Some businesses may begin reopening in days
Newsom to allow some stores in certain areas to operate with curbside pickup
In a step toward kick-starting the country’s largest economy, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday that retail and hospitality businesses in some parts of the state may reopen later this week as California moves — cautiously — to the next stage of managing the coronavirus pandemic.
The looser restrictions, however, won’t apply right away in the Bay Area, which entered the latest stage of its lockdown Monday, and the hard-hit Los Angeles region, which both take slower approaches to reopening.
But the new regional approach to reopening the Golden State could clear the way for lower-risk businesses — such as clothing stores, bookstores, sporting goods stores and florists just in time for Mother’s Day — to open for curbside pickup as early as the end of this week, Newsom said. Restaurant dine-in service, shopping malls and offices will remain closed.
“This is a very positive sign and it’s happening for
only one reason — the data says it can happen,” Newsom said at a news briefing, pointing to data that show steady trends of hospitalizations and coronavirus deaths slowly declining across California.
While Bay Area public health officials in the seven-county region opened golf courses Monday and cleared the way for all types of construction and some child care services, their latest orders didn’t go as far as Newsom’s did on permitting more retail.
“Those that have stricter guidelines, we are not preempting their guidelines. We’ll still allow them to move forward,” Newsom said.
Newsom’s announcement came just days after thousands of residents across the state took to the streets to protest the state’s stay-athome order and some officials in more rural, Republican-leaning areas of the state moved to reopen their communities. On Monday, the state announced 4.1 million people have filed new unemployment claims since March 15. And more than half the states in the country now are partially reopened or plan to soon.
The governor’s new plan provides the ability for health officials at the county and local level — such as those in more rural areas of the state that have mostly gone unscathed by COVID-19 — to move further ahead and open more businesses, even as other counties like those in the Bay Area hang back.
Counties eager to move ahead must first meet certain health requirements, including hospital bed capacities, testing capabilities and plans to track infected individuals and their contacts.
Before Newsom unveiled his new reopening plan, three Northern California
counties — Yuba, Sutter and Modoc — had already permitted many businesses to reopen in defiance of Newsom’s statewide stayat-home order. Combined, those three counties had a total of 50 coronavirus cases as of Monday and no deaths.
The Bay Area’s latest restrictions aren’t scheduled to expire until May 31, but after Newsom’s announcement Monday at least one public health official here said he is leaving the door open for modifications before then.
“If we continue to have the public’s cooperation, I have great hope that the indicators we are monitoring will continue to improve and this order can be revised before May 31, in a manner that focuses more on behavior … and risk of disease transmission in contrast to categories of businesses,” San Mateo County Health Officer Scott Morrow said in a statement.
As of Monday, more than 56,000 people in California had been infected with the potentially fatal COVID-19 disease and more than 2,200 people had died.
Alameda County has recorded 1,776 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 63 deaths related to the virus, San Mateo County has 1,281 cases and 51 deaths, San Francisco has 1,624 cases and 29 deaths and Contra Costa County has 947 cases and 28 deaths.
Santa Clara County, which will add three new testing sites this week, confirmed 18 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, bringing its total to 2,244 cases and 117 deaths. The new testing sites — two in East San Jose and one in Gilroy — will open on Wednesday and prioritize people who have flu-like symptoms, as well as first responders who are asymptomatic.
The governor said Monday he was confident in the state’s ability — from available hospital beds to personal protective equipment to testing — to meet the health care demands of the disease. The state has more than 10,000 ventilators currently not in use and is conducting about 30,000 tests a day, he said.
Still, Newsom cautioned that the modifications to his statewide shelter-inplace order could be reversed if the numbers of COVID-19 patients in hospitals and intensive care unit beds begin to grow again.
“It has to be done in a very thoughtful and judicious way,” he said. “We just want folks to know we need to toggle back and forth here on the basis of what’s happening in these communities in real time.”
Arthur Reingold, division head of epidemiology and biostatistics at UC Berkeley, said the governor’s plan for a gradual reopening and differing time frames for different areas of the state seemed very reasonable to him.
“We have a very large state with very diverse counties, so this does need to be customized to a certain extent,” Reingold said. “The idea that all areas of the state would be opening all of the same things at the same time wouldn’t be very sensible to me.”
The governor also announced a plan Monday to redeploy thousands of state and county employees to help track COVID-19 patients and the individuals they have come in contact with.
Starting Wednesday, the University of California campuses in San Francisco and Los Angeles are launching an online training academy to recruit and train new tracers. Newsom said the 20-hour training programs are expected to prepare as many as 3,000 people per week for the positions, with the ultimate goal of training an additional tracing workforce of 20,000 people in the coming weeks. Of the state’s 58 counties, 23 are actively tracing COVID-19 cases.
George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at UC San Francisco who is running the program there, called contact tracing “the absolute first line of defense against further transmission” between the time the state begins to reopen and a vaccine is created.
“There’s going to be community transmission, so it’s going to be the principal strategy to keeping this under control — coupled with social distancing and wearing masks,” he said. “We’ll see cases quickly as they start to occur and we can ratchet up containment in certain places as needed.”
For the Bay Area, Monday marked the first day that some restrictions on outdoor activities and businesses, such as construction and golf, were loosened. The phone at Pleasanton Golf Course at the Alameda County Fairgrounds was ringing off the hook, according to course starter James Theodore.
Golfers who want to play are asked to maintain a safe distance between themselves and others, are required to pay with a card and wear a mask inside the golf shop and are only permitted to use a cart if they’re elderly or handicapped, according to Theodore.
“Golfers are pretty loyal to their sport,” Theodore said. “People are definitely happy to be back and have a course to play on again.”