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Monday was a day of coronavirus whiplash for many Californians as state health officials abruptly lifted the regional stay-athome order and Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a major shift in the state’s vaccine plan.

All but four counties are now in the purple tier of California’s color-coded system, permitting restaurants and gyms to reopen outdoors and hair and nail salons to reopen indoors with modifications, CalMatters’ Lauren Hepler reports. Meanwhile, California will transition to an age-based vaccine priority system after it completes its current phase — raising questions about when people with underlying health conditions will be able to access the vaccine, CalMatters’ Ana Ibarra reports.

Although Newsom emphasized Monday that the decision to lift the stayat-home order was “data driven, scientifically based, not arbitrary,” confusion around the data remains. On Sunday, the state Department of Public Health said the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley and Southern California regions would remain under the order because their projected ICU capacity in four weeks remained below 15%. But at 8 a.m. Monday, the department reversed course, predicting the three regions would by Feb. 21 have ICU capacities of 25%, 22.3% and 33.3%, respectively. How exactly these figures are calculated remains murky.

Adding to the back-andforth, Newsom’s messaging was at times contradictory.

Newsom: “We’re seeing a flattening of the curve — everything that should be up is up and everything that should be down is down.”

But when citing California’s 7-day average of 504 deaths, Newsom said, “This is a sober reminder of how deadly this pandemic remains, more so now than ever.”

Though there are signs the winter surge is beginning to plateau, conditions in California are significantly worse than they were on Dec. 3, when Newsom first implemented the stay-at-home order. The state also predicts that Northern California’s 47.9% ICU capacity will fall dramatically to 18.9% by Feb. 21.

The California Nurses Association in a Monday statement: “There is a human cost to lifting stay-athome orders too soon. Let’s be clear that even if numbers are ‘trending downward,’ we are still in the midst of the most deadly surge of COVID-19 yet.”