SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — California’s top health official Dr. Mark Ghaly provided more information on the state’s latest COVID-19 trends at noon on Tuesday, including the Bay Area’s tier status.
Just before the briefing, the state also revealed it changed the vaccine delivery system to take some control from health care providers and counties with a new statewide vaccine administration network.
“The state, through a Third Party Administrator (TPA), will allocate vaccines directly to providers to maximize distribution efficiency. This will also give the state greater visibility into what is happening on the ground,” the state said on Tuesday.
The briefing also follows another major announcement from Monday, when the California Department of Public Health gave the go-ahead to remove the stay-at-home orders which blanketed the state for about a month.
Counties went back to the state’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy system of tiered reopening — most starting from the Purple, most restrictive tier.
The Bay Area counties are in the Purple tier, as of Tuesday’s update.
Here’s how reopening works under the Purple tier:
- Retail stores: Open indoors at 25% capacity
- Shopping malls: Open indoors at 25% capacity, closed food courts/common areas
- Personal care/grooming: Open indoors
- Museums, zoos & aquariums: Open outdoors only
- Places of worship: Open outdoors only
- Movie theatres: Open outdoors only
- Hotels/lodging: Open
- Gyms/fitness centers: Open outdoors only
- Restaurants: Outdoor dining/takeout only
- Wineries: Outdoor only
- Bars/breweries/distilleries: Closed
- Family entertainment centers (mini golfing, batting cages, etc): Outdoor only
- Cardrooms: Outdoor only
- Offices: Remote
- Pro sports: Open without live audiences
- Amusement parks: Closed
Now that the state is back to its tier system, counties are able to make headway in further reopening if trends get better.
At one point, San Francisco county had made it to the least restrictive tier – the Yellow – which allows for most indoor businesses to resume operations (with enhanced safety measures in place).
But the sense of somewhat-normalcy was brief, with COVID-19 cases surging nationwide as Thanksgiving approached, snapping the entire Bay Area back into strict safety precautions.
The Bay Area had been under its stay-at-home order from Dec. 17, 2020 to Jan. 25, 2021. Some individual counties had opted to enact the order even sooner, however.
The tier system uses positivity rates and case numbers to decide whether a county goes forward, backward or stays stagnant.
As of Monday, here’s where the entire state stands in COVID-19 data trends:
- CASES: 3,136,158 total | 27,007 new cases on Sunday
- DEATHS: 37,118 total | 328 new deaths on Sunday
- TESTS: 40,688,908 total | 403,193 new tests on Sunday