In Los Angeles County, unions for teachers, nurses and grocery and hotel workers have called for stricter health orders, including a shutdown in January. A masked elf said Santa had a mask under his white whiskers, but children could forgo face coverings while being photographed. Lines of about half a dozen masked people formed outside Lululemon. In Northern California, at the Broadway Plaza in Walnut Creek, a popular open-air shopping destination usually jammed before Christmas, masked shoppers strolled the streets in vastly fewer numbers than in past years. Riverside County, which includes Temecula and Perris, had some of the highest per capita case and death rates of California’s 58 counties in the last week - even worse than hard-hit L.A. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco has called the stay-at-home order “flat-out ridiculous.” He said in a video this month that his department would not enforce it. “People are partying around us, they aren’t really abiding by the rules, and now they have an excuse to go out in public for the holidays,” said the Perris resident. “Everything is open still, and people are going out.”įatima Tomlinson, 21, who went to the mall to buy hoodies that were unavailable online, said the stay-at-home order should be stricter. “This is nothing like the past orders,” said the laid-off health worker. Shopper Josie Cardenas, 23, a resident of Perris, said she had not expected the mall to be so busy and wished people would take the health orders more seriously. Inside the Promenade Temecula mall last week, business appeared brisk. “I don’t think we will see a substantial drop in cases until sometime in the third week of January,” Swartzberg said.įor health orders to work, people must follow them, and compliance in some places has been spotty. But gatherings for Christmas and New Year’s Eve may bring another wave of infections. Several experts said the surge from Thanksgiving may ebb by Christmas, with a flattening or even a dip in new cases. Additionally, cooler weather has have made the environment more hospitable for the coronavirus, which thrives in low humidity and spreads more easily indoors. Many who traveled or gathered with people from outside their households got sick, then infected others. The match that ignited the fire was Thanksgiving. Watchdog As crisis deepens, hundreds of hotel rooms reserved for COVID-19 response go unused by San Diego Countyĭata shows San Diego near bottom of California counties in filling hotel rooms set aside under state relief program Now, there is a “full-blown, raging, viral wildfire,” and “it’s just going to take longer” to bring it under control. The March shutdown flattened the curve in three weeks, he said. Robert Kim-Farley, a UCLA medical epidemiologist, likened the spread of the virus early in the pandemic to “lighted matches being thrown into the forest, which occasionally resulted in flare-ups.” John Swartzberg, an infectious-disease expert at UC Berkeley.ĭr. “There is no precedent for how well a lockdown will work when you are having as many cases as we are currently having,” said Dr. But the number of infections then, while rising, was only a fraction of what the state faces today. The state has ordered thousands of body bags and refrigerated storage units to handle the dead.Ĭontrast this misery with the state’s success in the spring, when California reaped nationwide praise for flattening the curve by shutting down in March, closing all schools and nonessential retail. Experts say the lack of hospital space and shortage of staff will lead to more deaths, not just for COVID-19 patients but also for people with other ailments who should have been hospitalized but were not able to gain admittance. The crush is expected to get worse before it gets better. Meanwhile, intensive care units at many hospitals are filled, and medical providers are being more selective about which patients are admitted. But their predictions of when cases might stabilize or dip - if only briefly - varied, ranging from a week to after the holidays. Health experts interviewed by The Times said the situation would be even more dire without the new stay-at-home order. Greater rates of movement have been associated with higher case counts throughout the pandemic. GPS data from cellphones show that people in California are moving around less, Newsom has said. The new stay-at-home order is making some difference, though. “Once the rates get really high,” said Aragón, “it is not like you can fine-tune it with levers.” The state’s count was 82.2 per 100,000 residents, compared with a national average of 64.6. Los Angeles County’s daily case rate last week was 153.6 per 100,000 residents, Aragón said. California’s daily case rates are soaring way beyond that number.
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