San Francisco has done an excellent job following public health guidance and made a huge leap from the orange tier to the less restrictive yellow tier Tuesday, providing a pathway for more businesses and activities to reopen.
S.F. is the only Bay Area county and only urban area in the yellow tier.
Mayor London Breed announced that with the new yellow status the city will move forward with reopening offices at 25% capacity starting Oct. 27, as well as reopening climbing gyms and some new personal services.
“As long as our Key Public Health Indicators remain stable or improve, we expect that starting November 3, we can expand capacity at businesses and activities that have already reopened, like indoor dining, indoor worship, and museums up to 50%,” Breed said via Twitter.
“Making sure our young people can get back into the classroom and get the education and support they need is a top priority. As of today, we’ve approved 56 schools in SF to reopen, and we’re on track to approve some high schools to reopen in November.”
In the eighth week of California’s new color-coded reopening structure, Dr. Erica Pan, California’s acting state public health officer, announced that Napa County has also improved its COVID-19 numbers, advancing from the red to orange tier. Outside the Bay Area, Butte County also moved from red to orange.
With cases exploding, Shasta and Riverside counties moved back from red to purple, requiring some businesses to close.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s system sorts counties into four tiers — “purple” (widespread), “red” (substantial), “orange” (moderate) or “yellow” (minimal) — that measure the spread of COVID-19 and dictate what types of businesses and activities are allowed to open. The structure allows counties to be more restrictive and move more slowly than the state in its reopening if they wish.
The county tier status is based on the number of new cases per 100,000 residents and the adjusted positivity rate. Earlier this month, the state announced it’s now also taking into account an equity metric to address the fact that low-income, Latino, Black and Pacific Islander communities have been disproportionately impacted.
For a county to move into the red tier, it must report fewer than seven daily cases per 100,000 residents and a test positivity under 8% for 14 consecutive days. The orange tier requires fewer than 3.9 cases per 100,000 and a test positivity under 4.9% and the yellow less than 1 case per 100,000 and lower than 2% positivity.
Counties with low racial and economic disparities between who gets COVID-19 and who doesn’t will “move quicker through color tiers,” Pan said earlier this month. Counties with large disparities will advance more slowly.
Each county is assigned its tier every Tuesday, and a county must remain in a tier for 21 consecutive days before moving to the next one. To move forward, a county must meet the next tier’s criteria for 14 consecutive days.
On each day of assessment, the case counts are calculated by taking a seven-day average of daily cases per capita lagged an additional seven days to account for reporting delays.
A county can move backward by failing to meet the criteria for two consecutive weeks, or if state officials see a rapid rise in hospitalizations.