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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 5:14:57 GMT
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday issued a statewide order for all residents to ‘stay at home’ amid a coronavirus outbreak. “We need to bend the curve in the state of California,” Newsom said, as he announced a statewide order for Californians to stay home. “There’s a social contract here, people I think recognize the need to do more ... They will begin to adjust and adapt as they have been quite significantly. We will have social pressure and that will encourage people to do the right thing,” he said, in addressing how this order will be enforced. Newsom added: “Home isolation is not my preferred choice ... but it is a necessary one ...This is not a permanent state, this is a moment in time.” The stay home order is in place till further notice. All dine-in restaurants, bars and clubs, gyms and fitness studios will be closed, according to the order. Public events and gatherings are also not allowed. Essential services will stay open, however, such as pharmacies, grocery stores, takeout and delivery restaurants, and banks. Newsom said he made the decision “based upon some new information” and projections that came in from Johns Hopkins University. He reiterated throughout the press conference and in response to questions from reporters: “We need to meet this moment and flatten the curve together.” “We have 416 hospitals in CA, but within the hospital system we have a capacity to surge beyond the 78,000 currently staffed beds by an additional 10,000,” Newsom said. “If we change our behaviors that inventory will come down, if we meet this moment, we can truly bend the curve.” “It’s now just time to absorb and recognize that we need to change our behaviors in a way that meets this moment and allows a recognition that this moment will pass,” he added. According to the order, Californians in 16 critical sectors are to continue working despite the order. Those include emergency services, energy and food and agriculture. “The supply chain must continue, and Californians must have access to such necessities as food, prescriptions and healthcare,” the order said. “When people need to leave their homes, whether to obtain or perform the functions above, or to otherwise facilitate authorized necessary activities, they should at all times practice social distancing.”
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 6:03:15 GMT
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday ordered the state's 40 million residents to stay at home, restricting non-essential movements to control the spread of the coronavirus that threatens to overwhelm the state's medical system. “This is a moment we need to make tough decisions,” Newsom said. "We need to recognize reality.” His move came after counties and communities covering about half the state's population already had issued similar orders. People may still leave their homes for walks and exercise and for essential needs such as food and medical care. Restaurant meals can still be delivered to homes. Newsom earlier in the day asked the president to deploy a U.S. Navy medical ship to help the state expand its medical capacity and warned that more than half of California's residents could contract the new coronavirus. Newsom asked President Donald Trump to send the USNS Mercy Hospital Ship to the port of Los Angeles for use through Sept. 1, in a letter dated Wednesday. California has disproportionately aided people returning to the U.S. from foreign countries and needs the ship to help “decompress” its health care delivery system as infection rates climb, Newsom wrote. The ship is based in San Diego. He said infection rates are doubling every four days in some parts of the state and issued the dire prediction that 56% of California's population could contract the virus over the next eight weeks. His spokesman later confirmed that number does not take into account aggressive mitigation efforts underway across the state. Many large counties had already been issuing shelter-in-place orders aimed at keeping Californians confined to their homes and Newsom had directed the closure of bars, gyms and other gathering spaces statewide. “This projection shows why it’s so critical that Californians take action to slow the spread of the disease — and those mitigation efforts aren’t taken into account in this projection,” spokesman Nathan Click said in an emailed statement. Newsom's letter to Trump said 25.5 million people could be infected. But the state's population is estimated to be just shy of 40 million, meaning 56% of the population would be closer to 22.4 million people. The governor's office did not respond to questions about his calculation or offer a prediction that considers efforts to stop the spread of the infection.
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 23:04:20 GMT
The order took effect at midnight Friday, but what exactly does it entail?
The order has forced the closure of dine-in restaurants, bars and nightclubs, entertainment venues, gyms, public events and gatherings, and convention centers, according to the California state government website.
Services and businesses that have been deemed “essential”-- such as gas stations, pharmacies, grocery stores, banks and laundromats--will be allowed to stay open, as well as “law enforcement and offices that provide government programs and services.”
The order also asks Californians who work in more than a dozen federally-designated “critical infrastructure sectors” -- ranging from defense to nuclear reactors – to keep reporting to their jobs.
“I order that Californians working in these 16 critical infrastructure sectors may continue their work because of the importance of these sectors to Californians’ health and well-being,” Newsom wrote in his order.
He added the sectors are considered “so vital to the United States that incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, economic security, public health or safety, or any combination thereof.”
Newsom also called for the state’s healthcare system to “prioritize services to serving those who are the sickest and shall prioritize resources, including personal protective equipment, for the providers providing direct care to them.”
Shelter-in-place restrictions are rapidly expanding in California, affecting over 10 million residents; Claudia Cowan reports from San Francisco.
Overall, the order is designed to keep Californians at home and encourages them to only venture outside when necessary.
“People will ask ‘Well, how will you enforce?'" Newsom told reporters Thursday night. “As I say there is a social contract here, people I think recognize the need to do more and to meet this moment.
“We will have social pressure that will encourage people to do the right thing,” he added. “I don’t believe the people of California need to be told through law enforcement that it's appropriate just to home isolate, to protect themselves, go about the essential patterns of life, but do so by socially distancing themselves from others and do so using your common sense.”
