states have followed in California’s footsteps issuing stay-home orders, and almost 4 in 10 Americans were being told not to leave their homes except for essential reasons by Monday evening.
The state is already seeing economic fallout from the pandemic: Over the last week, about 106,000 people a day have submitted unemployment insurance claims, Newsom said, a stunning increase from the typical average of 2,500 daily claims before the crisis.
In a bid to help meet the hospital bed gap, Newsom said the federal government
was sending eight federal medical shelters to the state, and had begun to deliver the equipment to open one in the Santa Clara Convention Center on Monday.
Michael Clark, the acting operations section chief for the county’s emergency operations center, did a walkthrough of the convention center Monday afternoon to determine how county officials would transform the center into a makeshift hospital where about 250 non-coronavirus patients with less serious injuries or illnesses could be cared for.
Meanwhile, passengers from the Grand Princess cruise ship, which had docked in Oakland after reporting multiple cases of the virus aboard, started leaving their own quarantine on Monday. Passengers are expected to exit isolation over the next four days, even though not all of them have been tested for the disease.
Of U.S. passengers aboard the Grand Princess who were tested, 78 of 469, or 16.6%, became infected. Following docking in Oakland on March 8, passengers were transferred to Travis Air Force Base and
other sites for a 14-day quarantine period or isolation.
More critical government workers in the Bay Area also tested positive for the disease on Monday, including a janitor at San Jose’s wastewater treatment plant — a facility that treats the sewage from 1.5 million people in San Jose and seven other cities. The massive plant, located in Alviso, has 17 employees in self-quarantine as a result and is running at about 70% staffing.
“As long as we don’t all get sick and there’s no catastrophic equipment failure, we’re holding the fort down,” said Kerrie Romanow, director of environmental services for the city of San Jose.
In a worst-case scenario, officials said, if COVID-19 led to shortages of wastewater treatment plant operators around the region, it’s unlikely that sewage would back up into homes and businesses. Instead, it would be treated to lower standards, or perhaps not at all, at the plants and released into San Francisco Bay.
With the prospect of social distancing measures lasting months, the ongoing stay-home orders have forced some businesses to be creative about adapting to the new reality.
Flights, a Los Gatos restaurant specializing in dishes like ahi tuna appetizers and skillets of mac and cheese, transformed into a no-touch, drive-thru grocery store, with customers driving up, paying and popping their trunk for employees to put bags of food and supplies in.
“We need to come together as a community and provide a service for the people who need it,” said restaurant owner Alex Hult.
And a 76 gas station on West San Carlos Street at Bird Avenue in San Jose brought back full-service gas, a luxury that a few generations ago was common at stations around the country. Employees fill up cars and pick up snacks for customers, who stay in their vehicles the whole time — hugely reducing the number of people touching gas nozzles at the station.