(CN) — The state of California moved carefully toward opening its economy on Thursday, with Governor Gavin Newsom announcing the state would enter phase 2 of the process.
“We are moving away from viewing it as essential versus nonessential workers and toward opening businesses that are lower risk,” Newsom said in his daily press briefing.
Phase 2 means California will allow retail businesses to expand curbside pickup and delivery, manufacturing plants and warehouses will open back up if modifications are made so workers can physically distance themselves. The new phase also opens the possibility of opening restaurants, shopping malls and outdoor museums if certain stipulations met.
Specifically, counties with low spread of Covid-19 and without a death in the past 14 days can move more fully into Phase 2, whereas counties like Los Angeles — where the spread of the disease continues unabated — will have to hold off on some of the more risky elements of reopening.
“We can open only as we reduce the risk,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of California Health and Human Services. “We have managed to suppress Covid-19 quite a bit but it is still spreading.”
But Newsom and Ghaly said a steady decline in hospitalizations and ICU admissions throughout the state along with stabilization in deaths and new infections has allowed the state to enter Phase 2.
“By no stretch of the imagination is this over,” Newsom said.
The governor said the last seven weeks of lockdown has helped the state ramp up its testing capacity and hire “an army of disease detectives” — contact tracers who will help continue to contain the disease as the state slowly attempts to return to robust activity.
“We anticipate more engagement, more mixing and that puts people at risk,” Newsom said. But the state is prepared to mitigate that risk through testing and contact tracing while trusting citizens to continue to practice physical distancing when they are out and about.
Newsom also talked about the need for “regional variance,” meaning that California statistics in the aggregate do not necessarily reflect what is happening on the ground in all locations throughout the large and geographically diverse state.
Los Angeles has the most cases and deaths by far, and the largest and most populous county in the state continues to see a rise in infections and deaths, with 815 new confirmed cases and 51 new deaths in the last 24 hours. The county accounts for slightly more than half of the 92 new deaths reported throughout the state in the past 24 hours.
LA County Public Health director Dr. Barbara Ferrer said Thursday many more people will be out in public by the end of this week as the local health order is relaxed to allow for select businesses and services to resume. But that does not include large gatherings or people having close contact with people from outside their homes, she said.
The county’s death toll stands at 1,418. Just over 29,400 Angelenos have tested positive for the virus.
“As we begin this journey of recovery many of us will be going back to work or being around more people,” said Ferrer. “But that doesn’t mean that we’re living in a post-Covid-19 world.”
San Francisco, another large metropolis, saw only 104 new cases and two deaths over the past 24 hours.
There are at least 10 of the 58 counties that have five or fewer confirmed cases over the outbreak, and the clamor from those counties to be allowed to fully reopen their economies has increased in recent days.
Newsom’s promise to move into Phase 2 of reopening is in many ways a political concession to those areas that continue to stridently appeal for looser restrictions given the economic pain created by the pandemic, but so far remain inoculated against the public health ramifications.
