I know of at least one large state (of California) agency has just let employees know they’ll be working from home until the end of the year.
CA Governor Puts Kibosh On Bars, Indoor Dining Amid ‘Alarming’ COVID-19 Spread | Talking Points Memo
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That’s a pretty low bar. Newsom opened up too soon, failed to get contact tracing worked up before opening, and failed to lock back down when it became clear that case numbers were going up. California has had more daily new cases than Texas for the last week or two, and our governor is utterly terrible.
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We also have almost 40 million people vs your state at 30. Think we can safely say the federal government failed all of us.
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California is only a bit behind Texas in per capita cases – 8.7 cases per thousand for California versus 9.5 in Texas.
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Well, there are a couple of things going on in the northeast. First, we’re really not all that open in most places. Second, we have lots of well-educated people and liberal people who are sensible enough to take precautions.
And finally, we’re having a perfect summer. Everybody’s got every window in their house open all day and all night long.
We’ll see how things look once some schools reopen and we start shutting the windows and turning on the heat.
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There’s a lot of bagging on Newsom here, and while I am not a huge fan, I think he’s done about as well as he could. California is a huge and diverse state, and there are large disinformation campaigns afoot. What he has done well is talking to Californians like adults, deferring to experts, and honestly answering questions. I think the fact that there’s no coherent national strategy has hamstrung the administration, and every other responsible governor.
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Katie Porter is working on it. 
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Uh, no. Not per capita on a 7 day moving average. Texas: 334 new cases per day per million, California 238.
Now let’s look at testing rates per capita: Texas 1762 per day per million, California 2626. There is a some truth to you test more, you find more. Just not when the white house and certain governors lie their ass off (via omission) by not mentioning that in some states test positivity rate is going off the chart. Speaking of which, TX’s is 18.9% positive (3rd worst in nation), CA is 8.2% (about 15th in nation). 8.2% is nothing to be proud of, but it ain’t 18.9%.
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It lasted 2 days, here…
The other difference is that Newsom has granted every county the right to implement preventive measures as they see fit, whereas Abbot has at times prohibited the County judges from ordering things like masking. The things Newsom is banning are the higher risk activities in response to per county pandemic numbers, whereas Abbot has been intermittently prohibiting the mitigation measures. There’s no comparison.
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What Newsom needed to do was:
- Stick to the original March criteria for reopening rather than loosening it when he got pushback
- Keep control and responsibility for the reopening rather than treating reopening like a goodie bag and encouraging counties to submit shoddy plans
- Provide political cover so that he took the heat rather than all the local county officials
- Push for emergency spending on testing, testing, testing, and contact tracing, rather than sit back after negotiating some high-profile, generally wasteful PPE purchases early on
- Provide massive state aid for the unemployed and small businesses, so that we could actually sustain a lockdown without assholes griping quite as loudly
This is a lot. But this is also a state with 75% Democratic legislature. He could have done all of it. Instead he made austerity a virtue and left decisions to the counties, with caseloads barely dropping before reopening.
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California’s testing rate per capita is 5th in the country, behind AK, DC, LA, and NY.
If she’s working on it, then there’s a real chance it’s gonna happen. She seems like the real deal: A go-getter who gets things done.
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Amen, sister.
I might add - seasonal Ag workers still need that help. Outbreaks among seasonal workers are part of the growth in cases in WA and OR, where we are at the beginning of the harvest season.
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“That woman” in Michigan just instituted a mandatory mask rule by executive order.
That’s gonna rile up IDIOTUS too.
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About a third of Californians, either out of economic necessity or stupidity, did not take the shutdown seriously. It is sad, because this sloppy behavior has cost everybody in the state. The contrast with Finland could not be more stark. PCR testing in Finland was in place in the beginning of February (the first positive case was in January 29, a woman tourist from Wuhan, more than a week after the first case in the US). The CDC was having its failed rollout of defective test kits a week later, essentially pushing the start of testing back to March. California, with its brand new head at the Department of Public Health, found itself heavily reliant on outside contractors to do testing, making the state close to last in the nation in per capita testing for a couple months. Finns, in contrast, tested as needed and pushed for more reliable testing methods. This month 55 clinics and hospitals are getting a CE-marked 20-minute swab test that uses a micro particle-laser technology. It catches live virus throughout the time of infection. Finally, Finns have not masked much outside hospitals or assisted living facilities (all 70+ citizens were put under martial law), but they do social distance (a natural feature of the culture). Finland had 16 new cases yesterday, no deaths and one person in the ICU. California had 8,358 new cases and 1,833 confirmed + 188 suspected in the ICU and 23 deaths. California’s population is about 8 times larger than that of Finland’s, but the covid numbers are not proportional.
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Given the long-term damage a covid infection can inflict, it is no surprise that Sweden is a bit of a pariah with its Nordic neighbors at the moment. On the other hand, as noted by Anders Tegnell, who has been in charge of the highly divergent covid strategy, we won’t know whether all-out suppression or stable infection rates were a good idea for a couple years. A recent Karolinska Institute study suggested that “silent” T cell immunity may mean that a third of the Swedish population has some resistance to future covid infections. The Tory-mouthpiece Telegraph in the UK is almost gleeful about this as it vindicates some of the missteps of Boris. However, to even have such resistance, you need a population that eats a healthy diet, has a normal body weight, and exercises a lot. Swedes (despite fika) are generally healthier than Americans, but even so the corona has been hell on people over 80. I think most readers here will dismiss the Swedish approach to date as a massive failure, and it certainly has been with respect to assisted living facilities, but that misses an important distinction. Unlike the US, the scientists were given time to debate and formulate the national policy, and then the government stuck by the expert decision. Even today, you have Trump attacking Fauci for using science. If you adjust for country size, the Swedish approach would have caused about 165,000 deaths in the US, i.e. more than the 140,000 which the patchwork approach has achieved in the US. However, the US has seen several instances of overwhelmed healthcare systems, and they are still happening. Sweden never faced a capacity crunch and peaked at the 50% of ICU capacity use in mid-April. Capacity demand has declined since. In contrast, some counties in CA such as Riverside County have hit 100% ICU capacity.
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The really idiotic thing is that Trump’s “strategy” has been a giant political loser for him. Crises like these are huge boosts for incumbents who handle them even halfway decently. Angela Merkel was a quite unpopular lame duck before the virus hit. Now, because Germany has done better than most countries, she is going to leave office with historically high approval. Morrison in Australia, Ardern in NZ, Trudeau in Canada all saw their approvals go way up during their handling of the crisis.
If Trump had just stood beside Fauci and said, “What he says” he’d be the odd-on favorite for re-election.
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Uh, no. [Cites completely different metrics.] So who’s the fool now?
My point: California is as deeply effed as Texas. Wait a week and see.
Trump has that quality the British call “sheer bloody-mindedness” and which makes less powerful people fall to earth like Icarus fairly quickly. His emotional age is about seven, and like many of that age he is absolutely committed to never admitting he was wrong. He has to be able to say, “I was right all along!” because he can’t ever say “I changed my mind.”
Between popularizing global warming denial, and sabotaging the medical response to the pandemic, he is going to be remembered as one of history’s true monsters. And he will deserve it.
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