County moves to red tier today
Most of the rest of the state remains in purple tier
While the majority of the state remains in the highest-risk purple tier for COVID-19 transmission, Humboldt County has been downgraded to the red “substantial risk” tier.
State Health and Human
Services Agency Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly announced at a Tuesday news conference that Humboldt County is shifting out of the purple tier, indicating widespread undetected transmission of COVID-19 in the community, to the red tier, which indicates a substantial spread of the virus but less so than the purple tier. The tier assignment goes into effect the day after it has been announced.
“Today there is one county, Humboldt County, that has met the threshold, the same threshold that we’ve always used under the (Blueprint for a Safer Economy) to move from purple to red tier,” Ghaly said.
In order to be in the red tier, a county needs to have
between four to seven new daily COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents and a 5% to 8% positivity rate. The purple tier is for a county with more than seven daily new cases per 100,000 residents and more than 8% positivity rate.
The most recent data from the county states the adjusted case rate per 100,000 residents is 12.1 and the positivity rate is 4.0%, which should have kept the county in the purple tier because the state imposes the more strict tier when a county’s case rate and positivity rate fall into different tiers.
However, the county issued a press release shortly after the announcement stating the reassignment was a surprise and “based almost exclusively on the county’s Health Equity Metric, which is intended to ensure that no population group within a county is disproportionately impacted by COVID-19.”
“Humboldt County Health Officer Dr. Ian Hoffman is in consultation with state and local officials about the next steps for implementing relaxed COVID-19 safety measures,” the release states, adding that there would be more information available after publication time.
Shifting into the red tier will allow:
• restaurants to reopen their dine-in services at 25% capacity or 100 people, whichever is fewer;
• retailers to increase their in-store capacity for customers to 50%;
• places of worship, weddings and other cultural ceremonies to take place indoors with up to 25% capacity or 100 people;
• movie theaters and museums to reopen with 25% capacity;
• gyms, fitness centers, and dance and yoga studios to reopen at 10% indoor capacity.
Businesses have expressed frustrat ion throughout the pandemic about being able to remain financially viable with frequent mandatory closures and lower customer volumes when they have been able to open. In response, the county started a grant program over the summer to help businesses pay for COVID19-related expenses.
The Small Business Restart and Recovery grant program has been helping small businesses buy personal protective equipment, plan to reopen, pay rent and more through distributing checks ranging from $500 to $12,500, according to a county news release.
The program has already distributed $1.8 million to more than 150 local businesses and nonprofits, “and staff are working to finalize more than $2 million in additional payments to local entities as quickly as possible,” the release states.
Schools won’t be allowed to fully reopen for in-person instruction until the county has been in the red tier for at least two weeks. Colleges, on the other hand, can resume indoor lectures at 25% capacity or 100 people, whichever is less, and regular capacity for some courses with a lab or studio component.
Mariposa and Alpine counties are in the red tier alongside Humboldt County (totaling 0.4% of the state’s population) and Sierra County is in the orange tier ( less than 0.1%), while California’s remaining 54 counties (99.6%) remain in the purple tier.