California stay-at-home order may be imposed on certain regions if the number of coronavirus cases continues to soar.
According to Gov. Gavin Newsom, the state will be divided into five regions: the Bay Area, Greater Sacramento, Northern California, San Joaquin Valley, and Southern California. For three weeks, California stay-at-home order will be implemented if the remaining ICU capacity in a region drops below 15%.
Under the stay-at-home order, bars, personal services, wineries, hair salons, and barbershops will temporarily close. Personal services refer to businesses like nail salons, body waxing, and tattoo parlors. Schools that qualify for the state’s health requirements and infrastructure could still operate. Meanwhile, retail stores could run at 20% capacity and restaurants would still be able to offer take-out and delivery, the governor said.
All parts of the state could trigger a stay-at-home order in December. Newsom said he expects four of the five regions to have less than 15% ICU capacity “as early as the next day or two.” The Bay Area is projected to reach that milestone by mid-to-late December, he said.
“The bottom line is if we don’t act now, our hospital system will be overwhelmed. If we don’t act now, we’ll continue to see a death rate climb, more lives lost,” Newsom said during a press briefing.
Meanwhile, 8,208 Covid patients were in the hospital in California as of Wednesday, based on a weekly average, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project. That number marks a more than 35% increase compared with a week ago.
“We are right now in the most dangerous time of this pandemic for our state and our region,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a tweet.
“Cases and hospitalizations are surging. Unless we get things under control immediately, we could quickly run out of hospital beds in the Bay Area,” Breed said.
Newsome's announcement came after the U.S. has reached 100,000 Covid hospitalizations.
Dr. Janis Orlowski, chief health care officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges, told CNBC in a phone interview that she does not remember any illness sickening so many Americans all at once ever before.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen this number. We certainly never saw this number with HIV or any of the other new diseases that we’ve had,” Orlowksi said. “It’s an astonishing, astonishing number and the shame of it is it’s a number that we could have impacted and we didn’t.”
According to Orlowski’s organization, the AAMC, all health systems must prepare to implement “Crisis Standards of Care,” which is regularly used in situations such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
White House Health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci also warned that the number of Covid-19 cases after the holidays may surge.
He believes that the U.S. may witness a “surge upon a surge” of Covid-19 cases after holidays as holiday parties and shoppers could trigger an outbreak.
“If you look across the United States, we are really in a public health crisis right now,” Dr. Fauci told Colorado Gov. Jared Polis during a livestream session. “Now that we’re in the mid- to late fall, merging on into the winter, we’ve seen, because a variety of circumstances, a surge that has really surpassed the others.”
According to the infectious diseases specialist, the potential surge of Covid-19 cases after holidays is based on the number of people who traveled for Thanksgiving and shared meals with family and friends.
