Coronavirus: Nail salon identified as source of community spread in California

'This whole thing started in the state of California, the first community spread, in a nail salon'

The governor of California has warned the first case of community spread in the state was determined to stem from a nail salon, as states across the country begin to reopen businesses amid the pandemic.

Gavin Newsom said at a news briefing on Thursday he was “very worried” about the new findings, which may begin to shed light on how the novel coronavirus managed to spread rapidly throughout the US in the initial months of global outbreak.

“This whole thing started in the state of California, the first community spread, in a nail salon”, the governor said.

He added: “I’m very worried about that.”

The comments come as California was preparing to enter the second phase of its four-part reopening plan, allowing “low-risk” businesses to begin reopening with reduced and otherwise modified operations. Nail and hair salons are not included in the second phase of the reopening plan, while retail stores, florists and bookshops are all allowed to begin a slow process of reopening.

Businesses like gyms and hair salons, which have been deemed “high-risk”, do not have an official reopening date. The governor declined to provide a timeline as for when those stores will be able to begin reopening with modified operations.

Nail salons are included in the state’s third-phase of its reopening plan.

More than 60,000 people have contracted Covid-19 in California, and at least 2,400 people have died in the state as a result of the pandemic.

Nail salon owners expressed frustrations with the revelations, saying they had not been informed by local health officials that community spread of the virus was occurring within their shops.

“Had they known that this was the situation, absolutely zero information was ever sent to any nail care people in the industry at all,” Michelle Saunders James, owner of Saunders and James Nail Care in Oakland, California, told CNBC. “It was very scary to hear that.”

She added: “I am just intuitively kind of following the rules of what a nurse would wear or a physician, or something that is more in the medical field.”