Coronavirus updates: Newsom shares California reopening ‘framework’ amid flattening curve
State leaders on Tuesday unveiled what Gov. Gavin Newsom called a “framework” for how California’s economy and public life may start to reopen following the peak of the coronavirus crisis.
Rather than a precise timeline for reopening, Newsom laid out several criteria that must be met before the state’s stay-at-home orders can be modified.
The plan includes six “indicators” that the state needs to achieve, Newsom said:
▪ The ability to “monitor and protect” communities by “testing, contact tracing, isolating and supporting” those who test positive or are exposed;
▪ The ability to protect vulnerable populations from infection and spread, particularly senior citizens;
▪ Hospital systems’ ability to handle surges in patients;
▪ Ability to develop therapeutics to “meet the demand”;
▪ Schools, child care facilities and businesses being able to implement sufficient physical distancing measures; and
▪ The ability to determine when and how to reinstate certain measures, “such as the stay-at-home orders, if necessary.”
Speaking to the sixth and final point, Newsom during the midday news briefing described the possibility that the state may have to “toggle” between more restrictive and more relaxed physical distancing measures “as things change and as data come in” that could show that to be necessary.
The announcement comes as more than 126,000 people worldwide have died of COVID-19, the disease caused by the highly contagious coronavirus, including nearly 26,000 within the United States as of Tuesday evening, according to a Johns Hopkins data map.
At least 783 confirmed deaths have been reported in California among more than 25,500 reported infections, according to a Sacramento Bee survey of individual counties’ public health departments. The figure represents a comparatively low number of fatalities for the nation’s most populous state at almost 40 million residents, but continues to rise.
Newsom, state leaders and health experts have said that California’s early social distancing measures and generally strong adherence to the sweeping, statewide stay-home order appear to be succeeding in flattening the pandemic’s growth curve to levels that hospital systems can manage without being overwhelmed. The state was the first in the U.S. to institute such an order.
But Newsom and others have also cautioned against lifting those measures too fast or too soon, which could cause a resurgence of cases and erase the progress made over the past month. And the governor has in recent weeks said that although some researchers’ data models have predicted an earlier peak for California’s coronavirus cases and deaths — some saying it would be as early as this week — his administration has expected the peak to be a “moment” beginning around mid-to-late May that could stretch for days or weeks.
A day earlier on Monday, the governor said that evidence of the “bending” curve suggests this is the right time to start planning the reopening of the economy, adding that science, “not political pressure,” must dictate the manner and timeline for reopening, which he says will be a “bottom-up” process.
“We need to see a decline in the rate of spread of the virus before large-scale reopening,” Newsom said.
Also on Monday, Newsom announced the state will be partnering with Oregon and Washington for a regional plan to reopen the three West Coast states’ economies.
Newsom, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement that a regional approach would better protect the West Coast, which has “an outsized stake in controlling and ultimately defeating COVID-19.”
Updated: See a map of the California counties with reported coronavirus cases
Is California slowing the spread of coronavirus?
A Johns Hopkins University modeling program used by Newsom’s health team projected there would be nearly 11,000 patients with COVID-19 symptoms in California hospitals by now.
On Monday, Newsom reported only 3,015 hospital beds were in use around the state for people who have tested positive for COVID-19, citing data from the previous day. Another 2,000 in hospitals are suspected to have the virus but have not yet received positive test results.
On Sunday, 1,178 confirmed coronavirus patients were in intensive care unit beds, “a modest” 2.9 percent increase over the previous day after flattening briefly at the end of last week, the govenor said.
“Things seem to be stabilizing from the ICU perspective,” he said.
If those numbers remain low, they will be far under projections from Newsom’s office that indicated the state would need to add more than 50,000 hospital beds to accommodate a surge in COVID-19 patients.
Last Friday, California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said the state is seeing numbers that fall within its broad projection windows, but toward the lower end — evidence Californians are slowing the spread of the virus by staying home and practicing social distancing.
Newsom during Tuesday’s news conference described the coming weeks as simultaneously a “phase of optimism” but also the hardest test yet for the state. Most optimism expressed by government leaders during the coronavirus crisis has been a very cautious form of optimism. In issuing his initial stay-at-home mandate almost a month ago on March 19, Newsom intentionally included no end date because he did not want to inspire false hope, he said at the time.
A coronavirus recession? It might be more of a depression
The virtual shutdown of entire industries deemed nonessential — including but certainly not limited to sectors like hospitality, restaurants, travel and recreation — has wrought havoc on the U.S. and California economies, leading both to shatter records for unemployment claims. The U.S. Department of Labor reported last Thursday that more than 1 million Californians filed for unemployment insurance in the previous week, up from a then-record of close to 900,000 the week before.
