Governor unveils tiered system
Hair salons, barbers can open Monday
Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a new tiered, colored-coded system on Friday that will provide guidelines for when — and what — counties in California can open as the situation with COVID-19 continues.
The system is the one Tulare County Health and Human Services Director Tim Lutz alluded to at the Tulare County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday.
Lutz said the tiered system was designed to allow for more sectors to open and that’s the case. Even though Tulare County is still in the worst category — purple — the county announced hair salons, barber shops and shopping malls would be able to open indoor operations with modifications beginning on Monday.
So the state monitoring list will now be replaced by the tiered system. The vast majority of counties in the state have been on the state monitoring list — including Tulare Coun
ty — which extensively restricted sectors those counties could open.
Under the new tiered system, not much else should change as far as what can be opened in Tulare County for the time being.
Under the new system, counties will fall into four color-coded categories based on the number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents and the rate of positive COVID-19 tests. But how well a county is targeting resources for the highest risk residents will also be considered in determining how a county is rated.
The color categories are purple, red, orange and yellow. These categories will determine what counties can open. The purple category is essentially the same as the state monitoring list now and counties that
have been on the state monitoring list will generally be in the purple category.
As an example counties in the purple category will still only be allowed to offer outdoor dining. The next restrictive category — the red category — allows for restaurants to offer indoor dining at 25 percent capacity.
A major change is counties will have to stay in a tier for at least three weeks before they can move to a less restrictive tier. Past guidelines allowed counties to begin opening certain sectors if they met certain requirements for two weeks.
And if a county falls short of the standards for the tier it’s in for two weeks, it could be moved into a more restrictive tier. The tiers will be updated every Tuesday.
When it comes to schools re-opening for in-person instruction, a county must be in the red tier for at least two weeks.
Elementary schools in purple-tier counties can still apply for waivers to provide in-person instruction for grades TK6. That standard for having the waiver granted has been unchanged as Tulare County is working to allow those schools to reopen as soon as possible once it meets the threshold of 200 cases per 100,000 residents.
Counties in the red tier are still considered to have “substantial” virus spread. Virus spread is “moderate” in orange counties and “minimal” in yellow counties. There are eight counties in the red tier, eight counties in the orange tier and three counties in the yellow tier.
The rest of the counties — including Tulare County – are in the purple tier. To view which tiers counties are in visit https://covid19.ca.gov/safer-economy/
BY THE NUMBERS
The number of active cases in Tulare County continued to decline on Friday as reported by Tulare County Health and Human Services.
The number of people in Tulare County who now have COVID-19 is 592. That’s a decline of 75 from the 667 that was reported on Thursday.
The department did report three more deaths, bringing the total number of deaths due to COVID-19 in Tulare County to 232. The department has reported 16 deaths over the past three days.
But the state model for projecting the number of deaths in Tulare County has basically remained unchanged. It now projects Tulare County to have 264 deaths by September 27.
There was a slight increase in Tulare County’s R number from .82 to .84. The R number projects how fast the rate of the spread of the virus will be.
Tulare County’s rate of increase is still considered to be “likely decreasing,” meaning it’s expected to be lower than it is now.
There have now been a total of 13,884 COVID-19 cases in Tulare County. The county reported 109 new cases on Friday.
But the number of recoveries continue to increase significantly, leading to a decline in active cases. The number of people in Tulare County who have recovered after testing positive from COVID-19 is now 13,060, an increase of 181 over the previous day.
Tulare County is also coming closer to the magical number of 200 cases per 100,000 residents over the past 14 days that would allow schools that have applied for a waiver to open for in-person instruction for grades TK-6. That number is now down to 370.6 per 100,000, a decrease of 31.1 from the previous day.
The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations in Tulare County has increased from 52 to 61 as reported by the county. But that number should come back down based on the latest data reported by Visalia’s Kaweah Delta Hospital and Sierra View Medical Center.
Kaweah Delta reported on Tuesday it had 38 COVID-19 hospitalizations. The hospital reported it has 57 employees who have tested positive for COVID-19 and 280 employees who have recovered.
Kaweah Delta reported it had 10 of its 58 ventilators in use. The hospital also reported it has had 3,169 positive tests.
As of Friday, Sierra View reported it had 16 COVID-19 hospitalizations and four patients suspected of having COVID-19. Sierra View has had 38 deaths due to COVID-19.
The hospital reported eight of its 10 ICU beds were in use and that seven of its 19 ventilators were in use.
Sierra View also reported it has three employees who have tested positive for COVID-19 and 37 employees who have recovered. The hospital reported it has had 289 positive tests.
There have been 2,194 cases in Porterville, 138 cases in Terra Bella, 189 cases in Strathmore, 596 cases in Lindsay, 123 cases in Richgrove, 38 cases in foothill-mountain communities, 263 cases in Pixley, 28 cases in Alpaugh, 83 cases in Tipton, 2,109 cases in Tulare, 1,579 cases in Dinuba, 285 cases in Cutler, 519 cases in Orosi, 24 cases in Woodlake, 270 cases in Exeter, 390 cases in Farmersville, 40 cases in Goshen, 76 cases in Traver, 11 cases in the Reedley area, 11 cases in Orange Cove and 579 cases in Earlimart.
In Visalia there have been 1,740 cases in one region, 969 cases in another region and 1,129 cases in a third region.
There have been 68 cases reported as travel-releated, 4,527 due to person-to-person contact and 9,289 are under investigation.
There have been 1,881 cases ages 0-17, 2,199 cases ages 18-25, 3,992 cases ages 26-40, 4,331 cases ages 41-64 and 1,472 cases ages 65 and older.
There have been 7,806 cases who have been Hispanic, 1,313 have been Caucasian, 223 have been Asian, 53 have been African-american, 29 have been Native American, 250 have been multi-race and 4,210 are unknown.
There are 459 people in Tulare County who are under self-quarantine and being monitored by public health officials.
Tulare County’s doubling time — the amount of days it would take for cases to double — continues to increase, indicating the curve of cases is continuing to flatten. As of Thursday Tulare County’s doubling time was 87.4 days.
With a population of about 470,000 people, Tulare County has had an overall rate of close to 3 cases per 100 residents or 3 percent.