Reopening the economy in the West? California partners on post-shutdown plan

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Monday that California, Oregon and Washington are developing a regional plan to reopen their economies after the coronavirus and to mitigate a future spread of COVID-19 in the west.

More details on the strategy won’t be available until Tuesday, Newsom said during his daily press conference, but he said public health data would guide the framework.

“We began a process of establishing more formally what it would look like and how we could begin the process of the kind of incremental release of the stay-at-home orders that advance the fundamental principle of keeping people healthy, keeping people safe, using science to guide our decision making, and not political pressure,” Newsom said.

The governor repeated that though California is “bending the curve,” physical distancing remains imperative. As of Monday, 22,348 people have tested positive for the virus and 687 have died, Newsom said. More than 3,000 people are hospitalized and 1,178 are receiving intensive care.

In a statement following his press conference, Newsom, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said a regional approach would better protect the West Coast, which has “an outsized stake in controlling and ultimately defeating COVID-19.”

“The virus knows no boundaries, no borders,” Newsom said. “You can’t build walls around it.”

Newsom’s administration is also working on what he called California’s “bottom-up” plan to ease restrictions in the state through targeted interventions.

COVID-19 infection rates vary statewide, but large outbreaks are mostly concentrated in cities and certain counties that experienced early spread, said Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health.

Testing is also not uniform across the state, Angell said. It’s being prioritized for certain patients who are hospitalized and need the information to make medical decisions, or in potential “hot spots” like jails and homeless shelters.

Angell also said California will soon roll out targeted testing that closely follows where the coronavirus is spreading.

“We are following and expanding testing so we understand the movement of disease,” she said.

This story was originally published April 13, 2020 at 2:13 PM with the headline "Reopening the economy in the West? California partners on post-shutdown plan."