Restaurant dining rooms, bars, wineries, movie theaters, card rooms, and museums are among the businesses affected by the order, which will be in effect at least three weeks.
“This doesn’t mean restaurants are shut down,” Newsom said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It means that we’re trying to take the activities, as many activities as we can — these mixed activities, these concentrated activities — and move them outdoors, which is a way of mitigating the spread of this virus.”
Newsom urged those 19 counties to consider canceling fireworks displays and ordered all parking facilities at state beaches in Southern California and the Bay Area to be closed for the upcoming weekend.
The California Department of Health reported 9,740 new cases on Tuesday, a one-day record, CNBC reported. The state has reported more than 216,000 coronavirus cases with almost 6,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tally.
Health experts say the current surge of cases in California, Florida and Texas occurred partly because people gathered to socialize over the Memorial Day weekend and didn’t practice social distancing. If that happens again over the Fourth, coronavirus cases could increase even more.
The 19 counties are on the state “watch list” because they haven’t been able to reign in new COVID-19 cases. The order covers Contra Costa, Fresno, Glenn, Imperial, Kern, Kings, Los Angeles, Merced, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Joaquin, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Solano, Stanislaus, Tulare, and Ventura counties.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday that indoor dining won’t be allowed in the immediate future.
As part of the city’s reopening schedule, indoor dancing was supposed to be allowed starting July 6. But indoor activities have been shown to contribute to the spread of the virus, de Blasio said at a news briefing.
“We see a lot of problems and we particularly see problems revolving around people going back to bars and restaurants, indoors,” he said. “And indoors is the problem more and more, the sciences showing it more and more.”
