New California Health Corps unprecedented — will it work?

It’s easy for political leaders to order people to stay home and cover their faces when they venture out. What’s hard is to make those ambitious programs work.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti deserve kudos for almost daily briefings on their latest steps to fight the highly contagious coronavirus.

Newsom was the nation’s first governor to issue a stay-at-home order for people not engaged in essential services, such as providing health care, bagging groceries or operating gas stations.

But that’s just verbal jabber mixed with persuasion and cheerleading.

Making all these programs work — many in partnership with private enterprise — will be the final test of their performances during this pandemic.

For example, Newsom’s unprecedented California Health Corps program is an effort to build up a reserve of backup doctors, nurses and other medical care specialists who can be called up to replace front-line providers should they get overwhelmed. He wants to add 50,000 hospital beds to the 75,000 already existing in California, to be staffed by his Health Corps volunteers (who’ll be paid).

“We need you,” Newsom exclaimed, echoing Uncle Sam in World War II posters. His appeal was aimed at trained medical providers just short of qualifying for licenses or recently retired.

Newsom is hoping for a 37,000-person corps. Within the first 24 hours, 25,000 applied; within 72 hours, 75,000.

Great! But is the state government capable of swiftly vetting that many people to ensure they’re truly qualified and can be counted on?

I’m skeptical, having long watched state government move at a snail’s pace, regardless of who’s governor. Newsom needs to be hands-on and insistent.

“What’s the alternative?” asks state Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a pediatrician. “If (recruits) need a little brushing up, they can learn on the job. In a war when you’re out of reserves, you’re really in trouble. You lose the battle.”

Assemblyman Jim Wood, DHealdsburg, a dentist who has volunteered in disasters identifying bodies through dental records, worries that Newsom’s Health Corps will ship recruits from rural areas into big cities, leaving rural areas strapped.

“Are there going to be resources for rural regions or is it all going to be sucked into large urban areas?” Wood asks. “What happens when rural and urban counties have outbreaks at the same time?” Rural patients lose.

One irresponsible state move on March 30 was to flash the OK sign for overcrowded hospitals to send virus-infected patients to nursing homes. Nursing homes have been fighting their own battle against the pandemic and largely losing.

Outraged nursing home advocates shouted that the state was prescribing death sentences for residents.

The state public health department backed down a bit on Thursday, but nursing home advocates weren’t satisfied. Newsom needs to ensure no virus-infected patients are shoved into already diseasestricken nursing homes.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 testing has been a bust in California and across the nation. Results often take agonizing days. On Thursday, there was a backlog of 59,000 unprocessed tests, Newsom said. On Saturday, he reported it was down to 13,000 out of nearly 127,000 tests.

Testing “has been challenging… and I own that,” the governor said. “I have a responsibility … to do better and do more testing.”

Most important, Newsom announced that Stanford University was about to secure federal approval for a COVID-19 antibody test. Presumably an immune person could return to work.

Newsom and other political leaders deserve credit for trying. Now they need to produce.