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Governors in New York and Illinois announced stricter orders for residents to stay at home Friday, while leaders in other states such as Massachusetts reassured they would not be imposing similar rules there. As each state is being left to chart its own course in the COVID-19 pandemic in lieu of a nationwide lockdown by the Trump administration, California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday night ordered the state’s residents to stay at home amid the outbreak.
In his announcement, Newsom indicated outdoor recreation and exercise is also allowed — he mentioned dog-walking and “taking your kids outside” — as long as social distancing and other “common sense” preventive measures are followed. Read the order here.
Without a concrete end date to the statewide order, Newsom reassured Californians that it was a response to a “moment in time,” arguing that if the state is to be criticized for the measure, it should be “criticized for taking this moment seriously.”
The governor’s announcement came the same day that he provided a grim projection that 56% of Californians — 25.5 million people — could be infected with coronavirus in eight weeks if no efforts are made to control the spread of the disease. Beyond the stay-at-home mandate aimed at mitigating this projection, Newsom announced efforts to stabilize and expand hospital capacity during the crisis, including acquiring two hospital facilities with a total of 750 beds.
Arriving three days after seven counties in the Bay Area enacted a similar order, Newsom ended his announcement by channeling his local roots to call out an increase in racially-motivated attacks amid the COVID-19 pandemic:
“One thing I want to express is deep, deep recognition of the xenophobia, the racism that is being perpetuated against Asians in our state. We are seeing a huge increase in people that are assaulting people on the basis of how they were born, the way they look and I just want folks to know: We are better than that. We are watching that. We’re going to begin to enforce that more aggressively and I just hope people put down their bigotry, their bias and recognize that in a state where 27% of us are foreign-born … in order to meet this moment, we have to recognize our common humanity.”
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