2 California counties, once defiant, see virus cases rise

YUBA CITY, Calif. (AP) — At a bus stop in Yuba City, Ron Starkey sat on a concrete wall watching videos on his phone, a white face mask tightly folded in his right hand.

He wears the mask at work because his employers make him, and he wears it on the bus because his girlfriend asks him to. But he's not happy about it.

“I think this is all a hoax,” Starkey, 57, said Thursday. “They are trying to distract everybody. They are trying to panic everybody. They are trying to control everybody. That's how I feel.”

Sutter County, where Starkey lives, was one of the first places in California to more broadly reopen its economy. It and neighboring Yuba County defied Gov. Gavin Newsom's stay-at-home order to let restaurants, hair salons, gyms and a shopping mall reopen in early May.

County leaders had passionately argued the two mostly rural counties shouldn't be under the same rules as Los Angeles and other major population centers. Their counties are filled with farmland ready-made for social distancing and at that point both counties had only a relative handful of cases and barely any hospitalizations.

But two months later, the counties that together have a population of about 175,000 are averaging a combined 30 new cases per day — up from five at the beginning of June — with what the counties' shared public health director calls a “scary elevation of hospitalized cases” from seven to 21 in just one week.

The rising numbers prompted state officials on Thursday to place Sutter and Yuba on a monitoring list of counties with rapidly increasing caseloads. If they stay there for three days all bars will close and restaurants and other businesses must halt indoor operations.

“People are not taking it seriously,” Dr. Ngoc-Phuong Luu, Yuba-Sutter public health...