SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Heading into Memorial Day weekend, California’s mood was celebratory. The state had avoided dire predictions of a coronavirus surge, hospitalizations were starting to decline and restaurants and most other businesses had reopened.

As July 4th approaches, the mood has soured. Infection rates and hospitalizations are rising fast. Most bars have been ordered closed along with inside dining at restaurants. Many beaches are off-limits or have restrictions to limit crowds. Fireworks shows are canceled and Gov. Gavin Newsom is imploring residents to avoid the holiday tradition of backyard barbecues and other gatherings of relatives and friends.

In about five weeks, the nation’s most populous state went from success story to cautionary tale. Health experts say no single thing went wrong, but contributing factors included a populace made complacent by a long stretch of positive trends, the rapid reopening of businesses, a confusing patchwork of local rules and enforcement, and Newsom’s late adoption of a mandatory mask rule, on June 18.

“On Memorial Day, why did we just unleash the floodgates without a statewide mask order in place? I wish I had an answer to that, and it’s alarming to us,” said Stephanie Roberson, government relations director for the California Nurses Association.

Just before that holiday, about 3,000 people were in the hospital due to the virus; now it’s more than 5,000. Far more people are being tested and in the last two weeks that has helped fuel a nearly 50% jump in confirmed cases to 230,000. But the infection rate also has risen sharply from just over 4% of those tested around Memorial Day to 6% now.

A data-driven governor, Newsom earned plaudits for issuing the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order in mid-March and rapidly moving to shore up the statewide heath care system. The first-term Democrat has been loathe to admit any mistakes during the pandemic, saying all of his decisions were based on the best information available at the time, always in consultation with public health officials.

“It’s easy to criticize but the response in the state, with exception to a few counties, has been thoughtful, responsible, evidence-based, and where it’s been confusing it’s because it’s confusing,” said Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.

Signs of trouble began to emerge last week. Newsom resumed the near-daily press conferences he’d abandoned and pleaded with Californians to wear face masks. On Sunday he pulled back on his mid-June decision to reopen all bars because health experts say they are particularly prone for virus spread. On Wednesday, he broadened his order and shuttered more bars, wineries, indoor restaurant dining, movie theaters and other indoor entertainment venues for at least three weeks. He also said there should be no more singing at religious services.

“We’re in a very precarious situation,” said Anne Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California-Los Angeles’s Fielding School of Public Health.

She noted that May produced a rapid reopening leading into Memorial Day weekend and then Father’s Day. Many people gathered as they have in the past.

“All of these things together gave ample opportunity for this virus to spread, and I think that this just really demonstrates how quickly we can lose all of the gains that we made,” Rimoin said.

Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency, said he has no regrets on how California moved forward. But he said there was “poor execution” of the state’s reopening plan by some businesses and individuals who were more focused on when they could reopen instead of how to do it safely.

“We tried to give people the tools to reduce transmission, and I think in many ways it wasn’t followed,” he said.

Newsom, Ghaly and local health officials now are trying to get the public to again understand the gravity of the situation and the personal responsibility needed to reverse the trend.

The message resonated with Tyler Bertao, a 26-year-old from San Francisco who said he’s “extremely scared” by California’s rising case numbers.

“I think we’re going to have to go into another major lockdown,” he said.

When Newsom issued the stay-at-home order on March 19, the public largely listened and the state fared far better than places such as New York City and New Jersey. Even President Donald Trump, a frequent critic of California, heralded Newsom.

But the one-size-fits-all approach started to face resistance in a massive state with nearly 40 million residents and the world’s fifth-largest economy. By early May, after rolling out a methodical reopening process and under pressure from rural counties with few infections, Newsom began ceding more control to counties to determine which businesses and activities could resume.

“Bottom line is: People can go at their own pace, and we are empowering our local health directors and county officials that understand their local communities and conditions,” Newsom said May 18. “We’re going to start seeing a lot more activity, let’s just make sure we do it thoughtfully and very, very strategically.”

But the shift toward local control created a patchwork of rules. Rachel Michelin, president of the California Retailers Association, said her organization that represents grocery chains, big box stores and others, had long requested more consistency. On masks, she pointed to an Orange County shopping complex with stores in two separate cities with different rules on masks, which made it hard for store workers to deal with an annoyed public.

“Literally you would go from Macy’s furniture store which is in Irvine, which is where you would have to have your mask on, to Best Buy across the street and you wouldn’t,” she said. “Our perspective has always been its easier to have one statewide ordinance or mandate that we all follow that we can all enforce.”

Wachter, of the University California-San Francisco, said a monolithic set of rules wouldn’t have been workable in a state as sprawling as California. But he’s been surprised at how quickly California’s fortunes turned, when cases started to climb in mid-June. That was right around the time when bars, gyms and other high-risk businesses were cleared to open in most counties, and about two weeks after Memorial Day and widespread protests against police violence.

Californians may have adopted a false sense of security when the state didn’t experience the horror facing New York City, he said. More than 30,000 people have died in New York; in California, about 6,000.

