Too soon to start reopening California economy, Gavin Newsom says, but surgeries can resume
California isn’t ready to reopen its economy, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday, but hospitals can take the first step in loosening coronavirus restrictions and begin scheduling surgeries.
Purely cosmetic surgeries are still prohibited, Newsom said, but essential non-emergency surgeries like heart valve operations and pre-cancerous tumor removals can resume.
Newsom and Dr. Mark Ghaly, who leads the state’s Health and Human Services Agency, said stabilization of hospitalization rates drove the decision.
Despite flattening hospitalization rates, California still doesn’t have enough testing capacity to lift its stay-at-home order, Newsom said. Restrictions will loosen gradually, rather than all at once at a particular time. People and businesses must continue taking steps to avoid spreading the virus into the foreseeable future, Newsom has said, including by wearing masks and checking temperatures.
“We have tried to make it crystal clear that there is no light switch,” Newsom said. “There is no date.”
California has expanded its testing capacity to about 16,000 per day. That’s far short of the 60,000 to 80,000 per day Newsom says will be needed in the near term, but an improvement from the roughly 2,000 per day the state was conducting at the end of March.
California has struggled to increase testing since late February, when Newsom first raised concerns about limited supplies and promised to dramatically expand the state’s capacity to test for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
More than a month later, supply shortages persist. State officials have surveyed all testing providers, who report they are still low on swabs needed to collect samples and on the viral transport medium, the sterile solution swabs must be placed in once they are used to collect a sample, Newsom said. Labs are also short on RNA extraction kits, which provide components needed to run COVID-19 diagnostic tests.
Newsom said he had a “pointed, honest conversation” with President Donald Trump on Wednesday morning, during which the president promised to send California a minimum of 100,000 swabs this week, 250,000 next week and even more the following week.
“That was a very good phone call,” the Democratic governor said.
Newsom has pointed to testing as the top factor officials are monitoring to determine when the state can begin to relax restrictions. He has said the state must be able to test people who show symptoms and identify those in contact with people who test positive to determine how far the virus has spread.
The governor said he anticipates his testing task force will exceed its goal of conducting 25,000 diagnostic tests per day by the end of the month.
Newsom said some people have suggested the state should be testing a minimum of 1 percent of the population per day. In California, that would translate to about 400,000 tests per day. Newsom’s goal of 60,000 to 80,000 per day would allow the state to screen closer to 1 percent of its population per week.
Ghaly said the state will also need to have expanded testing in time for flu season, when many more people are expected to have respiratory symptoms, either from COVID-19 or the flu.
On Wednesday, Newsom also announced new contracts with companies Verily and OptumServe to open 86 new testing sites in “testing deserts” in rural, African American and Latino communities.
Newsom said the state has also agreed to buy 1.5 million serological tests from Abbott Laboratories. Unlike the diagnostic tests the state is already using widely, which determine if someone currently has the coronavirus, serological tests screen for antibodies in the blood to see if someone has been infected in the past.
For now, those tests will be used primarily to determine how widely COVID-19 has spread. Theoretically, those who have previously been infected may have immunity to the coronavirus and won’t be infected again, but Ghaly said more research is needed to know if that’s the case.
Newsom said those antibody tests have great potential, but that he’s been cautioned against promoting them too optimistically.
In the meantime, he’s directing coroners in California to determine if people had the virus as early as December after post-mortem tests in Santa Clara determined that the earliest deaths of people with COVID-19 were actually from early February, before officials knew the disease had reached the general population.
In addition to testing capacity, the state is also tracking how well it can protect high risk populations, its hospital capacity, research institutions’ progress in developing treatments, the ability of schools and businesses to implement physical distancing measures and state officials’ ability to reimpose stay-at-home orders.
This story was originally published April 22, 2020 at 12:35 PM with the headline "Too soon to start reopening California economy, Gavin Newsom says, but surgeries can resume."