Dialing Back
In addition to California, the nation’s most populous state, others are beginning to ease restrictions, including the Democratic strongholds of New York, Illinois and Massachusetts.
Last week, officials in Illinois said restaurants in Chicago and its suburbs could open for indoor dining. Those rules had been in place since October.
“The risk of a resurgence in Illinois, particularly with extremely contagious new variants is serious,” Governor J.B. Pritzker said in a press conference. “Our ability to have limited indoor restaurant service and to restart youth sports could be cut short if we aren’t extremely careful.”
Michigan will allow limited indoor dining at restaurants and bars starting Feb. 1, Governor Gretchen Whitmer said Friday. “Our actions saved our hospitals from shutting down, our actions saved lives,” she said said during a news conference in Lansing.
On Monday, Massachusetts lifted a curfew that forced restaurants, movie theaters and many other businesses to close by 9:30 p.m., and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said elective surgeries can resume in Buffalo’s Erie County, where he spoke Monday. More adjustments will be made over the next couple of days.
“We saw that holiday spike, and then you see it start to trail off,” Cuomo said.
Standing Pat
Other states are more cautious. Despite an easing of its case load, Nevada extended limits on group gatherings so that they are in effect for casinos during the Super Bowl on Feb. 7.
In Colorado, there are no immediate plans to reduce rules, even though the case numbers have been declining for two weeks, according to Rachel Herlihy, a state epidemiologist.
“It’s going to probably be until at least this summer that we really need to continue all of the strategies that we’re using,” she said during an online news briefing.
That will tax the patience of Americans, no matter how much sense it makes medically. Many have grown tired of the rules and have begun to resist. Rescue California, one of the group’s organizing a recall of Newsom, said it has helped gather 1.25 million signatures, more than 80% of those needed to initiate an election challenge to the governor, who is two years into his second term.
“The only data/metric that forced this change had nothing to do with ‘science’ — it was the number of signatures collected on the recall petitions against him,” Carl DeMaio, a Republican activist and former San Diego city councilman, said in an email to supporters Monday.
On Edge
Newsom, at the news conference, said the state’s decision was based on the case numbers and factors including declining hospitalization and test positivity rates, which has led to projections that intensive-care availability will improve. In Southern California, where the surge in cases effectively filled ICUs, capacity is now expected to be 33% in four weeks. The state is now averaging 30,300 new cases per day over a 14-day period, down from more than 40,000 in late December.
The governor said politics was in no way involved, calling it “complete utter nonsense.”
He said the state had tripled the number of people it vaccinates daily to 131,000 by Jan. 15. Plans to accelerate the process include a new age-based alert system the state will be rolling out.
Still, as businesses like the Pizza Press began to set up their tables again, many in the medical community still wonder whether California and other states are moving too fast.
“With each surge, we have opened up things too quickly when the pandemic seems to have crested,” said John Swartzberg, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. “I think we are doing the same this time.”
—With assistance from Elizabeth Campbell, Alexander Ebert, Shruti Date Singh, Tom Moroney, Vincent Del Giudice and Keshia Clukey.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.