Name: Editorial: California, Bay Area officials bear burden of reopening amid coronavirus
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Editorial: California, Bay Area officials bear burden of reopening amid coronavirus

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Despite the Bay Area’s success in stemming its coronavirus outbreak through nation-leading distancing measures, local health officials have rightly set a high bar for relaxing the restrictions. The Chronicle reported Sunday that San Francisco and five surrounding counties remain for testing and other preconditions for reopening the region.Unfortunately, some aren’t waiting. A few California jurisdictions and businesses are defying state and local orders and abandoning efforts to slow the contagion’s spread, and Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared ready to accede to a degree. Raucous crowds of protesters have descended on Sacramento and other cities to call for an end to distancing orders while recklessly ignoring them in real time. And the federal government has joined several southern states in letting official guidance and mandates lapse — all with negligible attention to testing and other precautions preoccupying epidemiological experts and Bay Area officials.Cell-phone-data analyses show Americans are broadly increasing their travels away from home, though to varying degrees and at different paces. The Northeast and, to a lesser extent, the West Coast continue to lead the nation in sheltering in place, especially in New York City and the Bay Area, but even those regions were seeing at the end of April, according to analysis by the University of Maryland and the U.S. Department of Transportation. A National Public Radio examination of data provided by SafeGraph found in parts of Virginia and Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott allowed retail, restaurants, movie theaters and other businesses to reopen Friday — even as new infections were still rising in some of the state’s cities.Newsom on Monday previewed a more limited reopening that would allow lower-risk commercial activity such as retail for curbside pickup and some manufacturing to resume at the end of the week. The governor also said local jurisdictions, which led the way on sheltering, would be given more leeway to loosen orders or maintain greater restrictions. Despite mounting pressure from north and south, with three rural counties bucking his statewide shelter order and Orange County officials challenging closures of crowded beaches, Newsom insisted that his decisions were based on data.That is certainly the right principle, but the numbers aren’t uniformly encouraging even in the Bay Area. While new infections have been steady or declining for the past two weeks, San Francisco is performing only half the testing called for and is ahead of the rest of the region. Statewide testing has yet to reach the goal set by Newsom, which is more modest than the Bay Area’s target. The state and region are also still working to ramp up capacity to trace the contacts of infected people, another factor crucial to containing renewed outbreaks.About OpinionDespite the vocal few protesting the shelter orders and the many more suffering job losses and other hardships, the mandates retain broad support in California and across the country. That’s because most Americans understand that rushing blindly into a second wave of a deadly disease is not a viable alternative. In the absence of federal leadership, the governor and local officials bear a heavy responsibility to put long-term public safety ahead of ephemeral political considerations.This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: .About Opinion

Despite the Bay Area’s success in stemming its coronavirus outbreak through nation-leading distancing measures, local health officials have rightly set a high bar for relaxing the restrictions. The Chronicle reported Sunday that San Francisco and five surrounding counties remain for testing and other preconditions for reopening the region.Unfortunately, some aren’t waiting. A few California jurisdictions and businesses are defying state and local orders and abandoning efforts to slow the contagion’s spread, and Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared ready to accede to a degree. Raucous crowds of...

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Editorial: California, Bay Area officials bear burden of reopening amid coronavirus

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