Counties get more leeway to reopen
More counties qualify for looser restrictions, but Bay Area is still enforcing stricter rules
As California reopens for business, Gov. Gavin Newsom has called the shots on how quickly the Golden State’s 58 counties can loosen the stay-at-home restrictions that have slowed the deadly coronavirus but crippled the nation’s largest economy.
Earlier this month, he established a set of benchmarks that only one county in the greater Bay Area — Santa Cruz — could meet to unlock the door to more retail shops, restaurants and manufacturers. But this week, the governor revised the metrics, paving the way for most California counties — including most in the Bay Area — to soon hang up a “Welcome” sign.
Though Newsom said Monday all but a handful of counties should now make the cut, he didn’t specify which — and the state doesn’t make it easy to keep score. Each county publicly reports outbreak data differently and not in a way that readily shows they’re meeting the state’s new benchmarks.
But replacing the most difficult requirement with a lower bar for new cases appears to allow most Bay Area counties to meet the state’s revised threshold, which could allow them to progress toward further reopening with things such as in-store shopping and restaurants with table service, a Bay Area News Group analysis found.
Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin, Napa, Sonoma, Solano and Contra Costa counties all appear to fall within the green zone now. There’s not enough publicly
available data for Alameda County, but officials there are reviewing the new standards.
That doesn’t mean the Bay Area — which continues to enforce stricter rules — will be reopening right away. Most counties here just entered the state’s early stage 2 reopening phase, which allows retail businesses to offer curbside pickup and industries supporting them to operate. County health officials say they will monitor how that goes before reopening more. Bay Area health officials have devised their own similar indicators for when it’s safe to reopen.
“The data is showing us
we are heading in the right direction,” said Neetu Balram, Alameda County’s public information manager.
Still, the new bar allows local officials more leeway in reopening without setting up a potential conflict with the state.
The sticking point had been metrics for “epidemiological stability” that had required counties to show they had no deaths and no more than one new case of coronavirus per 10,000 people in the last 14 days. Los Angeles, one of the few counties that still won’t meet the new benchmarks, recorded 74 of the state’s 116 deaths on Tuesday, which turned out to be the deadliest day of coronavirus in California since April 22, when 118 died.
Though it wasn’t the
only yardstick counties had to measure up to — others that remain unchanged involve testing and hospital capacity — it was a standard no urban county with a significant population was close to meeting, even as case rates and hospitalizations stabilize and decline. That left only sparsely populated rural counties mostly north of the Bay Area in range for reopening.
The revised case metrics eliminated the no-newdeaths-in-14-days requirement that was the highest bar for big counties. Instead, it gave counties a couple of new ways to pass. They can show fewer than 25 new cases per 100,000 people over the last 14 days, or a rate of positive tests for the virus over the past seven days of less than 8%.
They also must show hospitalizations have stabilized, with a seven-day average that doesn’t spike more than 5%, or no more than 20 hospitalizations on any single day over the past 14 days. Hospitalization trend lines in Bay Area counties have been fairly flat in recent weeks.
Balram said Alameda County is reviewing the data and will watch for changes over the coming weeks from the partial reopening.
“We expect additional interactions to cause some amount of increase in case numbers and hospitalizations,” Balram said. “We will monitor and act as needed to protect community health.”
Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody said Monday as Newsom
was announcing his revised metrics that the county, once a state hot spot that has seen a steady decline in cases, is “picking off the menu that the state has offered as well as adding some additional local guardrails to keep our community safe.”
In Contra Costa County, health department spokesman Will Harper said that while they may be within the case metrics, they are still working to improve other key measures.
“While we are making progress in some areas such as flat or declining number of hospitalizations, we still aren’t where we want to be for things like testing and PPE supplies,” Harper said.
Newsom indicated Monday that perhaps only five counties wouldn’t pass the revised metrics. Though he didn’t provide a list, he mentioned Los Angeles, which has recorded nearly half of the 83,000 reported cases in the state, as well as Tulare and Kings counties, where outbreaks occurred at a long-term care facility or meat plant.
In San Francisco, Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax said the city “will be aligning generally with the state’s plan” for further reopening, monitoring case rates and hospitalizations for spikes over the next two to four weeks and discussing new safety protocols for businesses when they reopen.
“I have hope — and we should all have hope — that if people continue to take precautions,” Colfax said, “we will continue to make progress.”