California Coronavirus Update: Governor Gavin Newsom Says New State Criteria For Reopening Businesses, Ending Stay-At-Home Orders Will Be Released Next Week, Could Include 21-Day Wait Period
California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Wednesday that the state will be issuing new guidelines for reopening businesses in the state.
“We’re working with local health officers all up and down the state,” said Newsom. “We’re working on new criteria, more prescriptive criteria, more dynamic criteria, as it relates to our health order statewide, as it relates to reopening business sectors in the state.”
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“We’ve been working on drafts back and forth with local officials,” revealed the governor, “in a spirit of collaboration.”
While Newsom was careful not to reveal the exact direction of the guidelines — whether looser or more strict — He said they would be made “With…an understanding that we have today based on what we’ve seen around the world, around the rest of the state and our own experiences going back a number of months.”
The governor revealed that watch periods may vary from sector to sector. The modifications would also impact the current stay-at-home order, he said.
In terms of the business and stay-at-home orders, Newsom reminded residents that “This is not a permanent state.”
“It has been traditional to look at a 14 day period,” he said, in terms of safety periods before reopening. Newsom said that, in some cases, those watch periods could extend “potentially up to 21 days.”
The governor said the new guidelines would include, in reference to his “more prescriptive” line, “a deeper emphasis in how to do it.”
There was no indication how this would impact the restart of film and TV production in the state, or how it might impact the protocols contained in the “white paper” issued June 1 by the Industry-Wide Labor Management Safety Committee Task Force, and the “Safe Way Forward” guidelines issued jointly by the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, Teamsters Local 399 and the Basic Crafts on June 12.
Deadline reported just this week that studios, networks and Hollywood’s unions are close to finalizing terms for restarting film and TV production.
“We’ll be making public next week the details of our strategy as it relates to reopening,” he said.
While the reopening guidelines are being created in consultation with local officials, the guidelines themselves “will come from the state of California and we will assert a frame of clarity and a framework that is adopted in a spirit of cooperation,” he said.
Los Angeles County now meets five of the state’s six current requirements for the lifting of business, school and stay-at-home restrictions. There was no indication of how the new guidelines may impact that.
In terms of the daily COVID-19 data, Newsom announced a spike in coronavirus-related deaths on Wednesday. While the toll reported on Tuesday was 100, that jumped to 181 in the past 24 hours. Death numbers have see-sawed widely over the past month, from an all-time high of 212 on July 31 just 77 on Saturday.
The governor reported 6,164 new cases over the past 24 hours for a total of 638,831 infections since the pandemic began.
Hospitalizations and patients in the ICU with coronavirus continue their downward trends, with .1 percent and 1 percent drops, respectively.
Watch the governor’s news conference below.
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