LA allows shopping, worship sooner than expected in pandemic

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Retail shops and offices were allowed to open Wednesday and the largest Roman Catholic archdiocese in the U.S. announced a plan to resume services as Los Angeles County took another step toward a reopening that seemed hard to imagine a week ago.

Los Angeles, which has been proceeding more cautiously because of a disproportionately large share of California's coronavirus cases, moved ahead after Gov. Gavin Newsom relaxed statewide rules Monday to allow worship and shopping to resume with restrictions.

San Francisco and other Bay Area counties, which have had more success curbing the spread of the virus than LA, have yet to take those steps out of an abundance of caution. Santa Clara County health officer Sara Cody, who led others in issuing a stay-at-home order, even criticized the governor for relaxing rules too rapidly before they could determine if incremental reopenings led to a resurgence of infections.

In LA, the new rules were announced just a week after the county set a July 4 target to further reopen businesses. At the time, most of the state's counties were moving to let restaurants serve meals for the first time in two months and allow shoppers to return to malls and other stores that had been shuttered because they weren't deemed essential.

LA officials downplayed the change of plans Wednesday, saying they always intended to gradually reopen businesses leading up to Independence Day.

“I don’t think really there’s a disconnect," Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said. "We always talked about a phased-in approach. It’s never been one day we’re closed, one day we’re open.”

LA, with a quarter of California’s 40 million residents, has nearly half the state’s 100,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 55% of the 3,895...