California says the order is to remain in place until further notice.
As of Friday morning, California has 1,030 confirmed coronavirus cases and 18 deaths, according to statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Newsom's office projected the virus will infect more than half of California’s within two months, according to a letter he sent to President Trump on Wednesday in which he said the state has been disproportionately impacted.
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Post by Admin on Mar 23, 2020 6:03:21 GMT
Total case tallies Much of the attention on data tracking the coronavirus has centered on charts and maps showing the total number of cases reported so far from around the world. As the source of the outbreak, for example, China has reported more than 80,000 confirmed cases so far, the most of any country. In the U.S., New York state has recently reported the largest number of cases – more than 11,000 as of March 21. That was nearly half of all U.S. coronavirus cases reported by that date in the Johns Hopkins database. New York state independently reported more than 15,000 confirmed cases on Sunday. Cumulative case counts don’t account for how many patients have recovered. They also don’t account for lags in reporting cases and differences in reporting methods. “When people get sick especially in the context of a new outbreak, it takes a while to move them through the detection pipeline and the diagnostic pipeline,” said Dr. Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “So just because we saw a big influx in cases today, it doesn’t mean those people got sick today, but they probably got sick recently.” Incomplete data Cases can also be removed from the cumulative total if they are later found to have been incorrectly diagnosed. So far, the available data on confirmed cases is also severely limited because it only accounts for cases that have been reported. These counts don’t include the unknown number of people who weren’t sick enough to go to a doctor or clinic, or who weren’t tested because there were not enough test kits available. The result is that the number of cases reported daily provides an incomplete picture of the outbreak at any moment in time. Still, researchers say that even incomplete data is critical to the task of controlling the spread of the illness. The hope is that widespread “social distancing” can “flatten the curve” tracking the spread of the pandemic - from the steep rise in the initial phases to a more gradual increase as efforts to contain the outbreak take effect. Delaying the spread of the virus can mean the difference between delivering care to all those patients who need it and overwhelming local or national health-care systems. Quick intervention Countries that appear to have contained the outbreak have taken aggressive measures to test widely and isolate those found to have the most serious cases, according to Rivers. In China and South Korea, she said, this policy of “case based intervention” centered on isolating and treating infected patients quickly to limit the spread of the illness. The impact of those measures can be seen in the the flattening of growth in the number of reported cases for those two countries, where the outbreak first began to spread widely. In the short term, the rapid increase in the distribution of coronavirus test kits in the U.S. will likely accelerate the pace of reported and confirmed cases. At a White House press briefing last week, Dr. Deborah Birx cautioned that the rapid increase testing will likely skew the case counts until those tests are more widely available. “We will see the number of people diagnosed dramatically increase over the next four to five days,” she told reporters. “It will be five to six days’ worth of tests being run in 24 to 48 hours. So our curves will not be stable until sometime next week.” That’s one reason the confirmed case counts have taken an alarming jump in New York state in recent days, after the state dramatically increased the availability of test kits. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters last week that the expanded testing represents an “exponential increase of what we have done.” “What happens when the testing capacity increases, the number of positives increase by definition,” he said.
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Post by Admin on Mar 24, 2020 5:05:54 GMT
On the second full day of California’s unprecedented shelter-at-home order, Gov. Gavin Newsom sharply criticized young people who flocked to parks, beaches and elsewhere and ignored the 6-foot social distancing requirement. “Those young people are still out there on the beaches thinking it’s time to party. It’s time to grow up, time to wake up,” Newsom said at a Saturday evening news conference. “Time to recognize that it’s not just about the old folks, it’s about your impact on their lives. Don’t be selfish.” The governor’s effort to curb the pandemic in the nation’s most populous state was by far the most sweeping and was followed Friday by similar announcements in New York and Illinois. Newsom has said infection rates of the COVID-19 virus are doubling every four days in some areas and projected that 56% of the state’s population — about 22 million people — could contract the virus in the next two months if aggressive prevention isn’t taken. On Saturday, he ordered spending $42 million in emergency funding to allow the state to lease two hospitals — Seton Medical Center in Daly City and St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles — for three months to provide care for patients with COVID-19. The emergency fund will also be used to buy or refurbish ventilators, provide more patient transportation service and expand testing capacity at a state laboratory. California’s 416 hospitals have a combined 78,000 beds for patients, Newsom said, and the state was working to set up 10,000 additional beds by converting hotels and convention centers into quasi hospitals to meet the potential demand. The Clara Convention Center, for example, will accommodate 250 patients with non-COVID-19 illnesses, such as recovery from surgery, to divert them from regular hospitals. Newsom said he expected social pressure — not policing — to help enforce his stay-at-home order. He said he doesn’t want to shut down parks or beaches, and that National Guard troops will only be deployed to help law enforcement “make sure all our logistics are operational.” ___ Associated Press writers Adam Beam, Don Thompson and Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento, Stefanie Dazio, Michael R. Blood and Justin Pritchard in Los Angeles, Olga R. Rodriguez and Juliet Williams in San Francisco, and Amy Taxin in Orange County contributed to this story.
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