The Day the Bay Area Shut Down - The New York Times

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Monday: A year into the pandemic, California is reopening. Here’s a look back at the day it started shutting down.

Popular areas around the Golden Gate Bridge were noticeably emptier on March 17, 2020, after officials issued a shelter-in-place mandate.Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Good morning.

This week, counties across California will be allowed to ease some of the nation’s most stringent remaining pandemic restrictions.

Starting today, restaurants in Los Angeles County will be able to serve diners indoors for the first time in most of a year. Gyms, movie theaters and museums, which have all been shuttered or allowed to operate only outside, will at last be able to open their doors in L.A., as well as in Orange, San Bernardino, Sonoma and nine other counties moving from the state’s most restrictive purple tier to the second most restrictive red tier in the state’s color-coded reopening framework.

Another dozen counties are expected to meet the threshold for moving into the red tier on Tuesday, after the state loosened the rules in conjunction with an effort to vaccinate people in hard-hit, vulnerable communities.

[Here’s everything you need to get caught up on California’s reopening.]

On Thursday, President Biden marked the anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaring of a pandemic.

But many Californians might remember March 17, 2020, the day that eight counties in Northern California ordered residents to shelter in place, as the real start to what would become our bewildering pandemic reality.

The move to shut down life for some nine million people was, at the time, the most ambitious experiment in America in containing the novel coronavirus. The restrictions were almost unfathomable. They were deeply disorienting, even in a state where natural disasters force residents to upend their lives with tragic frequency.

[Read about the day counties in and near the Bay Area ordered residents to shelter in place.]

Two days later, Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded the experiment, ordering all 40 million Californians to stay home.

The orders immediately raised many urgent questions for which Californians still don’t have full answers: How can you enforce an order to stay home? If you make exceptions for so-called essential workers, how do you decide who’s essential? How do you decide when it’s safe to let businesses reopen? How are people who don’t get paid time off supposed to pay their rent or buy food if their workplace is closed?

Still, looking back on the day that the Bay Area was ordered to shelter in place, it’s impossible to ignore how accustomed we’ve become to locked down life. The images of empty streets, empty shelves, masked pedestrians edging away from others on the sidewalk feel less shocking now, a year later.

Seeing a crowd packed into a club for a concert, unmasked people greeting friends with hugs, children laughing at lunch in a full cafeteria, office workers gathering around a literal water cooler — that’s what’s almost unfathomable for many Californians now. But leaders say we’re getting closer.

[Track the vaccine rollout across the country.]

Here are more images from the day the Bay Area shut down:

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

(This article is part of the California Today newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox.)

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Here’s what else to know today

• Amid criticism, President Biden directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help shelter migrant children at the southwestern border. [The New York Times]

• “I think my residents know I don’t give a hoot about party — all I care about is making sure the street sweeper runs, the police show up and the water doesn’t stop.” Local and state governments see the federal stimulus money as transformative. [The New York Times]

• California could get $150 billion from the new coronavirus relief bill. Nearly half will go to residents through checks and expanded unemployment benefits. Billions more would go to public and private schools, vaccination efforts, testing and contact tracing efforts. There’s also money for public transit agencies, airports and child care. [Associated Press]

Here’s more about why California cities in particular are relying on federal aid. [The New York Times]

• The vaccination rate for Black and Latino residents in California continues to lag behind white residents. [Yahoo News]

• A church in West Oakland held a vaccine clinic for Black people and Latinos. Most people who got shots there are white. [The San Francisco Chronicle]

• There is a severe shortage of data tracking Covid deaths among homeless people in the United States. [Stat News]

• “To have this kind of beauty nearby makes a difference in our lives.” A sprawling encampment around Echo Park Lake that has grown during the pandemic is a case study in the complex debates over how to address homelessness. [The Los Angeles Times]

• “Underwater Roombas.” Two underwater robots will comb the waters off Santa Catalina Island looking for barrels of toxic DDT waste that were dumped there in the 1980s. [Los Angeles Times]

• China is having a techlash moment, scorning the country’s once-celebrated internet giants. But one tech figure who has managed to keep the Chinese public in his thrall: Elon Musk. [The New York Times]

• The Grammy Awards were on Sunday night. Catch up on everything you missed if you didn’t tune in, and find a full list of the winners. [The New York Times]

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And Finally …

Nicholas Galanin’s “Indian Land,” part of the Desert X biennial, greets visitors to Palm Springs near its welcome center and tramway.Jim Mangan for The New York Times

The odds, my colleague Jori Finkel wrote, were stacked against Desert X this year.

But the biennial art exhibition was also well-suited to the pandemic: The show is made up of site-specific public installations.

Neville Wakefield, who is Desert X’s artistic director and co-curator of its third edition, said its organizers never considered canceling.

“While museums in L.A. have been closed for a year, we felt a responsibility to do what our walled institutions couldn’t and nourish the need for culture,” he told Jori.

Read more about Desert X.

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California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here and read every edition online here.

Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, graduated from U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.

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