Counties advance to fewer limits
Santa Clara, Alameda may have indoor dining soon
SAN JOSE >> South Bay restaurants could start serving diners indoors and movie theaters could welcome back limited audiences this week after Santa Clara County advanced to a looser tier of coronavirus restrictions on Tuesday.
Alameda County will move more slowly to reopen those businesses, but it too has now graduated to the orange tier of the state’s COVID reopening plan, which indicates spread of the deadly illness in the county is at “moderate” levels.
State authorities on Tuesday also issued new guidance for how to reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus during Halloween — an attempt to blunt the potential surge of new cases that many fear could emerge if people gather in large numbers for holidays through the end of the year.
Locally, though, health leaders were balancing those warnings with praise, saying the sacrifices of disciplined residents were paying off through lower transmission rates and looser restrictions.
“Today is really great news for everyone who lives and works in this county, and all of the collective work that everyone has done to move us into the orange tier,” Santa Clara County Public Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody said Tuesday. “We were a bit stricter for a bit longer than other jurisdictions … and now that is paying off.”
According to Cody, the rates of new cases in the county has slowly but steadily fallen from their summer peak. At 1.7%, the share of coronavirus tests that come back positive in Santa Clara County over a seven- day average Tuesday is half that of the state as a whole, which is 3.4%. It’s even lower in Alameda County, at 1.5%.
An updated Santa Clara
“That was very difficult to do. Hopefully with indoor (dining) we’ll get to see a large audience come back, which will enable us to bring back more staff. “
— Jessica Kapoor, whose family own Pedro’s restaurants
County health order allows for outdoor gatherings of up to 200 people, and indoor gatherings — at places such as restaurants, houses of worship and movie theaters — at 25% of a building’s capacity or 100 total people, whichever is fewer, starting today. The new policies in the county also allow its two college football programs, Stanford and San Jose State, to resume on- campus practices. Stanford had been practicing at a San Mateo County high school, while the Spartans decamped to Humboldt State University near Eureka as they got ready for
their conferences’ delayed college football season.
Still, in another example of the tricky calculations local authorities, businesses and everyday citizens have been forced to make in the midst of a still-raging pandemic, Cody and others added a warning: Just because you’re allowed to do something new, doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
Health officials strongly discouraged people who could be at higher risk from the coronavirus, or who live with someone who is, from taking part in activities like indoor dining — something San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties have all resumed in recent weeks. Indoor meals represent “a very high-risk environment,” said James Williams,
Santa Clara’s county counsel, because they involve sharing space with others without the ventilation of an outdoor patio and removing your face covering to eat and drink.
Despite that risk, many struggling restaurants have been pleading to reopen dining rooms, especially as winter could make eating outdoors less appealing.
The venerable Pedro’s restaurants in Los Gatos and Santa Clara plan to reopen dining rooms for lunch and dinner on Wednesday. Jessica Kapoor, whose family owns the restaurants, said the pandemic was the first time they’d had to lay off staff.
“That was very difficult to do,” Kapoor said. “Hopefully with indoor (dining)
we’ll get to see a large audience come back, which will enable us to bring back more staff. “
Alameda County officials are moving even more conservatively, saying the soonest they could allow indoor dining and other gatherings will be in nearly two weeks, on Oct. 26. The county on Tuesday began allowing elementary schools that had submitted reopening plans to resume in-person classes. And officials said they could permit certain outdoor activities, such as reopening playgrounds, on Friday.
“If we see spikes in COVID-19 cases and a rise in hospitalizations, we will take action to limit the spread and protect public health including resuming restrictions if needed,” Dr.
Nicholas Moss, Alameda County’s interim health officer, said in a statement.
While falling case numbers across California have made public health officials cautiously optimistic about the state’s direction, they also acknowledge the months between Halloween and New Year’s will ramp up the temptation for potentially risky get-togethers with family and friends.
After authorities issued guidance for gatherings last week that called for small, outdoor and short activities to reduce the risk of spreading the virus, Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s secretary of health and human services, sought to encourage COVID-safe Halloween activities on Tuesday.
The state stopped short of banning trick-or-treating or other Halloween activities outright but strongly discouraged them. Instead, Ghaly encouraged COVIDsafe activities that would keep people in their homes and with members of their own household, like scary movie nights or virtual costume contests.
“The whole act of going door to door in groups, ringing doorbells, digging into buckets of delicious candy, create a risk of spreading COVID-19,” Ghaly said during a virtual briefing. The state’s urging, he said, is that “we do Halloween differently than we have in the past.”