Coronavirus cases spiked after one Northern California county reopened, and now officials are scaling back, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Sonoma County — one of the first regions in California to begin reopening after months of restrictions in early May — has reported 203 new cases of COVID-19 in the last 14 days, doubling its case rate in that time from 20 per 100,000 residents to 41 per 100,000, the LA Times reported.
“We've also seen, over the weekend, a few more hospitalizations that make us worried that we might be seeing more COVID in our vulnerable populations," she told the news outlet.
In remote Lassen County, which borders Nevada, officials are taking an even more hard-line approach after seeing the county's first confirmed COVID-19 cases this week, the news outlet reported.
The move by the two counties comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that large areas of California could begin moving into the third stage of reopening.
"There is a lot at stake as we reopen," Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer told the news outlet. "More people being around one another can result in more transmission of COVID-19 — just more cases and likely more hospitalizations and deaths. This is why it couldn't be more important for us to take care of each other when we're out of our homes."
Dr. Sara Cody, health officer for Santa Clara County and a key architect of the nation's first coronavirus shelter-in-place order, has also criticized California's increasingly fast pace of lifting stay-at-home restrictions.
Reopening so fast, she said, means there isn't enough time to implement new procedures to make reopened activities safe.
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