Is California’s Lockdown Working?

By Emily Hoeven, from CalMatters:

As California begins to reopen, it’s unclear if it’s met its own benchmarks for doing so.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has repeatedly said California will need to see steady declines in coronavirus cases and deaths in order to reopen in earnest. But two months into the state’s shelter-in-place order, coronavirus cases are still rising and deaths remain at a stubborn plateau. In fact, Friday was the state’s second-deadliest day amid the pandemic.

Yet even as the state remains in limbo, it’s trying to move forward. It authorized 23 counties to reopen dine-in restaurants and shopping centers, though many didn’t meet testing-capacity requirements until the state itself provided new testing sites. But even with the sites, testing levels remain low — in part due to low demand — which experts say could conceal the prevalence of the virus.

• Aimee Sisson, Placer County public health officer: “It’s hard to say just how much hidden disease is out there,” and so the reopening will largely be “an experiment.”

One goal of the stay-at-home order was to buy public health officials time to get a handle on the virus, and ultimately suppress it, by figuring out just how much “hidden disease” was out there through increased testing and tracing.

But months later, coronavirus’s true scope in California remains elusive, and testing progress is slow. The state is currently averaging 35,000 daily tests, up from 25,000 in April. Newsom has said the state will need to test between 60,000 and 80,000 residents per day in order to reopen. And California just began ramping up its contact-tracing capacity less than two weeks ago.

• Natalie Dean, University of Florida biostatistics professor: “If we’re not using this time to scale up testing to the level that we need it to be … we don’t have an exit strategy. And then when we lift things, we’re no better equipped than we were before.”

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Full coronavirus coverage: Coronavirus In California: What To Know