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California Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday announced a stay-at-home order that will require non-essential work and rallies to stop between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. in counties with high coronavirus transmission rates.
The order is expected to go into effect Saturday at 10 p.m. for a month. It will apply to counties in the purple level of the state reopening structure.
“The virus is spreading at a rate that we have not seen since the start of this pandemic and the next few days and weeks will be critical in stopping the outbreak,” Newsom said in a statement. “It is essential that we take action to reduce transmission and slow hospitalizations before the number of deaths increases. We have done it before and we must do it again.
In the Bay Area, the order will apply to the six counties currently in the purple level, namely Sonoma, Napa, Solano, Contra Costa, Alameda and Santa Clara counties. The other three – the counties of San Mateo, Marin and San Francisco – are in the red level.
The announcement comes amid skyrocketing cases, rising hospitalizations and looming vacations that are wracking the country.
Statewide, California is seeing a record rate of daily new cases, averaging more than 10,000 cases per day over a seven-day period ending Wednesday.
And hospitalizations in California have nearly doubled from around 2,300 a month ago to 4,500 on Wednesday, state data showed.
While the Bay Area has performed better than most major metropolitan areas in the United States, the region is experiencing worrying spikes that have recently prompted local health officials to urge residents not to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday. Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joined in the plea on Thursday, holding a rare press conference to announce new guidelines recommending against travel during the holidays.
The nine counties in the Bay Area recorded an average of more than 1,000 new cases per day last week, a 36% increase from the previous week. Before recording 1,342 cases last Monday, it had been 67 days since the Bay Area had reached 1,000 in a single day. For the week ending November 1, the average was less than 540 new cases per day. The average number of new cases per day in November was 885 from 480 in October, an increase of almost 85%.
“We are alarmed by the exponential increase in cases, hospitalizations and deaths,” said Henry Walke, CDC COVID-19 incident manager.
Due to the increase in # COVID-19[FEMALE[FEMININE In this case, CA issues a limited stay-at-home order.
Non-essential work and gatherings are scheduled to stop from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. in Purple Level counties.
This will take effect at 10pm on Saturday and will stay for 1 month.
Together we can flatten the curve again.
– Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) November 19, 2020
If people are traveling anyway, they should wear masks, stay six feet from people who are not in their homes, and wash their hands frequently with soap and water, the CDC recommends.
The health agency has issued other detailed guidelines, including the need to remain masked, to avoid indoor spaces and to maintain a good distance in public.
“I know everyone wants to know what to do on Thanksgiving, and the basic answer – being the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving – is not to do it,” Dr. George rutherford, an infectious disease expert at UCSF, told The Chronicle this week.
Public health officials are worried for good reasons. The number of cases has exploded across the country, particularly in the Midwest. That surge is now spreading across the country, even in California, which had managed to keep cases relatively stable for much of the past two months.
But the much anticipated winter push is clearly now spreading at a rapid pace, almost everywhere.
As of Thursday morning, 1,900 Bay Area residents died from COVID-19, county data showed. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 in the Bay Area have increased 69% since early November. Nearly 500 people with COVID-19 were hospitalized in the region on Wednesday – the highest number since mid-September.
Nationally, the United States has reported more deaths (over 250,000) and cases (over 11.5 million) than any other country in the world, by far.
Deaths from COVID-19 across the country are expected to increase in the coming weeks, with 7,300 to 16,000 deaths likely to be reported in the week ending December 12, the CDC said Thursday. The agency’s compilation of national models predicts that a total of 276,000 to 298,000 deaths from COVID-19, counted since the start of the pandemic, will be recorded in the United States on that date.
Despite these startling figures, the politicization of the disease remains evident across the country, with some people downplaying its danger.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s foremost infectious disease expert, said his frustration “borders on pain” as people deny the hard facts of the rise of the worsening virus across the country.
“The flu is not even approaching” the 250,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States so far, he said; the United States typically reports about 40,000 influenza deaths each year. “Either people don’t want to look at the data or they look at the data and they say it’s wrong. No, this is not wrong. … It’s a global problem, ”he said in an interview with USA Today. “I mean, let’s go, guys. And that, don’t you understand?
Without mentioning President Trump, who plays down the virus, Fauci said, “Enough is enough with this political divide, with this claim that people make things up. Get rid of these ridiculous conspiracy theories and realize this is a public health crisis.
Fauci said there is no need to “shut down as a nation,” but that people should come on board wearing masks and following distances and refrain from congregating inside.
Despite all the warnings, many Americans still plan to reunite as a family over the Thanksgiving holiday. Some believe that getting tested will help keep them safe, although most public health officials say the lag between testing and results makes this strategy inaccurate science and bad practice.
Those looking for coronavirus tests before their vacation face longer lines, including in parts of the Bay Area. Longer wait times for results are complicating efforts to slow the pandemic as people try to get tested before family reunions. Test sites from New York to Wisconsin to Oregon have report lines spanning three to four hours, with results taking up to five days, the Washington Post reports.
The nation sees something of a ‘split screen’ with the virus, with increasingly grim news of deaths and hospitalizations occurring at the same time as promising developments in vaccines and treatments emerge, Dr Robert Wachter , chair of UCSF’s medical department, said in a virtual meeting Thursday.
“We are seeing a horror film of epic proportions, with a quarter of a million deaths in the United States, hospitals are filling up and some are starting to be overwhelmed,” he said. “Half of the split screen is incredibly painful, and the other half feels like a romantic comedy.”
The recent news that two experimental coronavirus vaccines are over 90% effective, according to early data announced by vaccine developers Pfizer and Moderna, is “quite remarkable, almost beyond dreams we might have had there a few months ago, ”he said. .
Chronicle editors Aidin Vaziri, Catherine Ho, Rita Beamish, Kellie Hwang and Michael Massa contributed to this report.
Al Saracevic is a writer for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @alsaracevic
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