San Francisco Bay Area economy enters a three-week lockdown

The San Francisco Bay Area economy enters a three-week lockdown at midnight in order to slow the spread of the
COVID-19 coronavirus, with six regional counties directing residents to keep to their homes as much as possible.

As of Monday morning, Bay Area counties were reporting 273 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, with six deaths total in California.

Reuters reports:

The six counties under the lockdown order accounted for $877 billion of economic output in 2018. That’s about 30% of California’s economy, the biggest in the United States. That makes the collective economy of the six counties bigger than Sweden, and nearly the half the size of all of Italy, whose residents went under a similar lockdown a week ago.

Some public sector jobs, including police and firefighters, as well as healthcare, utilities and sanitation workers, will be allowed to carry on as usual. So will grocery stores and food delivery, including take-out.

Technology looms large: Apple, Google Inc.-parent Alphabet, Facebook and Intel are the Bay Area’s biggest companies by market capitalization. They were among the first to ask employees to work from home.

The Bay Area has 28,000 people who do not have permanent places to live, the third-largest homeless population in the country… The homeless are exempt from the order to remain at home, although cities say they are making efforts to shelter them.

MacDailyNews Note: More info on the Prevention & Treatment of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) via the U.S. CDC is here. Track the Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) here.