Vigilance Had a Three-Month Shelf Life

Read: The week America lost control of the pandemic

A lot went right in the early months. California had good leadership (by mayors, health officials, the governor, and corporate CEOs, many of whom told their workers to stay home well before the state’s stay-at-home order on March 19), good citizenship (among residents who accepted the restrictions as legitimate and prudent, with little give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death bluster), and plain good luck.

Why luck? In February and early March, when testing was scarce and Californians were all flying blind, the state somehow avoided a super-spreader event in a nursing home or at a parade or choir practice. This meant that COVID-19 was not out of hand when the state shut down, and things remained under control until it reopened.

But the surge in cases beginning in mid-June showed that California’s luck had run out.

The decision to end the shutdown and ease restrictions on businesses, a process that began on May 8, was not unreasonable. When a new pandemic breaks out, the whole point of stay-at-home orders is to give a region’s health-care system time to build capacity, so it can better handle a modest uptick in cases after those orders are lifted. And during the relatively benign months of March, April, and May, California acquired masks, gloves, and other protective equipment; added hospital and intensive-care beds; and expanded its ability to conduct testing, contact tracing, and disease monitoring. The drugs remdesivir and dexamethasone were proved to be moderately effective. By Memorial Day, the state seemed poised to be a model of reopening successfully, just as it had been a model of a successful lockdown.

But that’s not what happened. As Californians left their homes and returned to work, as well as stores, restaurants, bars, and gyms, the state experienced surges in case numbers far larger than anticipated. Of course, states such as Arizona, Florida, and Texas, whose leaders were more cavalier about safety measures than California’s, fared correspondingly worse. (See chart) But that offered little solace as California’s per capita confirmed-infection rate caught up to and surpassed that of the nation as a whole.

While the decision to lift stay-at-home orders might have seemed reasonable, the virus was soon spreading—and not just in newly reopened businesses. A huge outbreak occurred at San Quentin prison in Marin County after infected prisoners were transferred there from a Southern California facility. A surge of infections in Imperial County on the Mexican border was associated with cross-border traffic. The virus is undeterred by walls.

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The broader problem, however, was that too many people heard “We’re starting to open” but missed the next part: “… and we have to do it safely.” Safety meant that people needed to continue to maintain their distance from one another, reliably wear masks, and avoid large crowds. As shelter-in-place rules were relaxed, too many people—particularly, but not exclusively, young ones—interpreted opening up as permission to return to their pre-coronavirus life. They grew complacent. And with complacency came sloppiness.