California Governor Newsom announced some significant changes on Monday to the state guidelines for how quickly parts of the state can reopen, as the coronavirus pandemic levels off.
We could be able to eat in restaurants again by next week and within a few weeks, get haircuts and watch ballgames on TV, although not in person.
For today’s “State of California,” KCBS Radio reporter Doug Sovern discussed the governor’s latest guidelines for reopening, what moving into Phase Two and Three look like, and his experience as today’s pool reporter with news anchors Jeff Bell and Patti Reising.
The governor delivered his coronavirus briefing from Mustards Grill in Napa, a venerable establishment on Highway 29, one of the icons of the Napa Valley Food World. It’s been there for 37 years, and for the past couple of months, it’s been scraping by doing takeout and delivery only, like so many places.
The governor had good news, though. For Napa county and other counties that would like to reopen more quickly, but can’t meet the stringent guidelines, which included no Covid-19 deaths for two weeks.
While 24 counties did manage to meet those deadlines (but the new guidelines no longer hinge on deaths), now counties only need to have: no more than 25 cases for every 100,000 people (the number was previously 10); no more than 8% positive test rate; and the rate of people being hospitalized with coronavirus can’t go up more than 5% in the week. They also have to have sufficient Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), hospital surge capacity and contact tracing capability.
The bottom line is that the governor estimates that almost every county, all but five, can meet these new standards, and that can mean big changes over the next few weeks, which we’ll get into today.
Well, I asked that, and we all assume there’s been so much pressure on him behind the scenes and publicly from various cities and counties, that he’s perhaps relenting a little bit under that pressure. But he insists this is all about the data, and specifically that over the last couple of weeks, although we still have deaths (41 yesterday and it’s the lower number we’ve seen), hospitalization of people with coronavirus have gone down 7.5% in California over the last two weeks, and the number of people going into the ICU has gone down 8.7%.
So, deaths are a trailing indicator, people who die now have had it for a few weeks.
What he’s been looking for is the case load and seeing that curve flatten and seeing that curve come down. They felt it had gotten to the point in terms of the spread of the virus that they could allow people to go a little more quickly if they can meet these other parameters, which as he said, almost every county can.
Los Angeles isn’t going to meet that any time soon. A couple of counties that have had nursing home issues aren’t going to either.
The Bay Area is probably going to take it slowly. We’ve taken it slowly just to get to the part of Stage Two that the other states got to last week, so I wouldn’t expect it to happen next week.
Certainly, in a lot of the Bay Area, we could be talking about a couple of weeks, certainly by June we could see some real relaxing of these shelter in place orders.
They are, which is interesting, right?
What he was saying was you can move more quickly through Phase Two. That means having people eat in restaurants, and they’re already getting ready in Napa to start doing that, maybe next week, with 50% capacity and all sorts of new things in place. That means going inside stores and shopping, not just curbside.
Phase Three is where hair salons and nail salons open and people are going back to church, in small groups at least, and sporting events with no fans. He didn’t say these words today, but what he implied is that we would go into stage three statewide by the first week of June. So two weeks away or so he could be saying, ‘Enough of this expediting Stage Two, let’s go to Phase Three.’ That would mean, yes, the Giants and A’s could have games at their ball parks with no more than staff and players and no fans in the stands, but they’d be able to show them on TV, which a lot of people have been craving.
So it does sound from what he said today that he’s talking about getting us into Stage Three by June, which is a lot sooner than he was saying just a few weeks ago.
He did, but not at the news conference.
I don’t know where this came from, the governor’s staff is blaming me, but I tweeted this morning that I was going to be the pool reporter and people should send me questions, which they did. But somehow people on Twitter started sending questions saying ‘Ask him why he’s been to Montana,’ and there’s rumor in conservative blogosphere and Twittersphere circles that Newsom and maybe his family had fled California and gone to their place in Montana.
One rumor was that he had even been commuting back and forth, which, of course, he hasn’t been doing. And then there was this flurry of replies on Twitter about this. So I asked the governor point blank—I didn’t ask him at the news conference because they laid it to rest beforehand—and they said no, absolutely not.
I said on Twitter that anytime the governor leaves the state, he has to notify us. [The state> sends us an email that says, ‘The governor has left the state,’ and then the Lieutenant Governor takes charge. It’s a constitutional requirement, and that hasn’t happened under the coronavirus pandemic. Unless he’s sneaking out illegally, he hasn’t been doing it.
They said he’s not been to Montana and he hasn’t left California. Maybe he’s got a double running around in Montana somebody thought was Gavin Newsom.
It’s true his wife’s family has a big spread in the Bitterroot Valley there, but he said no, they have not been there, he hasn’t gone anywhere, and they don’t know where this came from.
And even after I tweeted that out, there are still people who insist it’s true.
Yea, and I did not get to ask him that.
I wanted to ask him more than just about the playgrounds, I wanted to ask him about the school year coming to an end in the next couple of weeks.
At the moment, there are no camps, there are no playgrounds and a lot of other things you rely on in the summer have been canceled.
We’re hoping, at least some day, camps open in the summer, but those questions are going to be more for school districts and counties, I think, than for the governor. But under the existing guidelines, we wouldn’t start to see that stuff until at least Phase Three. That’ll be sometime in June, but again that’s all very tentative. And as the governor said today, all of this hinges on the numbers continuing to improve.
Yea it was a little more stressful than I expected having to juggle all those incoming questions. But got it done and I got the information out.