“The virus couldn’t care less what the policy of the state is. The virus cares whether it can get to the back of your nose or the back of your throat,” he said.

Going into the weekend, Newsom said the state will create strike teams to enforce the mask order at businesses. As cases surge, that’s one of the most important things the state can do, Rimoin said.

“The mask order of course should have been in place earlier but you also have to be willing to enforce the mask order,” she said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House says President Donald Trump was never briefed on intelligence that Russia had put a bounty on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan because there wasn’t corroborating evidence.

But former intelligence officials say presidents are routinely informed about intelligence even when it’s not definitively confirmed. Intelligence that may be on shaky ground today may foreshadow tomorrow’s calamity.

Some questions and answers about how presidents are briefed on intelligence, what sort of information they receive and how this applies to the situation with Russia:

HOW DO PRESIDENTS RECEIVE NATIONAL SECURITY INFORMATION?

Both orally and through a written document known as the President’s Daily Brief.

The PDB, as it is known, is a compilation of intelligence and national security assessments from government analysts. It’s material the intelligence community thinks the president should know.

The document has been provided to presidents in some form since Harry Truman occupied the White House. Some presidents are said to have been voracious consumers of their briefings; Trump, by contrast, is known to demand only the sparest details.

Today, the PDB is coordinated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and includes contributions from the CIA and other members of the intelligence community who effectively pitch stories for inclusion, said Rodney Faraon, a former CIA analyst who served from 1999 to 2001 on the briefing team for the White House.

“It’s not unlike what you would see in a journalistic newsroom,” he said.

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WHAT SORT OF INFORMATION GETS BRIEFED TO A PRESIDENT, AND HOW DO AGENCIES KNOW IF IT’S CREDIBLE?

Depending on the day, and the particular interests of a president, the PDB could include the latest inside information about a country a president is preparing to visit, intelligence about potential national security threats or other secrets relating to current events.

“There’s no mathematical formula” for deciding what gets briefed to the president, said David Priess, a former CIA intelligence briefer and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America’s Presidents.”

“The job of the analysts is to decide, ‘does the president need to know this today?’ You are writing for the president,” he added.

There’s also no mathematical formula for evaluating the credibility of intelligence. Sometimes, information is deemed reliable because it comes from a trusted source, because it matches up with a separate piece of intelligence or fits into a pattern, or because it derives from surveillance or intercepted recordings.

“A lot of it comes down to the source of the information: Did the source have first-hand access?” said former CIA officer Cindy Otis. Or, conversely, “Is it a person with fourth-hand access who heard it from a dude who heard it from a dude and so on down the chain?”

“You’re not going to put garbage in front of the president,” she added.

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DO PRESIDENTS RECEIVE INTELLIGENCE ONLY WHEN IT’S CONFIRMED?

Absolutely not. If that were the case, the PDB would be both brief — since intelligence deals more often with uncertainty than fact — but also boring, restricted to observations that are obvious and likely already known to the president, Priess said.

“Because it’s intelligence, that means it deals with the unknown, things that are uncertain — but things that are of grave importance to U.S. national security and worthy of the president’s attention,” he said. “Nothing in there says that it has to be fully verified or certain because intelligence is rarely certain.”

Modern history is loaded with examples of briefings to presidents that contained warnings, or informed suppositions, but not certifiable facts.

One month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President George W. Bush was famously warned in a PDB that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike the U.S. The intelligence, including chatter picked up by counterterrorism analysts, was seen as urgent and credible enough to bring to the president’s attention though it lacked details about date, location and method.

Nearly a decade later, President Barack Obama’s advisers alerted him to their belief that bin Laden was in a compound in Pakistan — despite disagreement over the strength of that intelligence. Obama still approved the operation that killed bin Laden.

In his book, “The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism from al-Qaida to ISIS,” former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell writes that his confidence level was at 60 percent. Other analysts felt more secure.

When Obama asked about the disparity, Morell said it reflected differences in individual experiences but not differences in the information people had.

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WHY WOULD A PRESIDENT RECEIVE UNCORROBORATED INFORMATION?

Intelligence that may be on shaky ground today may precede an actual crisis, so briefers are expected to ensure that presidents have the fullest possible picture to prepare for something that may soon require maximum attention.

That’s especially true when even unclear or uncorroborated intelligence indicates that American lives or infrastructure could be at risk.

“The president is going to get hard decisions, and those hard decisions normally come with murky facts and gray areas,” said Larry Pfeiffer, a 32-year intelligence community veteran who held positions as CIA chief of staff and senior director of the White House Situation Room.

To account for the uncertainty, briefers will caveat the information and detail internal disagreements among different intelligence agencies so that presidents understand a situation’s nuance.

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HOW DOES THIS APPLY TO THE SITUATION WITH RUSSIA?

White House officials have repeatedly insisted that the president hadn’t been briefed that Russia offered bounties to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan to kill American troops, though officials have told The Associated Press and other news organizations that the information was included in the President’s Daily Brief.

