Roughly three out of four Americans are under orders to stay home, or will be soon.

A nearly empty park in Brooklyn on Monday.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times

While many states have issued stay-at-home directives to try to slow the virus’s spread — with Maryland, Virginia and Arizona becoming the latest to do so on Monday — in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, had resisted the step, favoring local action over statewide mandates.

But on Monday Mr. DeSantis said that he would sign an order codifying a patchwork of local rules urging residents in the densely-populated southeast corner of the state — including  Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties — to stay home.

Local Florida governments have taken wildly different approaches to restricting interactions. While the city of Jacksonville shut down its beaches, St. Johns County to the south did not. A striking photo taken over the weekend showed bare beaches on one side of the county line and crowded sand on the other. (St. Johns County later closed its shoreline.)

Roughly three out of four Americans are or will soon be under instructions to stay indoors, as states and localities try to curb the spread of the coronavirus before their hospitals are overwhelmed.

Virginia and Maryland both issued new statewide orders on Monday, and Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, directed his state’s residents to stay home until the end of April.

“We are no longer asking or suggesting that Marylanders stay home — we are directing them to do so,” Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, said.

And in Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, ordered all residents to stay home, closing the state’s beaches and campgrounds and insisting that people only go out for food, supplies, work or medical care.

“I want everyone to hear me: Stay home,” Mr. Northam, a Democrat, said.

Reference: NY Times