An economist at California Lutheran University put out a grim forecast Tuesday on the effects of COVID-19, saying the damage could last through late 2021 and “we may even experience what can rightly be called a depression.”
Matthew Fienup, head of the Thousand Oaks university’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, said 9 million Americans could lose their jobs each month between now and the end of June. Unemployment rates could top 22 percent by the early fall.
Gross domestic product, the measure of total economic activity, could shrink by 20 percent.
Perhaps more importantly, Fienup is among those predicting a “U-shaped” recovery, instead of a sharper “V-shaped” comeback. That means a long, painful return to normal. Unemployment might not fall back into single digits before the third quarter of 2021, he said.
Fienup did sketch out an alternative scenario that’s more optimistic. It anticipates unemployment peaking at 17 percent and falling below 10 percent in the first quarter of next year.
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Latest Sacramento-area numbers: More than 1,000 infected, 37 dead
The four-county Sacramento region as of Tuesday evening has recorded 1,081 positive COVID-19 cases, compared with 604 nine days earlier on April 5.
El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento and Yolo counties reported a combined total of 37 deaths as of Tuesday, up from the 20 reported April 5. A week before, in late March, only eight fatalities had been reported.
Sacramento County has reported 816 cases and 28 deaths, last updated Tuesday morning on a new dashboard being used by county health officials. Of the fatalities, 14 have come in the city of Sacramento, three in Elk Grove, two in Citrus Heights, one in Rancho Cordova and eight in unincorporated areas, the county says.
Sacramento County reported 77 new cases in a Tuesday update, the highest volume health officials have announced in a single day. The most recent death came in Rancho Cordova, the suburban city’s first.
El Dorado County reports 35 cases, up from a total of 22 the previous Sunday. No deaths have been reported.
Placer County reports 128 cases and five deaths as of Tuesday, compared with 103 infections and three fatalities a week earlier. The county recently added an online dashboard for COVID-19 activity. Only one new case was reported between Monday and Tuesday.
Yolo County has seen a large jump in confirmed cases, now at 102 compared with 37 about a week earlier. Four fatalities have been reported, including the death of a resident at the undisclosed Woodland nursing facility.
COVID-19 cases by Zip code
Map: Nathaniel Levine • Source: Sacramento County
Some schools struggle adjusting to distance learning
Monday marked the first day of online or “distance” learning for many schools in the Sacramento region, including those within the Sacramento City Unified School District, as physical campuses are now officially closed through the end of the academic year.
But students’ access to technology remains uneven.
In a media call Monday, Sacramento City Unified Superintendent Jorge Aguilar said the district has distributed more than 12,000 computers to students. There are more than 40,000 students in the district, and officials estimate they need to distribute 19,000 more Chromebooks in the coming weeks to students in need.
With shipment delays observed throughout the state due to coronavirus crisis, many students are left waiting for their devices.
“We have never had the ability to go one-to-one with our student to technology ratio,” said board President Jessie Ryan. “In a global pandemic, alongside districts across the state, we are struggling to ensure that our orders are expedited.”
District officials stressed that the new distance learning model is a hybrid program, and can be carried out a number of ways: conference calls, textbooks, and assigning work to students that is not necessarily online. But some teachers, along with the Sacramento City Teachers Association, said the hybrid plan can’t work if most students don’t have their materials on-hand.
Important data withheld as hospitals cite patient privacy laws
The general public, news outlets and some government officials have been denied access in some cases to broad information and data regarding coronavirus cases.
Hospital officials across the state, including in the Sacramento region, are refusing to say how many patients and hospital staff have tested positive for COVID-19, citing patient privacy concerns. Even the raw numbers are considered confidential.
The regulation most often cited to prevent the release of information is HIPAA, a federal law intended to protect patients in health care settings from having medical records released without their consent.
But experts told The Bee that HIPAA doesn’t apply in many of the instances in which it has recently been cited, because there is no realistic way for the public to glean individual patient information from the release of raw numbers for hundreds or more people.
After the CEO of UC Davis Health alerted staff members that coworkers were getting sick at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, The Bee attempted to find out how many employees and patients there and across the region had tested positive for COVID-19.
“State and federal privacy laws prohibit UC Davis Health from disclosing patient-identifiable information to the media,” hospital spokesman Edwin Garcia said in an email.
California’s county governments have cited similar confidentiality lines in denying or limiting what information is released, saying that providing too much information could identify patients, stigmatize certain communities where outbreaks are happening, and give communities where no positive cases have occurred a false sense of security.
