More counties reach yellow tier as system about to end

When California retires the color-coded tier system next week that it has used to set coronavirus regulations for most of the pandemic, six of the Bay Area’s nine counties will have reached its least-restrictive stage.

Alameda and Napa counties found out Tuesday that they are advancing to the yellow stage that indicates “minimal” coronavirus spread in the state’s final update of tier assignments before most rules limiting business capacities and the size of gatherings are

lifted June 15.

They joined Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco and Marin counties at that level.

The yellow tier’s looser rules, which include allowing bars that don’t serve food to operate indoors and higher capacity limits at businesses such as gyms and amusement parks, go into effect in Napa and Alameda counties today.

Contra Costa, Sonoma and Solano counties, meanwhile, will end the tier era in the orange stage, where the prevalence of COVID-19 is still considered “moderate.”

“I’m happy to say goodbye to the tier system,” UC Berkeley professor emeritus Dr. John Swartzberg said, “but I think it served us well.”

“No system would have made everybody happy,” Swartzberg added, “so I think we tried to find a system that kept people safe and at the same time allowed as much flexibility as we could have.”

Called the Blueprint for a Safer Economy, Gov. Gavin Newsom rolled out the four-level reopening system last August, in the

wake of a summer surge that scuttled a previous attempt to lift lockdown orders.

It grouped each of California’s 58 counties into tiers based on how prevalent the virus was locally, from the purple stage on the severe end signifying “widespread” COVID-19, to red, then orange and finally yellow. Classifications for most of the system’s tenure were based on three criteria: the rate of new coronavirus cases in a county, the overall test positivity rate and the positivity rate specifically within communities where the pandemic was taking a disproportionate toll.

The tiers allowed for more variation than the statewide lockdown orders by permitting certain higher-risk activities such as indoor dining in counties where the virus was less prevalent, while keeping them off-limits in other areas.

Its requirement that counties slowly advance through tiers, spending at least three weeks at each level, also ensured restrictions weren’t lifted prematurely, Swartzberg said.

But the system also proved dizzyingly complex.

Its rules were spelled out in a spreadsheet that delineated two dozen types of businesses and activities — everything from restaurants to water parks, churches to offices — assigning each of them a set of specific protocols or capacity limits depending on the tier. The requirements for advancing could be hard to follow, too.

“It was very complicated. I could never remember exactly what to do,” Swartzberg said, although he concluded that was “a small price to pay for the flexibility that it gave us.”

When COVID-19 exploded across California last winter, Newsom activated an “emergency brake” of regional lockdown orders more severe than the purple tier as the state scrambled to regain control during the worst chapter of the pandemic. Once the surge subsided early this year, counties again began advancing through the tiers.

When the blueprint ends, 24 counties, home to just over 25 million residents, will have made it to the yellow tier. San Diego, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties joined Alameda and Napa in advancing Tuesday.

Another 31 counties were still in the orange stage, and three — Del Norte, Yuba and Shasta — remained in the red tier.