California reopens some businesses today

Yahoo Finance's Myles Udland and Meldoy Hahm discuss California's Governor Gavin Newsom's decision to reopen retail businesses.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right, welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. Myles Udland here in New York. Certainly growing optimism around the country, growing conversations around what reopening states might look like.

Want to bring a Melody Hahm now for a conversation about what's happening out in California. Because if you look at, I think, the California response, next to Washington State, probably the firmest and most widespread in terms of getting a lot of measures in place. Where do things stand? And I guess, one, in terms of case counts, and two, in terms of what governor Gavin Newsom wants to do?

Because I think, like New York, we're really talking about-- what? Four or five distinct states within the one state, and each area of the state has its own needs.

MELODY HAHM: Yeah, Myles. In many ways, California is a microcosm of the United States, right. There's diversity in income, topography, industry, just varying levels of income, right. But I think this is one of those instances where Gavin Newsom's rhetoric is actually completely at odds with the reality that we're seeing.

So as we know, starting today, some retail businesses-- they're all non-essential-- florists, toy stores, bookstores, music stores, sporting goods stores, they will all open for curbside delivery if the owners themselves are comfortable doing so. As we know, those are not essential, right. So it's very unlikely that people are going to be running out of their homes in order to get items from those categories.

"The LA Times" actually did a very interesting analysis-- they just published it a few minutes ago-- trying to see whether counties-- there are 58 counties in California-- could actually just pass the first criteria that Newsom had laid out. Does the county show that people have stopped dying from the coronavirus? Number two, have new cases fallen to a manageable level? And they found that 95% of Californians live in counties that don't even meet those two criteria.

That's not surprising for someone who is living in California, where you understand that cases continue to escalate and deaths continue to rise. But not a single county in Southern California or the Bay Area actually met those two criteria.

So kind of going back to what I was saying where-- we get it. There is a lot of pressure on people like Newsom to try to reopen, especially as they see their neighboring, you know, states talking about it. And perhaps they see, especially in rural counties, that there's been a lot of early openings that we've seen over the last few weeks.

Yuba County, in particular, San Luis Obispo, Madera Counties, they're all in the northern part of the state. They actually defied Gavin Newsom's order starting last week and started to reopen. And there are a couple of counties that hope to fully reopen, opening schools, businesses, and the like starting today.

So it just shows how hard it is to actually wrap your arms around a state this wide. But I'm sure a state like New York is actually paying very close attention to kind of see the fallout and what I imagine will be sort of a disastrous navigation of this phase two, as Newsom calls it.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think the parallels between downstate New York and LA County, you know, are basically similar, I think, in terms of a number of people, percent of population, and how the governor is trying to thread the needle. I think San Diego, San Francisco definitely make California even more diverse in some of those concerns. But somewhat parallel situations, certainly.