On Thursday, at the peak of his coronavirus press conference, California Governor Gavin Newsom said “the masks keep people healthy.” He then went on to detail the announcements, public service announcements, and other campaigns the state has launched to try to get residents to wear their masks.
The governor revealed Thursday that the state had seen 4,056 new positive cases in the past 24 hours. The test’s positivity rate in California has increased to 6.3 percent in the past two weeks, he said. In the past seven days, that number has increased to 6.9 percent. “That is why we have the mask mandate,” Newsom said.
“We are going to see that hospitalizations start to increase as a lagging indicator,” he warned.
In fact they have. The governor reported a 56 percent increase over a two-week period. Also worrying: ICU bed occupancy increased 43 percent over the same period.
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There are currently 5,355 COVID patients in hospitals across the state. More than 46,000 beds in total are now occupied by patients, both COVID-affected and otherwise. That system has a capacity of more than 70,000.
On Wednesday, Newsom ordered restaurants, movie theaters, restaurants, indoor family entertainment businesses, arcades and zoos to stop operating indoors for three weeks. Over the weekend, the governor ordered the closing of bars and clubs. Los Angeles, Ventura and Imperial counties were among the counties that met those restrictions yesterday.
“I don’t want to be patronizing or patronizing about all of this,” Newsom said. “I’m just working with the data and local officials.”
On Thursday, Newsom went on to say it would not be “punitive” by enforcing the state mask requirement, which was issued on June 18. But three cities in the Los Angeles area are doing exactly that. “People know what to do,” he said.
West Hollywood announced that sheriff’s deputies would issue $ 300 tickets to non-masks. Santa Monica joined in, promising the application of the mask requirements as well. Beverly Hills has also had a compliance order on the books.
The Governor said OSHA had sent 350,000 letters to companies setting expectations in terms of “good business conduct … in a very, very prescriptive way.” It revealed 10 state agencies that will be deployed to encourage compliance, including now the Board of Barbers and Cosmetologists and Consumer Affairs. “If we cannot impose them through encouragement, we will have to lean on each other a little more.”
See Newsom’s Thursday address below.
California now has 240,195 confirmed cases of COVID-19, resulting in 6,163 deaths. The number of COVID-related deaths increased by 73, or 1.2 percent, from Tuesday’s 6,090 total. The number of COVID-19 diagnostic test results in California totaled 4,338,718, an increase of 84,542 tests since Tuesday. California hospitalizations due to COVID-19 increased by 159 since Tuesday.
This happened the same day the United States breached the 50,000 new cases per day mark, an increase of more than 25 percent in just six days. And it’s actually worse than that. Thursday’s exact count 54,357 were new cases of COVID-19 across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
On Wednesday, Florida, Arizona, California, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas reported a record number of new cases. Florida alone saw more than 10,000 cases, a new record. At least 23 states have paused reopening plans amid rising infections.
