SACRAMENTO, California: California’s governor on Thursday (Nov 19) ordered a curfew positioned on all indoor social gatherings and non-essential actions exterior the house throughout a lot of the state in a serious escalation of measures to curb an alarming surge in coronavirus infections.
The restricted stay-at-home restrictions will go into impact from 10 pm till 5 am every day, beginning Saturday evening and ending the morning of Dec 21, masking 41 counties representing over 94 percent of the state’s inhabitants, Governor Gavin Newsom mentioned.
“The virus is spreading at a tempo we have not seen for the reason that begins of this pandemic, and the following a number of days and weeks can be crucial to cease the surge,” Newsom mentioned in a press release saying the measure.
He mentioned the restriction is basically identical to California’s first-in-the-nation statewide stay-at-home order that Newsom imposed in March, besides it applies solely in the course of the designated curfew hours reasonably than across the clock.
A short while earlier, President-elect Joe Biden emerged from a teleconference with 10 governors from each event saying that they had mentioned a potential “implementation of a nationwide masks mandate”.
Biden, who has careworn the necessity for a coordinated nationwide technique to combat the pandemic, additionally repeated he had no plans to impose a US lockdown, opposite to claims made in the course of the election by President Donald Trump and different Republicans.
“I’m not going to close down the economic system, interval. I’ll shut down the virus,” Biden advised reporters, including, “I will say it once more: no nationwide shutdown. Each regional space, each neighborhood is totally different.”
The US-registered is greater than 2,200 deaths from COVID-19 within the final 24 hours, in accordance with a Johns Hopkins College tally on Thursday, a file excessive since Could because the pandemic surges throughout the nation.
REIMPOSING RESTRICTIONS
Newsom’s order got here as state and native authorities leaders nationwide had been transferring to reimpose restrictions on social and financial life, in search of to tamp down hovering charges of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations heading into winter following a summertime lull within the pandemic.
Wellbeing consultants say larger social mixing and indoor gatherings in the course of the vacation season, mixed with a colder climate, will seemingly speed up the surge, threatening to overwhelm already strained healthcare programs.
Newsom, a first-term Democrat, warned that “extra stringent actions” could also be mandatory if the newest efforts to blunt the contagion fall brief.
Republican state Assemblyman James Gallagher sharply criticized the governor’s motion, saying, “An arbitrary curfew will solely additional decimate struggling companies that already face a number of the hardest hurdles within the nation”.
The newly ordered curfew in California, essentially the most populous US state with some 40 million residents, got here a day after New York Metropolis’s public faculty system, the nation’s largest, known as a halt to in-classroom instruction on account of rising infection charges there.
NEW YORK GYMS, RESTAURANTS
Critics of New York Metropolis Mayor Invoice de Blasio questioned why public faculties, which had partially reopened for in-person studying in September, ought to shut once more whereas bars, eating places and different companies had been allowed to remain open.
De Blasio mentioned faculty closures had been solely non permanent and that he expects the state to close down indoor eating and gymnasiums within the metropolis “inside per week or two” given the rising infection charges.
Natalia Petrzela, whose 8-year-old daughter attends a New York Metropolis public faculty, mentioned the uncertainty over courses had taken an emotional toll on households.
“I’m sick as a working mother of ready, checking Twitter to see if faculties are going to be open tomorrow and how one can juggle my work tasks and inform my daughter once more to buck up,” Petrzela advised Reuters in an interview.
At a briefing by members of the White Home’s activity pressure on the pandemic, Vice President Mike Pence mentioned it was the place of the duty pressure and of the US Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention “that we don’t want to shut our faculties”.
Authorities officers in at the very least 22 states, representing each side of the US political divide, have issued a sweeping new public well-being mandate this month. These vary from stricter limits on social gatherings and non-essential companies to new necessities for sporting masks in public locations.
