One Lockdown Lifts, The Other Remains
On Monday California Governor Gavin Newsom lifted the state's lockdown order that had closed many in-person businesses and limited restaurants to take-out and delivery service only. Example coverage: Los Angeles Times article, 24 Jan 2021. The order had been based on hospital intensive-care unit beds across 5 regions in the state. See my Dec 5 blog with more details about how that worked.
The governor faces criticism from the political right that lifting the order was arbitrary and not sufficiently evidence-based. What, suddenly the political right cares about evidence? Science? Good governance? Wow, where were they the past 4 years? It's like the pot calling the milk black.
The state's decision is based on a forecast. Take a look at how new cases are trending in this chart from the New York Times:
Enactment of the policy came in early December when new cases were clearly trending up. Now that they're clearly trending down it makes sense to lift the restrictions.
This is hardly a case of "Woohoo! No more lockdowns!" though. California still has its four-tier system in place. And per today's update to the tiers (California updates them once a week, on Tuesday) most of the state remains in Purple, the highest risk level:
The four counties not in the purple tier represent less than 0.1% of the state population. So 99.9% of us are still under relatively strict safer-at-home measures. But hey, restaurants in many jurisdictions are allowed to resume outdoor dining (Eater.com article, 25 Jan 2021). That's a change from the past 8 weeks!
[This entry was cross-posted from https://canyonwalker.dreamwidth.org/23704.html. Please comment there using OpenID. That's where most of the action is!]
The governor faces criticism from the political right that lifting the order was arbitrary and not sufficiently evidence-based. What, suddenly the political right cares about evidence? Science? Good governance? Wow, where were they the past 4 years? It's like the pot calling the milk black.
The state's decision is based on a forecast. Take a look at how new cases are trending in this chart from the New York Times:
Enactment of the policy came in early December when new cases were clearly trending up. Now that they're clearly trending down it makes sense to lift the restrictions.
This is hardly a case of "Woohoo! No more lockdowns!" though. California still has its four-tier system in place. And per today's update to the tiers (California updates them once a week, on Tuesday) most of the state remains in Purple, the highest risk level:
The four counties not in the purple tier represent less than 0.1% of the state population. So 99.9% of us are still under relatively strict safer-at-home measures. But hey, restaurants in many jurisdictions are allowed to resume outdoor dining (Eater.com article, 25 Jan 2021). That's a change from the past 8 weeks!
[This entry was cross-posted from https://canyonwalker.dreamwidth.org/23704.html. Please comment there using OpenID. That's where most of the action is!]