California has now hit a million confirmed coronavirus cases this week and health officials are worried about what the coming weeks will bring. Several Bay Area counties have already put the brakes on business openings with the expectation of being booted back into more restrictive tiers.
State health director Dr. Mark Ghaly usually gives his updates on Tuesdays but the state held an additional conference on Friday, his second one for the week. This comes on the same day California, along with Oregon and Washington, imposed a travel advisory for the holidays.
Napa County is currently in the Orange Tier of the state's Blueprint for a Safer Economy four-tier color coded system. Orange Tier is the second least restrictive, but the virus numbers seen this week would qualify it for the lowest Purple Tier, which would close all indoor dining, with participation in gyms and places of worship once again pushed outdoors just as the rains are set to arrive on Friday.
George Rutherford, Director of Prevention & Public Health Group at UCSF told KCBS Radio that people need to be careful about potential transmission.
“What comes in from the outside comes in from the outside,” he said. “We have to hope that contact tracing catches as much of that as possible, but we can’t be creating situations where there’s a lot of transmission within California, by Californians.”
Marin Health Officer Dr. Matt Willis said that people should plan ahead for their holiday gatherings this year and limit the different groups of people they come into contact with.
“As people get invited to different holiday gatherings, it’s possible that you might participate in one group on one day and another on the next, and another on the next,” he said. “And that’s simply not safe.”
Dr. Willis emphasized that people need to "start making choices about their holiday pod,” and not to participate in multiple gatherings with different households.
With the weather getting colder, and state and city protocols necessitating indoor dining pauses, many restaurant workers and owners are worried that they won’t make it through the winter.
After being allowed to open at a reduced capacity just over a month ago, Friday, November 13, is the last night of indoor dining for restaurants in San Francisco, for now.
This is the city’s attempt to combat an increasing COVID-19 positivity rate, but some restaurant owners feel that this move was abrupt and unnecessary. And many don’t feel like there is a good answer either way.
Rodrigo Duran is the Marketing Director for Calle24, the business district representing many Latino-owned businesses in the Mission. He said that although the district empathizes with a lot of its Latino-owned businesses, they also understand because it’s “hitting home.”
Duran added that from a public health perspective, he understands the decision to reverse course on indoor dining, for now.
He said that because Latinx communities he works with have been disproportionately affected by the virus, they don’t want to take any unnecessary risk.
“They understand in order to thrive, they have to look at this in the long run,” Duran said.
But Laurie Thomas, the Executive Director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, argued the numbers right now do not warrant such a harsh order, and said that this back and forth is very hard for the restaurant industry.
“You can’t just turn something on, and then turn it off and on again,” she said.
As someone who runs two restaurants herself, she said she has already been forced to reduce her staff’s hours and worries about permanent layoffs.
Thomas argued that indoor dining with limited capacity is safe and closing it could have unintended consequences as we head into the holidays. She is worried that people may not return to restaurants like they have in the past.
“What this is doing is reinforcing behavior of people to say, ‘Well, I guess I can’t go to a restaurant, or it’s too cold or wet to sit outside, so let’s go have a dinner party at Joe’s house,’” she said.
Thomas said that these changes continue to have ripple effects across the restaurant industry, especially with waning relief from the unemployment system.
“It caused all of us to have to call and cancel all our reservations,” she said. “It means laying people off.”
Thomas said she has already sent a notice out this week notifying her employees that she would have to cut back on their shifts.
She said she thinks it was an “overreaction,” but hopes the spike in cases will level off soon.
Nevertheless, public health officials point to indoor dining as a potential place for outbreaks, and after a sudden rise in the positivity rate in San Francisco, decided to remove that risk from the equation.