Governor Gavin Newsom has quietly signed an executive order extending California’s ‘State of Emergency’ declaration through March 31, 2022.
Newsom first declared a state of emergency on March 2, 2020, mere hours after California recorded its first death from COVID-19. At the time, Newsom cited “heightened anxiety” and the rising number of new cases, but now nearly two full years later, conditions in the state are drastically different, leading some to question why the governor still needs to keep his emergency powers in place.
“Winter is coming. Winter is here,” Newsom said Tuesday during a press conference. He noted the “seasonality” of COVID-19 as more people gather inside. “And as we want to be reminded and should be reminded, last year we had a challenging winter, particularly down here in Southern California,” lectured Newsom. “We started to see around this time last year case rates, positivity rates, hospitalization rates, ICU numbers start to increase. We’re starting to see that now all across the globe. We’ve seen those trends, not dissimilar to last year.” But is this actually true?
While Newsom bleats about the number of COVID-19 cases rising, the CDC’s own data suggests that hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 are currently falling significantly and substantially across the country. The number of cases does not and has never correlated to the severity of the pandemic; only hospitalizations and death rates can tell us that.
Related: We Now Know Where Gavin Newsom’s Been for the Last Two Weeks. Or at Least Where He Said He’s Been
Newsom also invoked the flu “twindemic” saying, “last year we didn’t have much of a flu season. This year, I just want to remind people, that we want to avoid the twindemic.” While it’s true that Los Angeles County has recently reported its first flu-related death of the 2021-22 flu season, according to the L.A. Department of Public Health, the patient was a “middle-aged resident with multiple underlying health conditions,” who tested negative for COVID-19 multiple times while sick with the flu and “had not been vaccinated against the flu.” One death with multiple comorbidities is hardly a “twindemic,” nor is it a valid reason for Newsom to keep his emergency powers. There simply is no emergency.
According to the California Department of Public Health, statewide 55,370,315 total vaccines have been administered, 74.3% of Californians have had at least one vaccination dose, the death rate is 0.1 deaths per 100,000, and there’s a 2.3% test positivity rate. Newsom himself said that mask mandates would be lifted once the test positivity rate got below the 5.0% threshold — an easing that has yet to happen here even though the rate is well below that threshold — as the rest of Real America goes maskless.
So why would Newsom still be so reluctant to end the state of emergency? According to the California Globe, the answer lies in Newsom’s need to keep his “unchecked powers” through county health officers and a “compliant, uninvolved legislature” who don’t and won’t obstruct his emergency-executive-order-law-making, no-bid contracts, school vaccine/mask mandates, and employer vaccine/mask mandates. Once Newsom’s emergency powers end, so will his mandates, executive orders, and county public health officers’ powers.
In other words, without the powers that come with the emergency designation, Newsom loses the ability for one-man rule. The left has learned to “declare a ‘health crisis,’ keep the ‘health crisis’ going, and then use that crisis to bypass democracy, and suppress Constitutional freedoms.”
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