Today marks the 45th day since Governor Newsom’s stay-at-home orders took effect on March 19th, 2020.
And for a second week in a row, protests greeted the steps of the Capitol in Sacramento, as well as in Los Angeles, as more people expressed their vexation with the ordinances, a lack of services, and burgeoning joblessness.
In the seven weeks since March 19th, 2020, over 3.7 million people in California have filed for unemployment claims, according to the LA Daily News.
But a lack of work and the call to continue socially distancing notwithstanding, it looked like a typical Sunny weekend driving past Echo Park this afternoon, with scores of people over the grass surrounding the famous Lake.
At least in Metropolitan L.A., even if the beaches are closed, city-goers have green pastures to enjoy. The fact of the matter is that as spring sunshine looms larger over L.A.’s dry interior, it will only become more difficult to keep the state’s 40 million people indoors. Californians pay taxes, after all, not to mention rent and mortgages, to be able to enjoy the outdoors here.
In L.A., 55% of the city’s residents are renters.
In all likelihood, then, in effort to fend off more unrest from the citizenry, then, Governor Newsom, along with mayor Garcetti should announce significant changes to the ordinances soon.
Since March 19th, Los Angeles’s 10 million residents have counted over 24,000 cases of the coronavirus across its population, though that number, as before, is an under-count due to lack of testing.
By contrast, halfway across the world, in Vietnam, with over 95 million people between its jurisdiction, the country has counted just 270 cases of COVID-19 since the outbreak, and zero deaths to show for it.
That statistic is one that should make every Californian–and indeed every American–pause to ask the following: As the richest economy on the planet, if not the health and future of its work-force, just what is our government invested in? And what’s it waiting for?
J.T.
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