Shelter orders may go to May 1
Officials looking at extending mandate, but length of time hinges on virus’ trajectory
SAN JOSE >> Bay Area residents will continue to live under stay-at-home directives for several weeks past the early April expiration of the initial regional order, according to officials and sources, dovetailing with an extension of federal guidelines by President Donald
Trump to slow the spread of COVID-19.
“In all likelihood, we’ll have another shelter in place order early this week,” Cindy
Chavez, president of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, said during a tour of county fairgrounds facilities that will be used to help unhoused people protect themselves from the coronavirus.
Bay Area public health officers who co-signed the country’s first widespread shelter-in-place order, which went into effect March 17 and is set to expire April 7, are in talks about potentially extending the order to May 1, according to several sources familiar with those discussions.
The counties in the first order were Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Cruz. The counties were joined by the city of Berkeley, which operates its own public health department.
Even if the Bay Area order were to lapse, it would be substituted with an indefinite statewide stay-at-home order issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom on March 20. But local jurisdictions are allowed to have more restrictive rules than the state, and the local health officer discussions, sources said, include proposed modifications to allowable outdoor activities and classifications of nonessential businesses, to help resolve ambiguity that arose out of the initial order.
For instance, park systems throughout the state and Bay Area have closed or curtailed access because of people taking advantage, en masse, of exemptions for exercise and constrained recreation.
And the local order’s classification of gun
shops as nonessential runs counter to those of other California counties, including Los Angeles.
Chavez’s remarks came on the same day Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, predicted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the new coronavirus could kill 100,000 to 200,000 people in the United States and that millions could become infected.
Later Sunday, Trump extended federal social-distancing guidelines to April 30 — from Easter Sunday on April 12 — which Fauci said afterward was “a very wise and prudent decision.”
But no one day on the calendar has real meaning on the trajectory of
the virus, health experts and sources say.
The length of stay-athome and social-distancing orders will hinge on whether the peak of infections and hospitalizations has passed; their main purpose is to drastically reduce the number of potential COVID-19 infections and lessen the overall strain on the health care system, a concept now popularly known as “flattening the curve.”
Through Sunday afternoon, Bay Area counties had recorded 1,925 cases and 49 deaths among a population of about 8 million people, according to data compiled by the Bay Area News Group.
An extension of the sheltering order also should not be seen as a surprise, as public health experts and officials from across the country were joined by Newsom in saying socialdistancing
and other restrictions likely would be in place for at least a few months.
In a profile published by this news organization Sunday, Dr. Sara Cody, the Santa Clara County public health officer who famously led the multicounty brigade behind the initial stay-at-home order, said county health officials will assess this week how effective the measures have been. But she was unequivocal in saying, “This is going to go on for quite some time.”
Santa Clara County confirmed 55 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, bringing the known total to 646, more than twice the 302 cases reported as of March 22, according to data released by the county Public Health Department. San Mateo County’s total reached 277 confirmed cases, though there were
no new deaths reported Sunday.
Alameda County had recorded 270 confirmed cases as of Sunday and seven deaths. Contra Costa County reported its third coronavirus death Sunday and said that 17 new cases had surfaced, bringing its total cases to 175.
San Francisco reported that two more people had died from the virus, bringing that city and county’s total to five fatalities. The latest count of known infections for the city was 340, also more than twice the number reported earlier last week.
Adherence to the stay-athome order has been met with broad compliance, but uncertainty remains about where and when people can be out for recreation, as allowed by the order.
Law enforcement personnel have been conservative with their ticket
books when they encounter large gatherings and “nonessential businesses” violating the order, opting instead for warnings rather than the misdemeanor citations and potential business license revocations they are authorized to issue. While some citations have been given out in Santa Clara County, no one has been criminally charged.
“Those are last resorts for us,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in an interview Friday. “We hope we don’t have to file charges.”
Rosen said a hotline and email address set up by his office garnered 1,500 complaints last week about potentially noncompliant businesses or gatherings, a total that does not include untold complaints made separately to police departments.
He said the majority of calls have been complaints about improper social distancing — too many people too close in line at the grocery store, for instance — that are difficult to assess because they’re often fleeting instances. About a third of the complaints were forwarded to police for followup.
“While we encourage people to exercise, we encourage them to use common sense in terms of keeping their distance from other people,” Rosen said. “If people are saying, ‘Let’s have a basketball game, a soccer game at the park,’ just ‘No.’ It’s not what the public health order is directing to be done.”