As California reopens for business, Gov. Gavin Newsom has called the shots on how quickly the Golden State’s 58 counties can loosen the stay-at-home restrictions that have slowed the deadly coronavirus but crippled the nation’s largest economy.
Earlier this month, he established a set of benchmarks to meet to unlock the door to more retail shops, restaurants and manufacturers. But this week, the governor revised the metrics, paving the way for most California counties to soon hang up a “Welcome” sign.
Though Newsom said Monday all but a handful of counties should now make the cut, he didn’t specify which — and the state doesn’t make it easy to keep score. Each county publicly reports outbreak data differently and not in a way that readily shows they’re meeting the state’s new benchmarks.
That doesn’t mean some counties will be reopening right away. Most counties just entered the state’s early “stage 2” reopening phase, which allows retail businesses to offer curbside pickup and industries supporting them to operate. Health officials say they will monitor how that goes before reopening more.
Still, the new bar allows local officials more leeway in reopening without setting up a potential conflict with the state.
The sticking point had been metrics for “epidemiological stability” that had required counties to show they had no deaths and no more than one new case of coronavirus per 10,000 people in the last 14 days. Los Angeles, one of the few counties that still won’t meet the new benchmarks, recorded 74 of the state’s 116 deaths on Tuesday, which turned out to be the deadliest day of coronavirus in California since April 22, when 122 died.
Though it wasn’t the only yardstick counties had to measure up to — others that remain unchanged involve testing and hospital capacity — it was a standard no urban county with a significant population was close to meeting, even as case rates and hospitalizations stabilize and decline. That left only sparsely populated rural counties mostly north of the Bay Area in range for reopening.
The revised case metrics eliminated the no-new-deaths-in-14-days requirement that was the highest bar for big counties to meet. Instead, it gave counties a couple new ways to pass. They can show fewer than 25 new cases per 100,000 people over the last 14 days, or a rate of positive tests for the virus over the past 7 days of less than 8%.
They also must show hospitalizations have stabilized, with a 7-day average that doesn’t spike more than 5%, or no more than 20 hospitalizations on any single day over the past 14 days.
Newsom indicated Monday that perhaps only five counties statewide wouldn’t pass the revised metrics. Though he didn’t provide a list, he mentioned Los Angeles, which has recorded nearly half of the 83,000 reported cases in the state, as well as Tulare and Kings counties, where outbreaks occurred at a long-term care facility or meat plant.
In San Francisco, Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax said the city “will be aligning generally with the state’s plan” for further reopening, monitoring case rates and hospitalizations for spikes over the next two to four weeks and discussing new safety protocols for businesses when they reopen.
“I have hope — and we should all have hope — that if people continue to take precautions,” Colfax said, “we will continue to make progress.”
