California pulls 'emergency brake' in bid to stop unprecedented virus surge - POLITICO

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A student nurse collects forms as cars line up at a Covid-19 testing site Monday in Costa Mesa, Calif. | Jae C. Hong/AP Photo

OAKLAND — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday ordered widespread closures of indoor operations as the state faces its fastest surge in cases since the Covid-19 pandemic began, pulling what he called the "emergency brake" on 94 percent of residents.

Newsom said he was compelled to act by a case surge that is “simply without precedent in California’s pandemic history.”

California’s daily cases have doubled in the past 10 days, with topping 9,890 on Sunday, the state reported Monday. “This is simply the fastest increase California has seen since the beginning of this pandemic,” Newsom said during a press briefing.

That has led Newsom to accelerate the stay-at-home process, ensuring 41 of California's 58 counties will have to shut churches, indoor dining and gyms until the state deems them safe for operation. That includes most of the state's heavily populated counties, including most of the San Francisco Bay Area that previously had forestalled the same coronavirus spread seen elsewhere.

Instead of waiting for the state's normal Tuesday announcement to restrict new counties, Newsom made the change Monday and said the emergency measure allows for them to move into shutdowns after only one week of rising infection spread. He said the state will no longer wait until each Tuesday and could respond sooner when infections rise. The timeline for businesses to comply will be compressed from 72 hours to 24 hours.

Until this month, California was still an anomaly compared to much of the nation that had seen an explosion in cases and positivity rates. On a per capita rate, the state is still not suffering nearly as badly as the Midwest. But the spread in less than two weeks has been dramatic.

University of California, San Francisco epidemiologist and infectious disease expert George Rutherford said he was surprised by just how quickly the virus was spreading in California. He supported the governor’s crackdown as necessary.

“Short of stopping planes from flying into California and walling the state off like Hawaii does and testing people at the border, we don’t have a lot more levels to pull,” he said.

Monday’s actions mark the most significant change to the color-coded, four-tiered reopening framework that the Newsom administration rolled out in late August after the state experienced a summer surge in Covid-19 cases.

Hospitalizations statewide over the past two weeks have increased by 48 percent, while intensive care units have seen nearly 39 percent more admissions in that same time period.

Santa Clara County officials had expected the county to move to the less-restrictive red tier on Tuesday, but called on residents to adhere to the new purple-tier requirements. It was a whirlwind shift for a county that just four weeks ago had reduced infections enough that the state would have allowed it to bring back NFL fans for the first time this season.

“These are really significant changes. We know that it has a huge effect on business in the community, but we all know this has a significant effect,” Santa Clara County Counsel James Williams said at a press conference Monday.

Not all government officials supported the rollbacks. In more conservative Placer County, “we’ve gone from the second-least restrictive tier to the most-restrictive tier in less than six days,” said Kirk Uhler, a county supervisor who has been critical of the governor’s approach. He said shutting down businesses hurts businesses, but doesn’t curb the spread.

“Los Angeles County, which never got out of purple — they've been in the most restrictive lockdown this entire time — and they’ve still had a spike,” Uhler said. “So show me the evidence that restricting these businesses stops the spread. It doesn’t exist.”

State Assemblymember Devon Mathis (R-Visalia), whose district includes Tulare County, which also never has gotten out of purple, doesn’t think the tier system is working. “We need to treat the people we govern as adults and allow them to make those decisions for themselves,” he said.

But Newsom on Monday defended his reopening process, saying the “blueprint” is working as the administration intended. The system was designed to offer a slower transition to businesses and residents, both in reopening and in closing back down. That was the case until infection numbers alarmed state officials over the past several days.

While the state's approach so far has allowed for variation among counties, Newsom said a spike in cases has prevailed across the state rather than in isolated areas and has hit every age group. "We are seeing community spread broadly," he said.

Newsom also floated the idea that he was "assessing" the idea of a curfew to help curb the spread. He said he is not yet committed to the idea and is reviewing what it would mean to impose a curfew on business activities.

Lee Riley, an infectious disease expert at the UC Berkeley, questioned how well a curfew would work if much of the transmission appears to be occurring within households.

Riley suggested that providing clearer guidance on how people can gather safely, such as maintaining a two-week buffer between visits, could be more effective than curfews. “The formal relaxation of businesses may have contributed to the relaxation of informal gatherings,” he said.

Monica Gandhi, also an infectious disease expert at UCSF, said the color-coded system sets clear standards, and she believed it’s appropriate to tighten restrictions on counties that exceed the thresholds for positivity rates and new cases.

“There’s going to be a dance — literally, it’s a dance — between the virus and the human populations," Gandhi said. “We’re going to go back and forth between restrictions until we get a vaccine, which we’re getting really close to.”

Under the new adjustments, some counties dropped multiple tiers to land in the most restrictive tier. Eight counties — Alameda, Butte, El Dorado, Napa, Nevada, Santa Clara, Siskiyou and Tuolumne — shifted two tiers, from orange to purple. Humboldt County and San Francisco, the only urban county to reach the least restrictive tier, were moved from yellow to red, skipping orange. Only two rural Sierra Nevada counties — Mariposa and Alpine — remain in yellow.

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