But did people die because of that decision? Probably. Maybe a lot.
Tough calls. It comes down to who made those tough calls earlier. And that's not a partisan thing, or a smart/dumb thing.
Plenty of bad decisions to go around, but we probably shouldn't lay the blame to thick anywhere. Because it's chaos and people are adapting and changing in real time.
Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people and he has to shut down the state to slow down the virus. I guarantee he's going to be a different person in 12 months.
“The next minute” is off by something more than 6 orders of magnitude.
You kind of skipped over ~4.2 million minutes he spent as Lieutenant Governor between those jobs.
California schools pretty much immediately set up daily meal pickup when they closed (often, for anyone under 18 at any school site.) And this was already happening when they said that.
This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school. Without those programs, many students have little to eat at home. It's a little disingenuous to represent it in another light. If anything, it highlights yet another weakness in our society.