Final state pandemic emergencies fade away
End of order a symbolic milestone in California
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – California’s coronavirus emergency officially ended Tuesday, nearly three years after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order and just days after the state reached the grim measure of 100,000 deaths related to the virus.
As California’s emergency winds down, such declarations continue in just five other states – including Texas and Illinois – signaling an end to the expanded legal powers of governors to suspend laws in response to the once mysterious disease. President Joe Biden announced last month the federal government will end its own version May 11.
The end of California’s order will have little to no effect on most people as Newsom has already lifted most of the state’s restrictions, like those that required masks, closed beaches and forced many businesses to close. It offers a symbolic marker of the end of a period that once drastically altered the lives of the state’s nearly 40 million residents.
Illinois’ order will end in May alongside the federal order, while the governors of Rhode Island and Delaware recently extended their coronavirus emergency declarations. In New Mexico, public health officials are weighing whether to extend a COVID-19 health emergency beyond its Friday expiration date.
Texas, meanwhile, hasn’t had any major coronavirus restrictions for years, but Republican Gov. Greg Abbott keeps extending his state’s emergency declaration because it gives him the power to stop some of the state’s more liberal cities from imposing their own restrictions, like requiring masks or vaccines. Abbott has said he’ll keep the emergency order – and his expanded powers – in place until the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature passes a law to prevent local governments from imposing virus restrictions on their own.
The conflicting styles show that, while the emergencies may be ending, the political divide is not – foreshadowing years of competing narratives of the pandemic from two potential presidential candidates in Newsom and Abbott.
Newsom has used his authority to make sure all of California’s local governments had restrictions in place during the pandemic, even threatening to cut funding to some cities that refused to enforce them. While California’s emergency declaration is ending, other local emergencies will remain in place – including in Los Angeles County, home to nearly 10 million people.
The Los Angeles emergency order encourages mask use in some public places like business and trains and for residents who have been exposed to the virus. It will remain in effect for at least another month.
Many public health experts say it makes sense that California’s order is coming to a close.
“Three years ago, if you … got infected, you were rolling the dice about dying,” said Brad Pollock, chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California, Davis. “What’s happened in the three years now is we have vaccines, we have antiviral therapy, we have much more knowledge about how we take care of patients in terms of supportive care. Your risk of dying is a fraction of what it was.”