San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Reopening at your own risk
The reopening of California and the country is catching on like an infection. Having led the nation in locking down, the Bay Area and the state are now following others into a risky attempt to return to normalcy even as the novel coronavirus keeps spreading.
Three weeks ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom allowed the resumption of some retail for curbside pickup and related manufacturing. Two weeks ago, he announced that they could be joined by some offices and shopping malls. On Monday, he cleared the way for instore retail and religious congregations with some restrictions. On Tuesday, he added haircuts, and the coming month could see the opening of such virusfriendly venues as gyms, professional sports facilities (without fans) and even Disneyland.
The Bay Area and greater Los Angeles, which have borne the brunt of California’s outbreak and imposed their own shelter orders ahead of the governor, were excepted from Newsom’s loosening, but the two metropolises have also felt the press of business as usual. Los Angeles County gave the goahead to instore shopping and inperson worship; outer Bay Area counties such as Napa and Solano unleashed salons, dinein restaurants and an indoor mall; and San Francisco officials plan to allow instore retail and summer camps to start up with modifications in June.
Officials in the Bay Area and Sacramento appear to have prevented immense losses by shutting down the region and state when they did. Although the first known coronavirusrelated death in the United States was in San Jose, New York’s pandemic losses per capita have been nearly 15 times greater than California’s. But with President Trump and rural Northern California officials alike pushing for a faster reopening as unemployment tops 15%, the governor appears to be bowing to pressure from above and below to restart the economy.
While the statistics offer powerful support for Newsom’s leadership in closing the state, they fall short of justifying his gathering retreat. California’s rates of reported infections and deaths remain low compared with other states facing major outbreaks, which has protected its hospitals from an overwhelming surge, but cases have failed to decline consistently. The number of newly reported infections peaked last week as the state’s total passed 100,000. And while new cases fell in San Francisco, they rose in every other Bay Area county and hit a new high in Alameda County, whose outbreak surpassed the original epicenter of Santa Clara County.
The climbing case numbers are partly attributable to increased testing, an encouraging development in a state that has struggled to screen an adequate share of its population for the virus. Still, while California reached its goal of at least 60,000 tests a day for the first time a week ago, it has since fallen below that threshold again. Of nine Bay Area counties, only Marin has reached the testing benchmark, raising serious concerns about capacity to detect new outbreaks as activities resume. The counties are also still trying to assemble enough staff to trace exposures and enough gear to protect health care workers.
The discrepancies haven’t gone unnoticed. State Sen. Steve Glazer, DOrinda, issued a series of pointed questions about the reopening last week, including: “Does lowering the infection rate remain the top state goal or has it been replaced with a desire to reopen the economy even if infection rates go up?” Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County’s health officer and a driving force behind the region’s influential shelterinplace order, noted that given a viral incubation period thought to be as long as two weeks, Newsom has proceeded too quickly to have “a real understanding of the consequences of what the last move has been.” Officials have already halted reopening plans in Sonoma County, where infections doubled in two weeks, and Lassen County, in the state’s sparsely populated northeast, which experienced its first known outbreak.
California has lost some 4,000 lives to the contagion despite distancing measures that have likely saved many more. Yes, the state can’t shut down indefinitely, but it should reopen only when officials meet the benchmarks they themselves set, and only at a pace that allows us to gauge the result of each risk before we take the next one.