California shutdown to last past Christmas
About 240,000 people tested positive in the state in the past 14 days
LOS ANGELES—For millions of Californians, the COVID-19 pandemic will provide a most unwelcome gift this Christmas: a wide-ranging shutdown imposed as the state grapples with its most massive and dangerous surge in infections and hospitalizations to date.
The restrictions that took hold at 11:59 p.m. Sunday across Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley will remain in place for at least three weeks, meaning those regions will not be able to emerge from the state’s latest stay-at-home order until Dec. 28 at the earliest.
Five counties in the San Francisco Bay Area also announced last week that they are proactively implementing the new restrictions and plan to keep them in place until at least Jan. 4.
Combined, those regions are home to some 33 million Californians, representing 84 per cent of the state’s population.
The timing of the rules is the latest blow in a year full of them — both for businesses that have been battered by coronavirusrelated restrictions and had hoped the holiday shopping season would throw them a desperately needed lifeline, and for the psyche of Californians who for months have lived with the threat of the coronavirus looming over their heads.
Officials, though, have said desperate times call for drastic measures. The number of new daily coronavirus cases has skyrocketed to a level that would have been unthinkable just weeks ago. Hospitals are already contending with an unprecedented wave of more than 10,000 COVID-19 patients and the state is on the brink of recording its 20,000th death from the illness.
As bleak as things are now, the ceiling of the surge may be yet to come, as experts say the ramifications of travel and gatherings for the Thanksgiving holiday have yet to be fully realized.
Cases that stem from “dinner tables or activities and plans, travel through Thanksgiving, are going to show up right about now,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s Health and Human Services secretary, and “we know we’ll be seeing that for many days to come.”
“We believe,” he said at a Monday briefing, “that the levels of transmission that we’ve been reporting so far will likely continue to go up some because of those activities around Thanksgiving.”
Statewide, average daily coronavirus cases have jumped sixfold since early October, hospitalizations have quadrupled since late October and average daily deaths have nearly tripled in the last month.
Over the last week, California has averaged 20,414 cases per day, a 78.3 per cent increase from two weeks ago, according to data compiled by the Times.
Roughly 240,000 Californians have tested positive for the coronavirus in the last 14 days.
An average of 112 Californians have died from COVID-19 every day over the last week.