Restaurants, places of worship, movie theaters, gyms, hair salons and other businesses in San Diego County can partially reopen indoors on Monday under new state guidelines.
The announcement came hours after after Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a four-tier, color-coded system that ranks the extent of the coronavirus pandemic from a “minimal” yellow to a “widespread” purple. The outbreak in San Diego County was classified as “substantial” and coded red.
“The County of San Diego is red surrounded by a sea of purple,” said Dr. Wilma Wooten, the county’s public health officer, at a briefing for local media.
“Keeping up the momentum to stay on track and not go backwards in this new tier system to the purple tier will require that all of us follow the best practices,” she said.
Wooten stressed that the indoor reopening is limited in most cases to 25% capacity or 100 people, whichever is less, and in the case of gyms and fitness centers is a lower 10%. Barbershops, hair salons and nail salons can operate indoors with physical distancing modifications.
The state has created a website that explains the specific rules for an extensive list of businesses.
The new system, which replaces the state monitoring list, relies on just two metrics: the daily rate of new cases per 100,000 residents, and the seven-day average rate of positive tests:
- Counties with more than 7 new cases per 100,000 and a positive rate of more than 8% are in the purple “widespread” category
- Counties with 4 to 7 new cases per 100,000 and a positive rate between 5% and 8% are in the red “substantial” category
- Counties with one to 3.9 new cases per 100,000 and a positive rate from 2% to 4.9% are in the orange “moderate” category
- Counties with less than one new case per 100,000 and a positive rate less than 2% are in the yellow “minimal” category
San Diego is currently at 5.8 new cases daily per 100,000 residents and a seven-day positive rate of 3.8%. It makes the red category based on the daily new case rate, even though the positive rate is low.
Newsom called the new system a “more dynamic list that we hope is not only more dynamic but much more simple to understand.”
“COVID-19 will be with us for a long time and we need to adapt,” he said. “We must deal with this reality and this fundamental truth until there is a vaccine, until we have the kind of therapeutics that could substantially mitigate the spread and the impact of COVID-19, that we will simply need to adapt our behaviors until that time.”
Of California’s 58 counties, 38 are now listed in the purple, or widespread, category, which Newsom equated to being on the previous monitoring list.
Supervisor Nathan Fletcher, who leads the county’s task force on the pandemic, expressed concern that too many businesses were being allowed to reopen Monday, possibly causing a new spike in cases.
“While there are some lower risk entities that could safely reopen at this point, what we are doing is very similar to what we did in June with a large segment of indoor operations all opening at the same time,” he said. “This led to a large increase in cases and required new restrictions.”
“But even though I prefer a different path, the decision has been made and I will continue to work tirelessly to help us find a way to slow the spread,” he said.
Updated at 4:40 p.m., Friday, Aug. 28, 2020
City News Service contributed to this article.
