CA Closes Most Indoor Activities Statewide As Coronavirus Surges
CALIFORNIA — After warning for weeks that California may need to reimpose statewide stay-home orders, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday ordered a wide range of indoor activities to close immediately across the state, saying the action was necessary amid a continued surge in coronavirus cases.
Newsom ordered restaurants, theaters, wineries, zoos and museums to close indoor operations in all counties, effective immediately. Bars are ordered to close completely.
The state will also impose stricter measures for the 30 counties on the “watch list,” which are being monitored for signs of elevated disease transmission and/or hospitalization. In those counties, which comprise 80 percent of the state’s population, indoor activities and businesses — including hair salons and barbershops, gyms and fitness centers, protests, worship services, nonessential offices and shopping malls — are being ordered to close indoor operations immediately once counties have stayed on the list for at least three days.
Those businesses and activities are allowed to stay open only if they can be modified for outdoor or pickup service, according to the state's website.
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“This virus is not going away anytime soon,” Newsom said Monday, noting that initial hopes that COVID-19 would decline during the hot summer months have not been borne out.
In the weeks since Memorial Day, the coronavirus has had a major resurgence in California, causing cases, hospitalizations and intensive care admissions to rise statewide after months of declining activity. While some increase was expected as the state reopened its economy, health officials have blamed the spike on improper social gatherings and residents’ failure to wear face masks while around others.
Officials knew that as the state reopened more sectors, "different conditions would present themselves," Newsom said Monday.
"And as a consequence, we wanted to be prepared for those conditions — based on the trend lines, based on the data, based on the science — to modify our stay-home order," he said.
Even before Newsom’s statewide action, a number of counties had begun to scale back their reopening plans. Earlier Monday, school districts in Los Angeles and San Diego counties announced they would not reopen campuses at the start of the school year and would instead continue with distance learning.
In the past week, the state has confirmed an average of 8,211 new coronavirus cases per day, Newsom said, while the percentage of tests coming back positive has risen from 6.1 to 7.5 percent over the past two weeks.
Roughly 60 percent of the state’s hospital beds are currently full, and state officials are concerned by rising ICU admissions, especially in rural counties. Meanwhile, the number of counties on the state’s watch list has risen from 23 last week to 30 by Monday, with another two expected to be added within a day or two, Newsom said.
Again on Monday, Newsom used the metaphor of a dimmer switch to describe the state’s approach to modifying its stay-home order. Until a vaccine for COVID-19 is developed, the state may need to continuously toggle back between more- and less-restrictive containment measures depending on the virus’s activity, he said.
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This article originally appeared on the Across California Patch
