States Going It Alone When Planning to Close Their Economies

States continue to largely go it alone with how they respond to the coronavirus outbreak. Without a set of national guidelines they are relying on their local public health officials when deciding whether to re-close portions of their economies. Many are taking a county by county approach as cases and deaths rise and fall. Ted Mann, reporter at the WSJ, joins us for more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Wednesday, August five. I'm Oscar Ramiras from the Daily
Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is Reopening America.
States continue to largely go it alone with how they
respond to the coronavirus outbreak. Without a set of national guidelines,
They're relying on their local public health officials when deciding
to reclose portions of their economies. Many are taking a

(00:21):
county by county approach as cases and debts rise and fall.
Ted Man, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, joins us
for more. Thanks for joining us, Ted, thanks for having me.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of what's
been going down as far as guidelines has kind of
been every state for themselves. I know the CDC put

(00:41):
out guidelines on how to reopen your state after the
first initial stay at home orners. All that stuff went down,
But now a lot of states are seeing rising cases
and a lot of local health counties are looking at
maybe closing down again or restricting businesses once again. And
it's up to the states themselves to really figure out
how to do it. I know Mississippi is imposing restrictions.

(01:04):
California has a county watch list on what to do, Ted,
tell us a little bit more about this. As you said,
the CDC put out what it called gating criteria for
how states should look at reopening, and so that was
a selection of different criteria included things like going fourteen
days with a declining rate of new infections. Some of
them looked at the availability of hospital beds and in

(01:27):
particular advice you beds. And the idea was that the
states we're thinking about reopening, they could look at all
of these six categories and use those to judge that
they had gotten the infection under control and that it
was safe to start slowly reopening. What we have not
seen as explicitly from the federal government is the opposite
of that, What are the criteria and what are specifically

(01:48):
the triggers that states and cities should look to if
cases start to go up again, to say we either
have to pause in our reopening or actually reimpose closure
orders be cause we're starting to see this virus go
out of control again. And at that time when states
started reopening, a lot of them really didn't even follow
those initial CDC guidelines. They were kind of pledging it

(02:10):
a little bit, saying, hey, we're close enough, let's just
kind of start going. And as we know now a
lot of people are pointing to just you know, a
lot of the state's reopening too soon, and that's why
we're seeing a lot of these rising cases. And now
you know, as these numbers are going up, they're not
even meeting those initial guidelines as well also where they
could have reopened. So now it's kind of in this

(02:31):
weird mode where they're starting to close down county by
county things like that. And I know residents are not
happy with these new restrictions being reimposed. Again, I can't
imagine residents like it, or frankly that anyone who's in
a position of political authority likes the idea of having
to put these things back in place. As he said,
there were places that reopened faster than others, and obviously

(02:55):
they're taking public health seriously, but also they are under
tremendous pressure because of all the economic pain that was
being felt to try to restore some normalcy. I think
you're going to see all of those same factors at
play here when you know, take one of the examples
in our story, the state of Maryland is trying to
do a very careful reopening. They have a governor who's
been talking a lot about public health and taking it seriously.

(03:16):
At the same time, they have officials in Baltimore County,
where the city of Baltimore is who are saying, we
are seeing way too many new cases. You have to
just stop all this. And there's gonna be a lot
of that tension, I think, in places all over the country.
And as you said, one of the groups we spoke
to is actually a coalition of all these different organizations
outside the government who are working on this. They put
together this dashboard, which essentially COVID Exit Strategy, and it

(03:39):
just shows how everybody's doing on those six initial criteria
for reopening. And this is a day old, but as
of yesterday, there were only four states in the country
that we're doing pretty well in terms of being out
of the woods on the virus kind of propagating at
the community level. Everybody else, even those that are quite
open or that have been fairly aggressive and trying to

(04:01):
combat the infection, is lagging in one or two or
more indicators. Those states that were doing well, they were
trending in the right way. We're Connecticut, Maine, New York,
and Vermont. And then they had a few other states
that had a good downward trajectory in the number of
documented cases. Those were Arizona, Iowa, Maine, Texas, and Utah.
But there's still a lot of work yet to be done.

(04:22):
So there was two states that you talked about a
lot in your article, Mississippi and California. What are they doing,
because I think they're doing the county by county approach
and kind of playing it as a c fit. They're
going county by county to try to decide which are
the area's geographically where this virus seems to not be
too much of a problem right now, and then which

(04:42):
are those areas where it looks like we're getting a
lot of community spread again and like the virus is
starting to basically go out of control again. And so
in many cases um or at this. In those cases,
you have states essentially setting their own criteria for what
constitutes to prevalent US spread. In Mississippi, they basically said,
if you have five cases for every hundred thousand residents

(05:05):
in an area, that means you're growing too fast and
we're going to impose new restrictions on on what people
can do California also has this sort of watch list approach,
and I think what you see there is these are political,
you know, elected officials who are trying to sort of
get every benefit they can of reopening, trying to get
their economies back to life a little bit where they can.

(05:28):
But they know from looking at what is happening all
over the country that the biggest problem is a hot
spot of this disease, which will just grow like wildfire
among the community of people unless you really clamp down
on it. And so that's I think what they're trying
to do at the state level is isolate those areas
where there's a real risk of the disease spreading like crazy. Again,

(05:48):
I'm in California, so I'm kind of seeing how Governor
Gavin Newsom is playing all of this. And you shut
down barbershops and hair salons, but you know, as things
kind of were progressing and they were arguing saying, hey,
let us open, they kind of took a compromise and
let them resume operations. But you gotta do it outdoors.
So there's just a lot as you keep saying, everybody's

(06:08):
making it up as they go, and the President keep saying,
I really think all these states should start reopening, but
there is no central leadership on this, even from the
c d C on these kind of what they should
do as cases go up and close down. Again, it's
very situational, so we'll have to keep monitoring and see
how it all plays out. Ted Man, reporter for the
Wall Street Journal. Thank you very much for joining us,

(06:31):
Thanks for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has
been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories.
You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast
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