Before Park had traveled to Sacramento, Governor Newsom’s advisers had sent him an Excel spreadsheet with some calculations made by someone inside their public-health department. These showed the virus never generating so much illness that the state’s seventy-five thousand hospital beds couldn’t handle. “I don’t know who did it,” said Park. “But it was all wrong.” The new model suggested that, if no action were taken to minimize the virus’s spread, the state would need seven hundred thousand hospital beds by the middle of May.
