Tough new virus rules imposed
Contact sports — including 49ers and Sharks — will be banned temporarily; some traveling into region now face quarantines
Santa Clara County released new COVID-19 restrictions in light of its rising caseload Saturday, including a three-week ban on all professional, collegiate and high school sports, a mandatory quarantine for those traveling into the region from more than 150 miles away and new capacity limits for indoor businesses.
The new restrictions arrive as California experiences its worst COVID-19 surge yet and within hours of a rollback for San Francisco and San Mateo counties, which both announced curfews as they were placed into the state’s most restrictive “purple” reopening tier.
Every Bay Area county, with the exception of Marin, is now in the purple tier, meaning the virus is considered widespread. Alameda and Contra Costa counties in the East Bay moved to purple in mid-november at the same time as Santa Clara County, although they don’t share all of the same restrictions since counties can impose stricter measures than what the state requires. Marin County remains in the red tier, the second-most restrictive, although that could change at any time.
Santa Clara County’s new restrictions will include a 14- day quarantine for all those traveling to the county from more than 150 miles away, as well as a temporary prohibition on sporting activities involving contact with other people — including professional sports like the San Francisco 49ers football team. Cardrooms must temporarily close, while hotels and other facilities must be open only for essential travel or to facilitate isolation or quarantine.
“I know this is not what any of us want to hear, nor is this situation one any of us want to be in, but here we are,” said Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody.
Retail stores and malls must reduce their capacity limits to 10% — the most restrictive in the Bay Area — just as holiday shopping begins in earnest. Gro
cery stores, drugstores and pharmacies may operate at 25% capacity.
For most Santa Clara County residents, the new quarantine rules would affect travel from destinations such as Lake Tahoe, Mendocino and Southern California and require a 14 - day shelter- in- place upon retur ning home. Health care workers traveling into the county to provide care — or patients — will be exempt from quarantine.
The new directives will go into effect Monday at 12:01 a.m. and last until at least Dec. 21, a time period of three weeks, though they may be extended again.
The order’s executive summary refers to “all recreational activities that involve physical contact or close proximity to persons outside one’s household, including all contact sports,” but does not specify whether any sports will be exempt from the temporary ban.
County CEO Jeff Smith clarified to this news orga
nization that the order includes football, basketball, soccer and hockey — in other words, the 49ers and the San Jose Sharks hockey team — but that tennis and swimming are exempt because they do not involve direct contact between people. The county has been in touch with both professional leagues and Stanford University, a Division 1 school, he said.
“That means that for those teams, they will not be able to play games or have practices where they have direct contact,” added County Counsel James Wil
liams.
The 49ers are set to play this afternoon against the Rams in Inglewood just south of Los Angeles, but when they return to Northern California, they’ll have choices to make about practices and games. They have three home games remaining on their 2020 schedule, beginning Dec. 7, but the team could look to move home games and practices away from their Santa Clara headquarters, a possibility the Niners investigated for training camp before receiving county clearance.
Other teams within the
county currently playing games are all among the college ranks; Stanford and San Jose State football are midway through their seasons, while men’s and women’s basketball teams from those schools and Santa Clara just began games. Both Stanford and SJSU football teams trained for some time outside the county before they received county approval to practice at their normal facilities.
Roughly a dozen San Jose Sharks players have been skating at the team’s practice facility recently ahead of an anticipated December training camp. Now, that training — and an expected January start to the season — may have to move outside the county.
Some high school sports, including football, were tentatively scheduled to begin practice Dec. 14 in the county, but the likelihood of actually returning to the field had become more remote as cases continued spiking during the season’s delay.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco and San Mateo counties, indoor worship and movie theaters, indoor gyms, and indoor operations at museums, aquariums and zoos must close starting at noon today. A curfew, which applies to all counties in the purple tier, will go into place starting Monday night and will bar nonessential travel and activities between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.
The movement from red to purple means that shopping malls and retail stores in those two counties that had been allowed to run at 50% capacity will have to scale back to 25%. Restaurants there may continue to operate outdoors but not indoors.
Coronavirus cases have risen dramatically statewide over the past few weeks, including in the Bay Area.
California’s seven-day average case count was 13,092 as of Friday, an increase of about 77% since Nov. 13 — even without case updates from some counties during the holiday week. The state’s positivity rate hovers at about 6.2%, more than double its 3% rate at the end of October.
Santa Clara leads the region in terms of overall cases, with more than 32,000 recorded since the pandemic began and 531 infections reported Friday. The county’s average weekly cases hit a high of 422 on Friday, marking the third day in a row that the average has beaten its previous August record of 360 weekly average cases.
In San Mateo, cases have spiked by about 85% over the past month, officials said, with a seven- day average of about 102 new daily infections as compared to 88 in mid-november.
“We have not seen numbers like this in quite a while, and we really need to reverse this incredibly troubling trend,” San Mateo County Manager Mike Callagy said in a statement announcing the county’s move to the purple tier. “What’s important to remember is that we can reverse the trend as long as we follow common-sense health and safety practices.”
Fifty- one of California’s 58 counties — more than 90% of the state’s population — are within the state’s purple reopening tier. Los Angeles County released its own stay-at-home order Friday night.