California became the first US state to formally shift to an “endemic” approach to COVID-19, as California Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday announced a plan that emphasizes prevention and quick reaction to outbreaks over mandated masking and business shutdowns.
The milestone, nearly two years in the making, envisions a return to a more normal existence with the help of a variety of initiatives and billions of US dollars in new spending to more quickly spot surges or variants of SARS-CoV-2, add healthcare workers, stockpile tests, and push back against false claims and other misinformation.
“We are moving past the crisis phase into a phase where we will work to live with this virus,” he said during a news conference from a state warehouse brimming with COVID-19 pandemic supplies in Fontana, east of Los Angeles.
Photo: AP
The first-term Democrat, who last year survived a recall election driven by critics of his governance during the pandemic, promised the state’s nearly 40 million residents that as the surge of the Omicron variant fades, “we’re going to keep them safe and we’re going to stay on top of this.”
A disease reaches the endemic stage when the virus still exists in a community, but becomes manageable as immunity builds.
However, Newsom said that there would be no definitive turn of the switch, unlike with Wednesday’s lifting of the state’s indoor masking requirements or an announcement expected on Feb. 28 of when precisely schoolchildren can stop wearing face coverings.
There would be no immediate lifting of the dozens of remaining executive emergency orders that have helped run the state since Newsom imposed the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order in March 2020.
“This pandemic won’t have a defined end. There’s no finish line,” Newsom said.
The WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. With Omicron fading in many parts of the world, some countries have begun planning for the endemic stage.
However, no US state has taken the step Newsom did and offered a detailed forward-looking plan.
Republicans have been frequent critics of Newsom’s handling of the pandemic and were quick to disparage his latest effort.
California Republican chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson called it “an extra-large helping of word salad” and renewed the call to “follow the lead of other blue states and end his state of emergency or lift his school mask mandate.”
Newsom’s plan sets specific goals, such as stockpiling 75 million masks, establishing the infrastructure to provide up to 200,000 COVID-19 vaccinations and 500,000 tests per day in the event of an outbreak, and adding 3,000 medical workers within three weeks in surge areas.
Newsom’s administration came up with a shorthand acronym to capsulize key elements of its new approach: SMARTER, which stand for shots, masks, awareness, readiness, testing, education and Rx, a reference to improving treatments for COVID-19.
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