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First, we have an update on the pandemic:
On Monday, Governor Gavin Newsom provided a snapshot of an ever-changing state a week after he announced the largest state-level reversal to date of plans to lift restrictions in California, which has the world’s fifth-largest economy. .
While across the state, new cases appeared to have slowed slightly in their alarming growth in recent weeks, with a positivity rate that held steady at 7.4 percent, Newsom warned in its online news report that the regions were feeling the effects unevenly.
“These numbers are aggregated across the state, but none of us live in the aggregate,” he said. “It is a very different image that you can paint depending on where you live in the state.”
He mentioned that intensive care units in some smaller counties, including Placer County, northeast Sacramento and San Benito County, between Salinas and Fresno, had become worryingly crowded, even as the state as a whole has some additional capacity.
While only nine people were reported to have died in Covid-19 status on Sunday, Newsom urged Californians to keep the numbers in perspective: On average, 91 Californians have died from the virus per day in the past week.
According to The Times database, the state has officially had more than 400,000 known cases.
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Still, California’s fight to contain the virus illustrates the complexity of the task, even in a state whose leaders and residents initially showed a willingness to comply with public health orders and take what Mr. Newsom has repeatedly described as a science and data. approach to constraints.
When Mr. Newsom announced that a wide range of businesses, including restaurants and “personal care services” would have to close once again in most counties unless they could operate outdoors, he said that hair salons and salons found barriers to moving their work outside due to chemicals used by stylists.
So, he said, the state released updated guidelines for such companies to adapt.
And while state rules on when schools will be allowed to reopen do not currently include guidelines for moving learning abroad, he said: “I am open to discussion.”
Still, Mr. Newsom has been criticized for, as The Los Angeles Times reported, allowing counties to reopen businesses even when they were not meeting the state’s testing and contact-tracking goals.
On Monday, he defended the state’s reopening processes and emphasized California’s relative early success in halting the spread of the virus. Now, he said, the goal is to “sharpen the focus.”
[Sitelolost[Ifyoumissedit[Siteloperdiste[Ifyoumisseditread about Mr. Newsom’s order that many companies close again.]
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When it was announced in April that Lenny Mendonca had resigned as the chief economic and business adviser to the Governor and President of the California High Speed Rail Authority for family and personal reasons, I quietly assumed that he had been released.
For many people in the corporate world, especially men, leaving a job to take care of the family has become a kind of efficient shorthand.
Mr. Mendonca knew that. He mentioned it in the column he wrote for CalMatters this month and explained in more detail why he quit.
“Three weeks before my resignation, I had an emergency night in the hospital,” he wrote. “After a battery of tests, I was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety.”
He returned to the pandemic response, “against medical advice,” but Mr. Mendonca soon realized that he could no longer do his job. I hardly slept; his local businesses and family needed attention.
So he resigned and for the past three months, he wrote, he has been in recovery. He has been hospitalized and has received counseling.
“This thing hit me like a freight train,” Mr. Mendonca told me shortly after the column was published. “I have never experienced anything like this before.”
As the pandemic swallows up time and mental energy, Mendonca said she wanted to share her story precisely because she knows it is common. But it is extremely rare for people with power to report.
Seeking mental health care is stigmatized in a way that no other type of health care is. Mr. Mendonca said he saw this when he broke his leg on a mountain bike; people wished him a quick return.
“If he has a mental health problem, it’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if this person is okay to come back,’ and we really need to change that culture,” he said.
Mendonca said he recognized his privilege, as a white man who has had a successful career as a management consultant. Taking time to seek mental health treatment is a luxury that many people of color and women cannot afford.
From an economic perspective, he said, that is not a good thing.
“We simply launch challenges, stress and anxiety to a large part of the population,” said Mendonca.
The solutions involve major policy changes aimed at making work sustainable for all, he said. In addition to providing more pandemic aid, workers must have access to paid family leave. Leaders should encourage them to take it.
Still, he said, the pandemic has put mental health front and center in a way that it has not been before. And Mr. Mendonca hopes that the conversation will continue.
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Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, went to school at UC Berkeley, and has reported across the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield, and Los Angeles, but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley.