When the first case of the coronavirus was confirmed in Yolo County, county public health officer Dr. Ron Chapman said he couldn’t disclose at which hospital the patient was treated, or even whether the patient had arrived by ambulance.
Then on Monday, officials announced that an outbreak of COVID-19 had occurred at a nursing home in Yolo County, but county representatives declined to name the facility or even, initially, to say in which city it was based. In an updated statement later that afternoon, issued due to “the number of inquiries and rumors” officials said were circulating in the community, the county disclosed the outbreak happened in Woodland.
A total of 23 residents and 12 staff members at the facility had tested positive as of Monday, with one death reported, and an unknown number of other residents and staffers awaiting tests, the county said.
Last month, Rey Leon, the mayor of Huron, a small town in western Fresno County, got word someone infected with COVID-19 may have attended a wedding in his community. But the county’s health department has refused to tell him whether that was the case. Leon said he found out about the potential case through others in the city, and that he believes the wedding party included over a dozen people.
In an email to The Fresno Bee, Fresno County Health Department spokeswoman Michelle Rivera said the department “does not share confidential information such as a person’s place of residence or employment, etc. due to HIPAA.” If county officials believed the public was exposed in a high-risk event, officials would reach out to the media to spread the word on who may have been exposed and where, she said.
Following the report of the wedding party, the Fresno County Health Department finally released a breakdown of COVID-19 cases by each community, showing five confirmed cases in Huron as of Monday.
The report of the wedding party sent residents panicking, Leon said. The mayor said he was accused of inciting panic himself, but he insists he decided to make a public statement about the party to inform residents of the potential risk sooner rather than later.
Pastors sue Newsom for stay-home order’s impact on churches
A group of Inland Empire pastors is suing Newsom in federal court, alleging that the governor’s administration is “criminalizing the free exercise of religion” via his March 19 stay-at-home order.
The Dhillon Law Group, which is led by conservative attorney Harmeet Dhillon, filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, on behalf of four plaintiffs, three of whom are pastors.
One of the plaintiffs, Dean Moffatt, is a Riverside County pastor who was fined $1,000 for holding a Palm Sunday church service, according to the complaint filed.
At a Friday news conference, Newsom said he wasn’t opposed to people worshiping, provided that they do so in a safe, physically distant manner. Many churches across the state have transitioned their services, including Easter and Good Friday, to online livestreams in recent weeks.
“Practice your faith, but do so in a way that allows you to keep yourself healthy,” Newsom said.
Defendants in the lawsuit also include California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and officials in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, including county supervisors and sheriffs.
Newsom’s office did not respond immediately to The Bee’s request for comment.
Worldwide numbers: 126,000 dead, almost 2 million cases
The global total of confirmed COVID-19 cases is primed to surpass 2 million soon, standing at nearly 1.98 million as of 6 p.m. Pacific time Tuesday, according to the Johns Hopkins data map.
The United States accounts for more than 608,000 of those cases and more than 25,000 fatalities, each figure the most of any country in the world. New York state has exceeded 200,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and has surpassed 10,800 deaths, with almost 8,000 dead in New York City. New Jersey reports over 2,800 dead among 68,000 infected. More than 1,700 have died in Michigan.
Over 21,000 have died of the coronavirus in Italy. More than 18,000 have died in Spain, over 15,000 in France and 12,000 in the United Kingdom, according to the Johns Hopkins data. Iran and Belgium have each suffered more than 4,000 fatalities. China’s reported death toll stands at around 3,400. Roughly 3,000 have died in each of Germany and the Netherlands; between 1,000 and 1,500 have died in Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and Brazil.
What is COVID-19? How is the coronavirus spread?
Coronavirus is spread through contact between people within 6 feet of each other, especially through coughing and sneezing that expels respiratory droplets that land in the mouths or noses of people nearby. The CDC says it’s possible to catch the disease COVID-19 by touching something that has the virus on it, and then touching your own face, “but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”
Symptoms of the virus that causes COVID-19 include fever, cough and shortness of breath, which may occur two days to two weeks after exposure. Most develop only mild symptoms, but some people develop more severe symptoms, including pneumonia, which can be fatal. The disease is especially dangerous to the elderly and others with weaker immune systems.
Sacramento Bee reporters Tony Bizjak, Sophia Bollag, Sawsan Morrar, Jason Pohl, Ryan Sabalow, Andrew Sheeler, Hannah Wiley and Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks; and Fresno Bee reporter Cresencio Rodriguez-Delgado contributed to this report. Listen to our daily briefing:
