Still red: The reprieve may be brief, but S. F. was not dropped into most- restrictive purple tier.
City’s reprieve may be brief as state’s virus cases continue to climb
San Francisco did not move into the most restrictive purple tier of California’s economic reopening plan as expected on Tuesday. But public health officials said coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are climbing dramatically and they expect to land there later in the week.
Average daily cases have shot up more than 60% since the start of the month, from 73 to 118, although San Francisco’s numbers are still lower than many parts of the state and
country.
“We are at a critical moment,” Dr. Grant Colfax, director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said during a Tuesday briefing.
“We cannot let the virus get so far ahead of us or we will never catch up,” he said.
Colfax warned late last week that he expected San Francisco to shift from the red tier to purple as early as Sunday based on rising case rates. He still anticipates that happening.
“We are surrounded by purple,” Colfax said, referring to the six of nine Bay Area counties that are in the most restrictive tier now. “The fact that we’re in red should give nobody reasons for not taking precautions, particularly around the holiday. We’re hopeful we can crush this third curve but we do expect nevertheless to be in purple relatively soon.”
A number of counties in California fell back to more restrictive tiers when state health officials announced the new tier assignments in the state’s reopening blueprint on Tuesday. Falling into the purple, most restrictive, category were Colusa, Del Norte, Humboldt and Lassen counties. Dropping back to red, the second most restrictive level, was Calaveras County. Reassigned to the orange, moderate, tier were Alpine and Mariposa counties.
“We are truly in the midst of a surge in California,” Dr. Mark Ghaly, California Health and Human Services secretary, said during a briefing on Tuesday.
The state experienced an 81.3% increase in COVID19 hospitalizations over the past 14 days and a 57.1% jump in intensive care hospitalizations.
“Statewide, I don’t believe we have ever seen as many hospitalizations increase like we did in the past 24 hours,” Ghaly said. “I hope but don’t expect that it will be the highest we ever have.”
California’s 14day positivity rate continues to rise as well, moving up to 5.6% on Tuesday from 3.7% on Nov. 10. That is a 51% increase.
Bay Area health experts are bracing for an uptick in deaths in the coming weeks, with many residents eschewing public health officials’ entreaties not to travel or gather with more than their household members for Thanksgiving.
To help stave off the coming wave, Santa Clara County will ramp up business compliance efforts for the Thanksgiving and Black Friday shopping weekend from Thursday through Sunday, county officials announced during a news briefing on Tuesday.
“We will be out in force to help ensure that businesses are adhering to these rules,” said James R. Williams, the county counselor. “It is a matter of health and safety.”
The county will dispatch compliance staffers in custom yellow vests to visit “high traffic shopping areas” to ensure businesses strictly follow COVID19 safety precautions. Businesses found in violation of density rules or other safety measures will be assessed fines of at least $ 250 that can go into the thousands. Those fines will not have a grace period.
“We’re doing that in the hopes that businesses will really be on point in compliance,” said Michael Balliet, Santa Clara County’s director of community and business engagement. “We have been doing education for months. The things we are asking businesses to do are not new.”
In the purple tier, grocery stores must limit capacity to 50%, and clothing and retails stores have a 25% capacity limit.
The most restrictive status also means having to halt most indoor activities, including gatherings with people from different households. In other words, Thanksgiving dinner, beyond single household attendees, would have to move outside.
San Francisco, though it’s not yet in the purple tier, already bans indoor gatherings with people from different households.
Ghaly commended health experts and community leaders in the Bay Area for their overall efforts in containing the spread of the virus.
“Whatever they have there, I hope we can continue to spread that throughout the state,” he said.
In other parts of the state, officials in Los Angeles County on Tuesday were looking at a possible stay home order just days before Thanksgiving after a spike of coronavirus cases surpassed a threshold set by public health officials to trigger one.
An “impressive and alarming surge” of more than 6,000 new cases put Los Angeles over a fiveday average of 4,500 cases per day, Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Monday, a day before the county supervisors’ meeting.
California recorded 15,329 new cases of the coronavirus on Tuesday, pushing the sevenday average up to 12,532, according to Ghaly. The state reported a recordsmashing 20,654 cases on Monday, according to data compiled by The Chronicle. That number may have been artificially high due to weekend lags and a massive spike in testing done in the days prior.
Even Gov. Gavin Newsom is feeling the impact of the pandemic. His family began a twoweek quarantine on Sunday because three of his four children had been in contact with a CHP officer who later tested positive.
The U. S. is averaging 172,000 new coronavirus cases per day, nearly doubling since the end of October, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers.