Speaking on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Wednesday morning, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti stated, “We’re not moving beyond COVID-19, we’re learning to live with it,” later adding, “We’ll never be completely open until we have a cure.”
Host George Stephanopolous asked Garcetti, “Let’s start with these stay-at-home orders. Your top health official said yesterday expect to extend the orders for another three months, but explain exactly what that means.”
Garcetti replied:
Sure. I think we all have to recognize that we’re not moving beyond COVID-19, we’re learning to live with it. It’s important not to overreact, but it’s important to take this serious (sic) because it is as dangerous today as it the first day it arrived in our cities and our country. So quite frankly, there’s no so-called “open state” or “open country” that doesn’t continue to have health orders telling us to cover our faces, physically distance, and to tell people that you’re safest working from and staying at home. That’s all that the county health director was saying. And we can’t expect that to disappear in a matter of weeks or even a few months.
At the same time, we are learning a lot of really important lessons about how to safely reopen sectors and places and we have to assess each of those steps, give three or four weeks, time to see if there is any additional spread, are we endangering more people, and how can we keep our most vulnerable safe. So we are learning to live with it at the same moment that we are also learning the lessons of how to do that.
Stephanopolous asked, “So do you have a sense of where you’re going to be in September? We did see that news this morning that California State University system is saying they’re not going to have classes on campus. What are you expecting in Los Angeles and for your schools?”
Garcetti answered:
I hope for our K-12 schools that we will have some sense of opening but it won’t be in the way that we’ve known school in the past; it might be fewer days in the week; it might be staggered because we have to maintain that physical distance and we have to make sure for our vulnerable children. Some of them won’t be able to go back to school for some time.
Look, we have to tell the hard truths and protect our people at the same time we take steps forward. For example, this past weekend, we opened up our trails; we have retail for curbside pickup; we’ll see that expanded and even some active recreation on our beaches this coming weekend. Those are important, and we’ve never been fully closed. We’ll never be completely open until we have a cure. But I do believe that we can take steps, but monitor those numbers, listen to the scientists and the medical professionals and make the tough calls even when there’s criticism.
The Daily Mail noted, “California Governor Gavin Newsom has allowed individual counties to implement their own lockdown measures based on the state of the pandemic in their areas and Garcetti first issued the city’s ‘Safer at Home’ emergency order on March 19.”
Video below:
“We all have to all recognize that we’re not moving beyond COVID-19, we’re learning to live with it,” @MayorOfLA Eric Garcetti weighs in on latest stay-at-home orders. https://t.co/oCtlM8IWmi pic.twitter.com/Cyr5MlBbvM
— Good Morning America (@GMA) May 13, 2020
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