S. F. virus rates improve, and reopening advances
County is first in Bay Area to achieve state’s yellow tier
San Francisco on Tuesday became the first Bay Area county to advance to the least restrictive tier in California’s economic reopening blueprint, clearing the way for nonessential businesses to reopen at a limited capacity next week and expanding several activities in the coming weeks, from pools to movie theaters to houses of worship.
Starting Oct. 27, nonessential offices in San Francisco can reopen at 25% capacity, city officials announced Tuesday. Offices with fewer than 20 employees can reopen beyond 25% capacity as long as employees can maintain safe distances from one another.
Indoor climbing walls within gyms can also open at 25% capacity next week, with certain sanitation and staffing protocols in place, the city said. And gyms may increase capacity to 25% — up from 10% — without cardio or aerobic classes.
San Francisco’s move to the state’s yellow tier follows a steady reduction in coronavirus cases and positive test rates. Its progress is owed, in part, to the county’s holistic response to the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Grant Colfax, the county’s director of public health. San Francisco is one of nine California counties in the yellow tier, and the only urban one.
“It’s really our citywide response from the beginning of the pandemic,” Colfax said. “While we have adapted and iterated our response, we’ve always had an infrastructure that has helped us get to this point, from providing testing, to case investigation, to our
robust contact tracing programs, the free isolation in quarantine hotels, the food security. This was a public health effort, but it went beyond public health.”
The county got a boost by meeting the state’s new health equity metric Tuesday, said acting state health officer Dr. Erica Pan. The metric, which went into effect earlier this month, aims to ensure that counties are tracking and controlling the virus in disadvantaged communities. In some cases, counties that meet the metric may reopen their economies faster.
Elsewhere in California, Napa County advanced to the orange tier Tuesday, which allows some indoor businesses to open with modifications. Riverside and Shasta counties moved back into the most restrictive purple tier, indicating the virus is widespread, according to the state’s Department of Public Health.
State officials said large theme parks may open when the county in which they are located reaches the leastrestrictive tier and local officials grant approval, meaning parks like Disneyland in Orange County and Universal Studios in Los Angeles County will remain closed. Smaller attractions can open outdoors, at 25% capacity, when their respective counties reach the moderate orange tier.
The authority of local officials, who can impose stricter rules than the state’s tier system, was highlighted when the 49ers, and other professional sports teams, got the green light from the state to begin selling tickets at outdoor stadiums on a limited basis. Santa Clara County quickly pumped the brakes, saying Tuesday, “Audiences at professional sporting events will not be allowed anytime soon in Santa Clara County, and theme parks will not resume operation.”
Overall, things are looking up for California as the rest of the nation battles a striking surge in coronavirus cases. More than half of all states now fall into the “uncontrolled spread” category, according to data gathered by the COVID Exit Strategy. California, by contrast, is one of eight states where transmission is decreasing or flat — a likely sign that the rigorous restrictions the state implemented over the summer have paid off.
“We’re happy with the progress that we’ve made, but as I said earlier, with every day in COVID, we can see something change and it can change quickly,” said California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly during a news briefing Tuesday. “We want Californians to continue to keep their guard up, to be attentive to the local and state public health guidance and to limit their activities as much as possible.”
San Francisco County is averaging about 31 new coronavirus cases per day and has 25 COVID19 hospital patients, Colfax said. The county has a positive test rate of 0.8%.
Infection rates among San Francisco’s Latinos — who have consistently accounted for roughly half of the city’s overall infections — have also dropped significantly in recent months, Colfax said.
Latinos in the city have a positive test rate of 3%, down from 7% in September and 13% in July, he said.
Colfax, on Tuesday, credited the county’s cautious approach for its success. The county is moving more slowly in its reopening than the state requires — a key factor in its upward progress, he said. Though San Francisco reached the least restrictive tier Tuesday, the county plans to rely on guidelines from the orange tier in its reopening, he said.
“We want to make sure that we’re using a balanced approach that is building on our success but that we don’t go too far,” he said. “Because we’ve seen, as we’re seeing across the country right now, that this virus can get out of control very quickly.”
San Francisco is on track to expand several services next week:
Some personal services that may require the removal of face coverings, such as skin treatments and facials, waxing,
tattoos or facial piercings, can expand operations.
1 Institutions of higher education can increase the capacity of outdoor classes to 25 people, including instructors, and can request exceptions to the twohour limit on indoor classes.
The county will continue its expansion on Nov. 3, allowing activities such as pools and bowling alleys to continue and movie theaters, indoor dining establishments, museums, aquariums and zoos to expand to 50% capacity.
On Sept. 30, San Francisco restaurants were allowed to begin offering indoor dining at 25% capacity as long as they also followed strict protocols, including requiring patrons to wear masks and answer questions about their health. A twohour time limit and 100person maximum were part of the guidelines for dining establishments.
Now restaurants — including those inside hotels, shopping centers and museums — can have up to 200 people and allow diners to stay up to three hours.
Places of worship in San Francisco will allow up to 200 people indoors — or up to 50% capacity — and up to 300 people for outdoor worship, as long as social distancing measures are in place.
City officials said they plan to open bars indoors in mid-November, without food service.
“Every step of the way, we’ve made decisions through the lens of public health, and we will continue to do so going forward,” said San Francisco Mayor London Breed, in a statement Tuesday. “We know new cases of COVID are rising in other parts of the country, so we cannot relax. We must remain vigilant.”
For some companies, like software provider ServiceMax, it doesn’t make sense to bring employees back to work immediately, even with transmission rates falling in places like San Francisco.
“We’re taking a very conservative approach,“said ServiceMax CEO Neil Barua, speaking before Tuesday’s tier announcements.
With a large number of employees able to work from home, Barua said he will “not unduly send them into the office if we don’t need to.”
The company is based in Pleasanton but maintains a coworking space in San Francisco that Barua said the company would consider letting go of if there isn’t a safe way to return to the office in the next three months or so.
“Until there’s a lot of consistency around vaccines or testing, let’s not go back,” Barua said.
Other companies, like San Francisco internet calling company Dialpad, intend to have some employees return to the office — though not all at once.
While many software engineers prefer to work from home, sales, marketing and customer support employees will likely be among the first to come back to the company’s San Francisco office, said Chief Revenue Officer Dan O’Connell.
“There’s a bunch of serendipitous moments and learnings that happen when you have people in an office together,” O’Connell said, noting roughly half of the company’s 100 sales and marketing staff could be slowly brought back into the office on a rotating basis in coming weeks, while still working from home part time.
The ability to return to the office would also be a boon for companies like San Francisco’s Eden, which facilitates cleanings and repairs at other workplaces and offers software to track who is in a building.
About five employees have worked at Eden’s San Francisco headquarters throughout the pandemic, according to CEO and cofounder Joe Du Bey. That number may grow in the coming weeks, but the company won’t be able to bring back all of its roughly 25 employees, he said.
Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, told employees they can work from home at least through July. The company doesn’t have a firm reopening date for its San Francisco office spaces, according to a company spokesperson.
“While our employees will have the opportunity to work from home until at least through July of next year, it’s encouraging to see San Francisco move into the yellow tier and start the process of reopening offices,” said Chief People Officer Brent Hyder, in a statement. “We all have to remain diligent and navigate through the pandemic, but it doesn’t alter our longterm growth plans here in San Francisco and around the world.”