Shelter orders prompt questions
Enforcement up as cases rise; Gun shop, bar, pool cleaner among businesses shut down
As the Bay Area hunkered down for the second day of life under unprecedented shelterin-place orders Wednesday, officials fielded a flood of questions about what residents are allowed to do and closed a few businesses that weren’t complying.
Many in the region wrestled with tough questions about the gray areas in the pages-long orders designed to combat the spread of coronavirus. Officials and law enforcement shut down businesses from a gun shop in San
Jose to a bar in El Sobrante to a pool-cleaning business in Marin, while some counties concluded that bike shops were essential enough to keep their doors open.
“We’re building this engine as the car is racing down the road,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said Wednesday. “Collectively, we’re going to be pivoting and tweaking as we learn more information.”
Even as the orders fell into place, the number of COVID-19 cases continues to grow around the Bay Area — a development experts said was to be expected. As of Wednesday morning, California reported 598 cases of coronavirus and 13 deaths, including one person who was not a resident of the state. Nearly 12,000 Californians were self-monitoring after returning to the U.S. through the San Francisco or Los Angeles international airports.
Santa Clara confirmed a total of 175 cases Wednesday and six deaths — the most of any county in the state and a jump of 20 cases from the previous day. San Mateo reported 80, a number that has nearly doubled since Monday. San Francisco had 50, Contra Costa 41, Alameda 30 and Marin
15.
In preparation for more cases, Gov. Gavin Newsom said late Wednesday that the state has requested two mobile field hospitals from the federal government, with a capacity of about 500 beds each, as well as a U.S. Navy hospital ship with about 1,000 beds that will take days to get ready. On Friday, the state will announce two new hospitals it is opening in currently unused facilities in Northern and Southern California. Overall, the state has plans to scale up to more than 90,000 hospital beds statewide.
Some hospitals already are running low on crucial supplies such as masks and swabs to conduct tests, Newsom said, adding that he’d requested a “massive” amount of supplies from the federal government. Officials at one hospital went to Los Angeles’ garment district to request that seamstresses make new masks,
he said, while another hospital has purchased swim goggles to use as makeshift protective gear.
The state also received more than 80,000 unemployment insurance applications on Tuesday, Newsom said — compared with about 2,000 on a typical day.
Shelter-in-place orders now cover much of Northern California from Monterey to Sacramento, and one of the last holdouts, Solano County, joined the others late Wednesday.
Usually gridlocked highways around the Bay Area were mostly clear Wednesday, and public transit agencies reported steep declines in ridership. BART saw just 54,031 passengers on Tuesday, down 87% compared to a typical weekday.
“It’s kind of a ghost town,” observed Fallon Dunagan, a 32-year-old tech worker in Sunnyvale, as she walked to a Safeway to re
stock on food — and break up the monotony of working from home. “It seems now that people are taking it more seriously.”
Other residents are coming up with innovative ways to replace favorite in-person rituals. Maureen De NievaMarsh, who works in public health in Marin County, was disappointed when her husband had to cancel the surprise barbecue party he had planned for her 35th birthday on Saturday. But instead, the couple is hosting a virtual party, with friends and family from around the world video-chatting in to watch her blow out the candles and sing her “Happy Birthday.”
“We’re going to max out Google Hangout,” De NievaMarsh
predicted. “Social distancing doesn’t mean emotional distancing — we just have to be creative about how we stay connected.”
But even with the lockdown in place, there was still plenty of activity on the streets around the Bay Area, from joggers getting exercise to shoppers in long lines for grocery stores to employees heading for work.
One reason: There are hundreds of thousands of residents working at “essential” businesses who would be exempt from the orders, U.S. Census data suggests. The 2018 census found that 125,000 people work in health care in the San Francisco or San Jose metro areas, including emergency room doctors, surgeons and nurses. There are an additional 52,000 employees in the region working in protective services, which includes firefighters and police officers. And even if just one-fifth of food prep and service employees are going to work as restaurants can only provide takeout or delivery, that would still mean 35,000 workers.
Officials around the Bay Area said they’d been inundated with calls from residents asking what the order meant for them. Scott Alonso, a spokesperson for the Contra Costa County joint information center, said they’d received hundreds of calls from businesses and had set up a hotline to answer questions.
County officials already are updating online FAQs and clarifying the order. In Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties, for example, officials have said bicycle repair shops are now considered essential businesses — and can keep operating — because of how important they are in helping people get around.
In San Jose, the police department ordered Bullseye Bishop gun shop in Willow Glen to close Tuesday after a long line of customers showed up to buy firearms.
Alameda County is sparring with Tesla over whether the company’s Fremont factory can continue to manufacture cars. In Contra Costa County, sheriff’s deputies showed up at the Rancho Sports Bar in El Sobrante on Tuesday after receiving complaints that it was still open. The owner voluntarily closed. And in Marin, officials had to tell a small pool-cleaning and repair business that it did not qualify as essential, said Laine Hendricks, a public information officer for the county.
Still, the complicated orders have left plenty of gray areas. Officials in Marin were meeting Wednesday and Thursday to discuss some of the thorniest questions — such as whether couples who live apart are allowed to break the 6-feet social distancing boundary.
“I don’t want to be the one to say no,” Hendricks said. “This is going to put a wrench in the dating scene.”
Some Bay Area residents said they were concerned that people and businesses weren’t taking the restrictions seriously enough.
Pamela Baker, a former San Jose resident who returned Sunday to the Bay Area from South Korea where she had been working, said she was shocked at how little the region seemed to be doing compared with the widespread testing, masks and health checks that have helped keep the virus under control in that country.
At the airport in Seoul, she and her husband had to go through several screenings, including temperature checks, before passengers could even enter the terminals. There was nothing like that when the couple landed at San Francisco International, she said.
“No checks, no signs for masks, no (coronavirus) area, no one taking their temperatures,” Baker said. “My husband goes, ‘Holy crap, we’re walking into ground zero. This place is a mess.’ ”
Now, as the couple waits out their 14-day self-quarantine, Baker said she couldn’t help but worry about whether the U.S. is doing enough: “I definitely feel safer in Korea than here.”