Most of California remains under Stay At Home orders, based on a complex set of numbers that state officials will not disclose to the public.
The orders are supposed to remain in effect until the state projects that ICUs will have at least 15 percent capacity, four weeks out - but the Sacramento region hasn't come close to that since the order was lifted there.
The Bay Area and two other regions remain under these orders, with no end in sight, but the state will not share how it makes these projections, just as it would not share the models it used at the start of the coronavirus pandemic to project how bad the situation would become.
Dr. Lee Riley, Chair of the Infectious Disease and Vaccinology Division at the U.C. Berkeley School of Public Health, said that because each county in the state is different in populations and regulations, it's difficult to see what the future holds for the state at this point.
Dr. Riley said that, while state officials think that releasing all data to the public would add to confusion, he thinks more transparency would help ease the public of confusion and frustration.
"There are many experts out there who can look at the data and then assess for themselves that what they're doing is a valid way to decide when to ease the restrictions," Riley said. "So I think it's very important that they be more open and transparent about their data and how they do this."
Dr. Riley said that safety and health measures really should not be made on a "one size fits all" strategy, but that the state take into consideration the needs of each area based on its own local data.
"We're hearing about this variant that seems to be arising in some parts of California, and that may need to be entered into these parameters," Riley said. "So it's not that simple. We have to really try to do this with information that's really available at the particular location."
As of Friday, California ranked last in the nation for its vaccine administration process. But Dr. Riley said that it's not necessarily because of how officials are handling the situation, but because California has more people under its wing.
"I think the logistics of doing this in California is much more complicated than some of the other states, and I think that's one of the problems," Riley said. "I don't think we're doing anything wrong necessarily, I think we just need to ramp up the resources to be able to do this, and give some flexibility on how to apply the tier system. But we certainly need more people trained to administer these vaccines. As we all heard, they have to be maintained in super cold temperatures and they have to be used up in a certain period of time. So it's not like some of the other vaccines that they know of. It takes a certain training and lots of people to administer these in a large state like this."
Dr. Riley said that, even though coronavirus case trends are beginning to look more hopeful, we need to remain careful and vigilant so we do not see those trends spiral out of control once again.