The AP, citing officials familiar with the matter, also has reported that national security adviser Robert O’Brien had discussed the matter with Trump and that former national security adviser John Bolton told colleagues that he had done the same last year. O’Brien has denied that, and Bolton has declined to comment.

O’Brien has said the CIA and Pentagon did pursue the lead and briefed international allies. But he said the intelligence wasn’t brought to Trump’s attention initially because it was unverified and there was no consensus among the intelligence community.

After news broke about the intelligence, Trump was briefed, the White House said.

Former intelligence officials say it’s a matter Trump absolutely should have been briefed on earlier, whether corroborated or not.

“The safety and security of American troops posted in a war zone is of the highest importance,” said Faraon, a partner at the Martin + Crumpton Group, a business intelligence firm.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision Thursday blocked a lower court ruling allowing curbside voting in Alabama and waiving some absentee ballot requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conservative justices granted Alabama’s request to stay a federal judge’s order that would allow local officials to offer curbside voting in the July runoff and loosen absentee ballot requirements in three of the state’s large counties. The order will remain stayed while the court decides whether to hear Alabama’s appeal.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said he was pleased the court acted quickly so that Alabama voting rules remain in place for the July 14 runoff.

“Alabama is again able to enforce laws that help ensure the fairness and integrity of our elections,” the Republican said.

The court rulings stem from a lawsuit filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program. A group of voters had sought more voting options because of health concerns.

U.S. District Judge Abdul K. Kallon last month issued a preliminary injunction after finding that Alabama’s election rules will cause sick or elderly voters to “likely face a painful and difficult choice between exercising their fundamental right to vote and safeguarding their health, which could prevent them from casting a vote in upcoming elections.”

Kallon said Alabama can’t prevent local election officials from offering curbside voting at in-person polling locations in the July 14 runoff. Kallon also ruled Alabama can’t require some absentee ballot voters in three counties to submit photocopies of their identification and witness signatures if it is dangerous for them to get out during the pandemic because of their age and underlying health conditions.

The three counties are where plaintiffs in the lawsuit live.

Alabama appealed the decision. The state argued that it would be confusing to change absentee ballot rules in three of Alabama’s 67 counties and that curbside voting would be a major change done right before the election.

The state also argued that Alabama’s rules are needed to combat voter fraud and are not unreasonable.

“But this dichotomy between voting and safety is false, even during COVID-19. The individual plaintiffs in this case regularly see at least one other person. Can they really not find a safe way to have a second person watch them sign a piece of paper?” lawyers for the state wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court.

The court’s five conservative justices ruled in favor of Alabama while the four more liberal justices indicated they would deny the state’s application for a stay. The justices did not offer an explanation for their decision in the brief order handed down late Thursday.

“Unfortunately, this means that Alabama voters who are at greater risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19 will be required to risk their health and violate CDC recommendations in order to vote on July 14,” Deuel Ross, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., said in a statement.

The plaintiffs said they were disappointed by the decision, and will continue to pursue the ongoing litigation in federal court in Alabama.

A congressional committee criticized President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday for a series of problems in distributing personal protective and testing equipment during the coronavirus pandemic and called on the administration to come up with a better plan.

“We need urgent action from the federal government now, before this virus spins further out of control,” said Rep. James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and chair of a House committee overseeing the nation’s pandemic response.

He said that associations of doctors and nurses and others have noted a continuing shortage of N95 masks and other protective gear. Democratic committee members also said the federal government has been at times too hands-off in leaving procurement up to state and local governments and individual health care providers, and at other times they have steered purchases to a specific contractor.

In a sometimes testy hearing before the committee, administration officials defended their work. Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, for instance, outlined how the federal government worked with the industry from late March through April to fly in shipments of gear from overseas to hand out to hospitals and others. Without taking that approach, he said, equipment would have taken far longer to get in place.

Polowczyk said that most states have at least a month’s worth of protective gear on hand now, and some are working on building up to a 120-day supply. He also said the federal government, whose stockpile was depleted in April, is on course to build a 90-day supply.

Some Democrats questioned an earlier report he made projecting that federal supplies would fall short of demand. But he said that didn’t take into account equipment bought by states — and that the demand included gear for some industries, such as janitors, who may not need medical-grade equipment.

Democrats on the committee questioned the federal response in the earliest days of the coronavirus outbreak.

“The administration completely and utterly failed to provide the private sector with critical guidance” on how to prioritize distribution of gear from January through March, said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat.

Republicans on the committee tried to change the subject, saying the Democrats who control it were not looking at the right places as it digs into the coronavirus pandemic. Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, for instance, called on the committee to investigate whether China withheld information about the virus as the outbreak started.

Jordan also called for a probe of how some states sent patients with the virus to nursing homes and denounced the way Democratic governors and mayors kept churches closed in some places in the name of public health while not stopping protests over racial injustice. He specifically cited New York Mayor Bill de Blasio breaking up the funeral of a rabbi in Brooklyn in April.

“You go to someone’s funeral, you can get arrested,” Jordan said. “You can protest in the streets, not maintaining social distancing.”