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On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the lifting of all regional stay-at-home orders in California, clearing the way for a wider reopening in many regions, including Los Angeles County.
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The governor’s announcement was made amid promising signs that the worst wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to recede, though the state is “not out of the woods” yet, as Newsom reminded Californians on Monday.
The sudden announcement came as a shock to much of the state, and the governor’s team appeared to have been operating on a need-to-know basis in the hours immediately preceding it. Those in the know included leaders of California’s powerful restaurant lobby, which sent an email to its members Sunday night informing them of the impending announcement.
With state-mandated regional stay-at-home lockdown lifted, LA County will allow restaurants to open for outdoor dining on Friday after being closed more than two months.
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UC Berkeley epidemiologist Dr. John Swartzberg said he feared lifting the stay-at-home order was “premature” because the cases, while declining, remain very high. He said it might make more sense to wait a few weeks until cases go down further and California can begin reopening with a lower baseline.
He noted that after last year’s spring and summer surges, California failed to bring its case numbers to a low level before reopening. That meant that when the next surge hit, it became even bigger than the one before it, he said.
“It’s like we’re climbing this mountain. We go two steps up and we just take one step back, and we take two steps up from there and one step back and we keep just having more cases,” he said. “We’re doing a lot better than we were doing 2½ weeks ago, but we’re doing terrible compared to three months ago. We need to knock these cases down so as we get more and more people vaccinated, we’ll get to a safer en