A timeline of key government decisions during California’s coronavirus outbreak:
-March 15: Seven San Francisco Bay Area counties order their 7 million residents to shelter in place and only go outside for food, medicine and other essentials. Gov. Gavin Newsom directed bars and nightclubs to close statewide.
-March 19: Newsom issued the nation’s first statewide stay-at home order, closing all nonessential businesses and restaurant dining.
-April 14: Newsom outlined six conditions for the state to begin loosening the stay-at-home order, including more testing, more protective equipment for health care workers and better ability to track infections.
-April 28: Newsom unveiled the state’s four-phase plan for reopening.
-May 1: Rural Modoc County became the first to defy the state’s order, reopening its nonessential businesses and restaurants for dine-in service.
-May 8: Smaller counties with few virus cases clamored to reopen more of their economies and the state established measurements for doing that to ensure the local governments had the virus in check. Four days later the first seven rural counties were approved to go beyond what was allowed in the state order.
-May 18: Following a decline in hospitalizations, Newsom announced new criteria allowing larger counties to reopen more of their economies if they had the virus adequately in check. Within a month nearly every county in the state was approved for reopening large segments of their economies, including retail shopping and dining in restaurants.
-May 26: Newsom announced that hair salons and barbershops could reopen.
-June 12: Newsom allowed bars to reopen.
-June 18: The state issued a face-covering guidance, mandating people wear masks indoors and when social distancing wasn’t possible outdoors.
-June 28: With virus cases and hospitalizations rising across the state, Newsom ordered bars closed in seven counties including Los Angeles
• July 1: Newsom ordered a three-week closure of bars, movie theaters, museums, wineries and indoor restaurant dining in Los Angeles and 18 other counties.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.