California State University's Closed for the Fall →

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The 23-campus California State University system plans to all but cancel in-person classes in the fall and instead will offer instruction primarily online, Chancellor Timothy White announced Tuesday.

The vast majority of classes across the Cal State system will be taught online, White said, with some limited exceptions that allow for in-person activity. The decision comes as schools throughout the country grapple with how long to keep campuses closed amid the coronavirus crisis.

We are in for a new normal. And with Los Angeles announcing a shelter-in-place order until the end of summer, it’s going to be a very different West Coast experience or lack-thereof. At least the beaches are open?

California Seeing an Uptick in COVID-19 Cases as Mobility Increases

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Hopefully everyone continues to keep their distance as we start mobilizing a bit more. I know I’m getting antsy. In today's news (Monday, May 11, 2020), California is looking worse than expected and one family gathering at Easter has resulted in a cluster of 5 cases including an individual who was coughing and joking about possibly having it. Do everyone a favor and protect yourself. Wear a mask not only for yourself but for others as well. We should know this already! Thanks to contract tracing, it hopefully has been isolated.

Researchers are now predicting that California could see more than 6,000 COVID-19 deaths by the end of August, up about 1,420 from projections they released last Monday. It’s the fifth-largest increase in projected death tolls among U.S. states, after Pennsylvania, Illinois, Arizona and Florida.

The upward revisions “are a result of a combination of updated daily death and case data, recent actions to ease previously implemented social distancing measures and steadily rising levels of mobility in many places,” the researchers said in notes released with the data.

Possible Herd Immunity in California →

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As of Tuesday, the state had 374 reported COVID-19 fatalities in a state of 40 million people, compared to New York which has seen 14 times as many fatalities and has a population half that of California. Social distancing could be playing a role but New York's stay-at-home order went into effect on March 22, three days after California implemented its order.

"Something is going on that we haven't quite found out yet," said Victor Davis Hanson a senior fellow with Stanford's Hoover Institute.

Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.

This would be great if this were true and we’ll know in a few weeks. For the sake of safety, science, and medicine, I hope that these serology and anti-body tests get carried out more rapidly as well as general testing for COVID-19. It’s great to see that ALL RESIDENTS of Los Angeles with symptoms can get tested now.

Hanson said through all of this the Chinese have been disingenuous about the timing of the initial outbreak of COVID-19.

"They originally said it was in early January, then it got backdated to December and then early December and now they are saying as early as November 17," said Hanson.

China’s continuance of hiding the truth from the world has only hurt us as a human race. I really hope that when this is all over that something gets done about this. Victor Davis Hanson points out that with 8,000 Chinese Nationals / passengers landing at San Francisco Airport and Los Angeles Airport daily as well as direct flights from Wuhan that it would be naïve to think that we weren’t already being exposed to it back in late 2019.