California coronavirus shutdown will last through Christmas as daily cases rise past 33,000
LOS ANGELES — For millions of Californians, the COVID-19 pandemic will provide a most unwelcome gift this Christmas: a wide-ranging shutdown imposed as the state grapples with its most massive and dangerous surge in infections and hospitalizations to date.
Monday provided even more devastating news: At least 33,000 new coronavirus cases reported Monday alone, according to the Los Angeles Times' county-by-county tally of infections. That shatters the previous single-day record, set Friday, when 22,369 coronavirus cases were tallied.
The stay-at-home restrictions that took hold at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time Sunday across Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley will remain in place for at least three weeks, meaning those regions will not be able to emerge from the state's latest stay-at-home order until Dec. 28 at the earliest.
Five counties in the San Francisco Bay Area also announced last week that they were proactively implementing the new restrictions and planned to keep them in place until at least Jan. 4.
Combined, those regions are home to some 33 million Californians, representing 84% of the state's population.
The timing of the rules is the latest blow, in a year full of them, for many businesses — which have been battered by coronavirus-related restrictions and hoped the holiday shopping season would throw them a desperately needed lifeline — and to the psyche of Californians, who for months have lived with the threat of the coronavirus hanging over their heads.
Officials, though, have said desperate times call for drastic measures. The number of new daily coronavirus cases has skyrocketed to a level that would have been unthinkable just weeks ago. Hospitals are already contending with an unprecedented wave of more than 10,000 COVID-19 patients, and the state is on the brink of recording its 20,000th death from the illness.
"Once people die, they're gone from our lives forever — and there's no way to measure that impact at all," L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said during a briefing Monday. "There's no value you really can place on a person's husband or daughter or their friend or their loved one. And every death is a tragedy, particularly those deaths that, in some ways, if we were all better at doing our part, we could be preventing right now."
As bleak as things are now, the ceiling of the surge may be yet to come, as experts say the ramifications of travel and gathering for the Thanksgiving holiday have yet to be fully realized.
Cases that stem from "dinner tables or activities and plans, travel through Thanksgiving, are going to show up right about now," said Dr. Mark Ghaly, California's Health and Human Services secretary, and "we know we'll be seeing that for many days to come."
"We believe," he said at a Monday briefing, "that the levels of transmission that we've been reporting so far will likely continue to go up some because of those activities around Thanksgiving."
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the new round of restrictions last week, saying stricter intervention was needed to shore up the state's hospital system and make sure intensive care beds remained available.
The state's latest strategy carves California into five regions: Southern California, the San Joaquin Valley, the Bay Area, the Greater Sacramento area and rural Northern California.
A region is required to implement a state-defined stay-at-home order — which restricts retail capacity to 20% and shuts down outdoor restaurant dining, hair salons, nail salons, public outdoor playgrounds, card rooms, museums, zoos, aquariums and wineries — if its available ICU capacity drops below 15%.
Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley are already below that threshold, and as of Monday their ICU availability had tumbled to 10.9% and 6.3%, respectively.
The Southern California region encompasses Imperial, Inyo, Los Angeles, Mono, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
On Monday, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo counties announced that they may seek approval from the state to separate from the Southern California region and create their own Central Coast region.
The counties will request to be considered a separate region to assess restrictions to curb the spread of the virus if their ICU capacity exceeds 15% in the next three weeks, according to a Ventura County press release.
"A smaller regional approach is important for our community members and struggling businesses," said County Executive Officer Mike Powers. "We believe it's reasonable to have the Central Coast as one region instead of including our County with over half the State's population in the current Southern California Region."
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