SACRAMENTO, Calif. — After about a month and a half of isolation due to the coronavirus, Californians badly want to know when life will return to something more normal.
Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested Monday that we could see some loosening of the stay-home order in the months or even weeks ahead.
"The only thing that will set us back is our behavior," Newsom said Monday. "The only thing that will set us back is people stopping to practice physical distancing."
Fewer people are dying of coronavirus infections in California than public health experts first feared, but we're still not through the peak.
Newsom said Monday that he was disappointed to see crowds gathering on some beaches over the weekend and suggested that police may have to get more active breaking up crowds.
Still, the stay home orders could lighten up if we can test tens of thousands more people each day and track down the people they had contact with.
"Isolate people who are positive and then allow other people to be able to go about their business more," said Dr. Richard Pan, a Democratic state senator who represents Sacramento.
At some point during the summer of 2020, Pan thinks it's possible that Californians may be allowed to gather in small groups or go to restaurants with fewer tables available, but he argues we'll have to return to a strategy that we abandoned more than a month ago: containment.
In early March, Sacramento-area health officials ended the practice of trying to track down everyone who a sick person came into contact with, admitting that it was too late to stop the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead, they switched to a "mitigation" strategy, which focused on trying to reduce the risk to the most vulnerable people.
"When we first started, unfortunately, we didn't have the testing capacity," Pan said. "When someone was positive, we would contact trace them, but we couldn't test them all — the people. We would just assume they're positive and say 'stay home.'"
Since then, scientists have learned more about how easily the virus can be spread — even by people who do not have any symptoms at all.
"What we've learned from that is that we have to test a lot more people," Pan said.
Without a reliable treatment or a vaccine, health experts argue the novel coronavirus is simply too contagious to reopen more of society until and unless it actually becomes true that everyone who wants a test can get one.
Follow the conversation on Facebook with Brandon Rittiman.
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