They killed the spring break beach parties in Florida and Alabama, closed schools in Texas, and hinted at shelter-in-place orders like San Francisco’s. Some of American officialdom’s biggest social-distancing holdouts are folding, while early adopters are issuing further restrictions to slow the spread of new coronavirus.
“This is not a vacation. This is not time for social gatherings,” Mayor London Breed said Thursday at a press conference in San Francisco. “We are discouraging play dates and dinner parties and other things you might typically want to do in your homes.”
In New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham warned of penalties for businesses that open before April 10, including shopping malls, gyms, movie theaters and restaurant dining rooms. “There are still far too many New Mexicans who are coming into contact with one another,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement.
While hard-hit New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania this week coordinated policy to cut human interaction -- business restrictions and 50-person crowd limits, for instance -- some other states had taken few, if any, steps to limit the spread. That started to change as cases nationwide spiked and social media buzz grew around deliberately reckless behavior among young adults, who make up one-third of coronavirus cases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On Thursday, Florida officials started closing bars and beaches to hordes of spring break college partiers whose behavior is a challenge in any year, let alone when a deadly virus is rampant.
“The party’s over in Florida,” Governor Ron DeSantis said on “Fox & Friends.”
They also got the boot in neighboring Alabama, which initially had welcomed the booze-and-Airbnb dispossessed. With at least 79 coronavirus cases reported, Governor Kay Ivey enacted orders that went well beyond even those in some Northeastern states: closing beaches, preschools and child-care centers; delaying all elective dental and medical procedures; and limiting gatherings to 25 people.
“We’re all stressed about getting enough materials to conduct the Covid-19 tests,” Scott Harris, Alabama’s state health officer, said at a news conference in Montgomery.
U.S. coronavirus cases on Thursday topped 11,500, more than doubling in 48 hours, and at least 150 people have died, including four members of a single New Jersey family.
Texas Order
Texas health officials identified the state’s first coronavirus case March 4, but Governor Greg Abbott had resisted statewide orders, deferring to local officials until Thursday, when the health department reported 143 cases and three deaths. At an Austin news conference, Abbott declared a public disaster, closed public schools for 5 million students and applied restrictions to restaurants, gyms and other businesses. He also put a 10-person limit on gatherings.