Announcing that more California communities are in a position to slowly reopen businesses, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday loosened rules on allowable coronavirus infection and related death rates — a change that could release most parts of the state from the tight rules of his stay-at-home order.
“We recognize the conditions across the state are unique and distinctive depending where you are,” Newsom said.
Newsom offered Californians additional hope in revising his standards, saying current data on the spread of the coronavirus suggest some counties will be able to add in-person retail shopping and spectator-free sporting events as soon as the first week in June. Additional changes, including the opening of hair salons, could be made across the state with some local rules on how those businesses would be able to operate.
The decision, announced during a visit by Newsom to a restaurant in Napa, means that roughly 53 of California’s 58 counties can now move into the second of four stages toward reopening if they so choose, he said. It comes after a number of local leaders have pressed Newsom to loosen restrictions, arguing their communities are now safe enough to allow more commerce and more chances for residents to leave their homes.
Most notable in Monday’s announcement is that counties will no longer be kept from loosening the shutdown rules if there have been COVID-19 deaths in the previous two weeks. The original standard, announced by the state Department of Public Health less than two weeks ago, was criticized by many of California’s urban counties, whose leaders argued that even a single fatal case would block them from moving deeper into the second stage of reopening rules crafted by the Newsom administration.
The new standard removes all death rate requirements and creates a more generous threshold on rates of newly confirmed cases. Counties will now be able to move toward a more expansive reopening if they can show no more than 25 coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents in the last 14 days before taking action — a standard that was originally one new case per 10,000 residents.
Counties could, instead, show that less than 8% of residents tested for the virus over a seven-day period were positive.
Counties also must show that hospitalizations for COVID-19 patients have stabilized, meaning they can’t increase by more than 5% over a seven-day period or that a county can’t have more than 20 hospitalizations on any single day over a seven-day period.
The announcement marks another loosening of the restrictions of Newsom’s stay-at-home order, now in its ninth week, after several defiant counties reopened ahead of the governor’s plans earlier this month. Modoc County allowed all businesses to reopen May 1, while Yuba and Sutter counties cleared gyms, nail and hair salons, shopping malls and other retailers to resume operations days later.
The Newsom administration sent warning letters to the three counties May 7, stating that the local governments could become ineligible for disaster funding if they continued to defy the governor’s order and urging them to instead work with the state.
In a moment that marked the beginning of a slow return to normalcy in California, Newsom allowed bookstores, clothing retailers, flower shops and other retail businesses across the state to offer curbside pickup options May 8 under the early second stage rules of his administration’s four-stage reopening plan. Administration officials have said that hair salons, gyms, sporting events in empty stadiums and religious services will open again under Stage 3 in the weeks ahead. The final stage would also mark the end of the stay-at-home order and all restrictions.
Amid the pushback from counties, Newsom also adopted a framework to allow some areas to move ahead of his administration’s pace. If local governments want to open more businesses, the plan allows counties to submit an application declaring that the presence of the virus is limited or nonexistent in their jurisdictions and they’ve met certain requirements to prepare for a future surge in infections.
Giving credence to the arguments that the requirements were unrealistic, a Times analysis at the time found that the vast majority of counties in California failed to meet the first two criteria — no deaths and no more than one case per 10,000 residents in the prior two weeks.
Even after the governor announced Monday he was rescinding the requirement that counties have no coronavirus-related deaths in two weeks in order to move ahead of the state, it’s still unlikely that Los Angeles County will meet the standards. Local officials say the infection rate in the county is falling, but they remain concerned about the potential spread of the disease.
