California's Top Health Official Says Stricter Orders Not About 'Relative Safety' of Banned Activities

California’s top health official acknowledged in a coronavirus briefing Tuesday that the state’s order banning outdoor dining and closing playgrounds in certain regions is an effort to encourage people to stay home and not a “comment on the relative safety” of eating on patios or using a seesaw.

Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency, said coronavirus transmission is now so extensive in the state that every nonessential activity carries a serious risk.

“The goal is really to keep people at home,” Ghaly said. “We have reached a point where COVID-19 is so widespread in California that just leaving the house is a risky behavior.”

“Any mixing among households presents a risk of disease transmission,” he said.

Restaurant groups, lawmakers, parents and others have criticized the state’s latest attempt at curbing the coronavirus by shutting down a host of activities and businesses.

Ghaly’s comments came on the same day a judge tentatively ruled that Los Angeles County acted “arbitrarily” and without “rational” justification when it ordered all restaurants to stop dining service in outdoor parklets and patios.

Superior Court Judge James Chalfant noted, however, that outdoor dining in L.A. cannot resume because of the state’s separate, regional stay-at-home order.

California reported more than 23,000 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday. The state’s hospitals are swollen with over 10,500 COVID-19 patients, a record number.

Ghaly said officials are racing to ensure enough nurses are trained to manage the surge.

He also applauded San Francisco, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa and Marin counties for issuing local stay-at-home orders before the state-designated region the counties are in fell below the threshold for available intensive care units that triggers more restrictions.

“The sooner some of these changes go into effect, the hope [is] that the impact is greater and that we can shorten the time that these orders are in place,” he said.

In an interview with KQED’s Lily Jamali, Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UCSF, questioned whether the state’s lockdown approach is working, and she said the public is losing trust in public health officials.

While Gandhi thinks the message from government should be that the illness “causes suffering and death and we have to do what it takes to minimize spread,” she said the public is aware that the risk of transmission is much lower outside and that the coronavirus does not often spread through surface transmission, as scientists once believed.

“The arbitrariness of shutting down completely can be really disturbing to the public and you don’t want to erode trust,” she said. “We have to close down things where there can be unsafe spread.”

— Kevin Stark (@starkkev)