‘It’s Emotional Whiplash’: California Is Once Again at the Center of the Virus Crisis
The state was the first to issue a stay-at-home order, helping to control an early outbreak. It has now surpassed New York for the most known cases of the virus.
By Tim Arango and
LOS ANGELES — When everything shut down in March as the coronavirus took off in California, Canter’s Deli, a mainstay in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, laid off dozens of employees.
A few months later, it called them back to work. By then, the state appeared to have emerged from the initial virus crisis in much better shape than other parts of the country.
But now California’s caseload is exploding, with rising deaths and hospitalizations. As quickly as things had opened up, they have shut down again.
“To have to call those people up so many times, starting March 15, to say, ‘I’m sorry, we have to lay you off, we have to furlough you,’” said Jacqueline Canter, 59, among the third generation of her family to run the restaurant. “Then call them back. Oh guess what, we’re opening again, come back. Then call them back, guess what, you don’t have a job anymore. It’s just a devastating experience for me.”
“It’s an emotional roller coaster,” she added. “It’s emotional whiplash.”
If America is now experiencing a sense of national déjà vu, with coronavirus deaths rising and hospitalizations at a level similar to the spring peak, that feeling is perhaps nowhere more intense than in California.
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In the Northeast, the crisis that was so acute this spring in places like New York and Connecticut has now abated and shifted to the Sun Belt, where states like Texas and Florida had managed at first to escape the worst of the virus. But California is now in the unwelcome position of having found itself at the center of the pandemic twice over.
California was the first state to issue a stay-at-home order this spring, helping to control an early outbreak. But after a reopening that some health officials warned was too fast, cases surged, leading to a new statewide mask mandate and the closure of bars and indoor dining again. With more than 420,000 known cases, California has surpassed New York to have the most recorded cases of any state, and it set a single-day record on Wednesday with more than 12,100 new cases and 155 new deaths.
And as California struggles once again to contain the virus, the multitude of challenges playing out across America have collided in every corner of the state, as if it were a microcosm of the country itself.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is wrestling with how to convey a consistent message, while dealing with local officials who have resisted both new shutdowns and enforcing a mandatory mask order. Some rural areas of the state remain relatively unscathed with low case counts, while cases in Los Angeles are skyrocketing. The city’s mayor, Eric M. Garcetti, has warned that a new stay-at-home order could come down in the coming days.
In many parts of San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, people do not leave home without a mask. In Huntington Beach, and across Orange County, residents have openly defied mask orders and protested against them.
In Los Angeles and San Diego, classrooms will be empty this fall, after public school officials decided they were unwilling to risk in-person instruction. But in Orange County, a recommendation by the Board of Education that children return to school without masks became political fodder for debate, even as the governor announced that most California schools would not be able to teach in person.
The contradictions span the state, creating a sense of regional dissonance. In Imperial County, on the southern border with Mexico, hospitals have been so overwhelmed with virus cases that patients have had to be airlifted elsewhere. But in the northernmost tip, the virus has yet to hit Modoc County, an agricultural community of around 9,000, where there were zero known cases as of Thursday.
“It’s a small town,” said Cynthia Peña, the owner of Java Doc, a coffee shop in Alturas, Calif., where seasonal fires were the most pressing issue for local officials. “Everyone is pretty much social distancing — we already know a cow’s length.” Still, she has shut down her dining room and asked her employees to wear masks when customers arrive at the drive-through window.
In recent weeks, Mr. Newsom has walked a fine line between justifying the state’s reopening and imploring Californians to stay home and refrain from gathering. He has pleaded with residents to wear masks and chided them for allowing their children to hug their cousins or grandparents.
He has repeatedly pointed out that conditions across a huge state are varied, saying, “none of us live in the aggregate — it’s a very different picture you can paint depending on where you live in the state.”
It is in some ways California’s sprawling nature, with 40 million residents spread across urban downtowns and rural areas, liberal strongholds and conservative alcoves, that has aggravated the feeling of back-and-forth. What applies in one area may not feel necessary in another, even as residents live under statewide orders. And the sense of confusion is often made worse by conflicting political messages from local leaders, the governor and the White House.
“It’s very hard to go backwards,” said Jonathan Fielding, a professor of health policy and management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the former public health director for Los Angeles County, who worried that a lack of consistent messaging had allowed many Californians to choose which message they wanted to hear, at various points in the pandemic.
“When people have been isolated and in some cases lost a job and are hearing all of these different things, what is the message?” he said. “What is the message, when you are hearing, basically, a cacophony?”
In Los Angeles — which has seen the most cases in California, and where hospitals are filling up — parts of the city feel under siege and in other areas, there is little palpable sense of the severity of the situation. Unlike in New York City during the height of the outbreak, most Angelenos have not had to absorb the piercing wail of ambulance sirens at all hours, a sound that came to define the pandemic there.
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