California Gov. Gavin Newsom Explains Why He's Not Ready to Reopen America's Most Populous State

California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Photo: Rich Pedroncelli | Pool

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On Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, the state is days, not weeks away from making significant modifications to its shelter in place order and could begin reopening parts of the country’s largest state economy. He feel some confidence over the course of the next week we’re going to be able to make some announcements that will give people some more confidence in the ability for California to get back on its economic feet. He said, the state officials are very, very close to making some announcements that will be very meaningful to people in the retail and hospitality industries including restaurants, although modifications will be in place. If we can hold the line and continue to do good work and just avoid the temptation to get back and congregate with people in ways where we can see an increase in the spread of covid-19. We’ll get there much sooner than many people perhaps think.

He cautioned, however, that the state could set its progress in fighting the covid-19 outbreak back if people congregate and don’t adhere to social distancing guidelines referencing those who congregated on the state’s beaches last weekend. Newsom said, ICU numbers were flat on Thursday and hospitalizations have gone down slightly too. A bigger decrease in patients who are in the hospital who are believed to have covid-19 but haven’t received results are down 14%. California has now conducted more than 655,000 covid-19 tests and averages nearly 25,000 tests per day.

In a video series TIME is producing with Katie Couric, California Gov. Gavin Newsom says that the state’s relative closeness to China, where the covid-19 outbreak began helped the Golden State avoid a worst case scenario.

Newsom said, One key event that got Californian officials attention was their involvement with repatriating Americans from China’s Wuhan province back in early February, more than a month before the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic. Several California military bases were chosen as the locations to quarantine those Americans in part because of the shorter flight distance involved. It really brought to the fore what this pandemic was.

He said, he likes to call California a nation state and he’s under no illusion that it will be easy keeping people home in this vast jurisdiction for what might several more weeks, even months. There’s a lot of whitewater, a lot of friction that’s going to happen. It’s been difficult today but the next few months and yearsare going to be challenging.