While the rest of the country was forced to choose between bundling up for freezing dinners outdoors or spending a winter alone, the California sun shone strong, giving the most populous state the chance to keep restaurants alive. Outdoor dining also reduces the need for risky home gatherings. Instead of recognizing this, Gov. Gavin Newsom decided to ban outdoor dining despite weather the rest of the country could only dream of. Now that the experiment is over, it’s clear that the ban cost the lives of Californians, earning Newsom the deserved threat of a recall election.
By the end of November, California was cracking 20,000 coronavirus deaths, a tragedy, but still a shockingly less awful death rate per capita than the overwhelming majority of other states. At the beginning of December, Newsom rolled out bans of outdoor dining even as crowded Hollywood production sets remained active. Two months later, California’s death toll from the panic had doubled, with Newsom reversing the outdoor dining ban.
Newsom’s lackeys may try to spin the statistics to claim that the ban succeeded in flattening the curve, but a confluence of policies that he encouraged created the sort of death surge the state had avoided for nearly a year.
California went from around 16,000 new coronavirus cases on Dec. 1, that is, likely around when anyone who attended a super-spreader Thanksgiving would have been testing positive, to more than 40,000 cases per day through much of the end of December and the beginning of March. And why? Because the dining ban removed the last safe method for members of different households to socialize, forcing those in need of human contact into California’s disproportionately crowded households.
Second only to Utah and Hawaii, California has much greater household sizes than most of the states, but home sizes are constricted both by the state’s two dense and vast metropolitan centers and artificially by horrific policy preventing development, thus increasing the density of people in households.
So, 10 months into a pandemic leaving a nation fatter, poorer, and lonelier, if the multimillionaire governor who was spotted dining at a Michelin starred restaurant with his 22 friends tells you the only safe mechanism of seeing your friends is now illegal, do you go home or throw your hands up, banking that going to your friend’s packed house won’t wind up killing grandma?
Californians chose poorly, but the binary put before them was destined to fail.
As many Californians died from the pandemic during the outdoor dining ban as they had in the 10 months prior. I’d say it can only improve from here, but California’s vaccine roll out is looking about as good as its unemployment rate, which is third to last of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
