Are rogue dine-in restaurants hampering Fresno’s COVID progress? Here’s what top doctor thinks
Fresno County’s progress toward escaping the most stringent tier of COVID-19 business restrictions has slowed in recent weeks, leaving the county lingering at the cusp of progress within California’s color-coded Blueprint for a Safer Economy.
Throughout the community, restaurants that are supposed to be limited only to outdoor dining and to-go orders in purple Tier 1 of the blueprint have chosen to open their indoor dining rooms in defiance of the rules aimed at reducing the potential for spreading the novel coronavirus from person to person in public settings.
Dr. Rais Vohra, interim health officer with the Fresno County Department of Public Health, stopped short Tuesday of suggesting that restaurants, gyms and other businesses operating indoors despite purple-tier restrictions are responsible for a stall in reducing the rate of daily new coronavirus cases.
But he acknowledged that business owners need to recognize that Fresno County — like 32 other California continues — continues to have widespread transmission of the virus.
“It’s a matter of some sensitivity because obviously I trust that those businesses are trying to do the best by their staff and their customers and just trying to keep the lights on,” Vohra said Tuesday. “I don’t think they’re intentionally trying to commit crimes.”
“But on the other hand, everyone needs to know that whenever we have widespread community transmission — that’s the technical definition of the purple tier — that indoor operations are still considered higher risk.”
An article last fall in the journal Nature, reporting on a study of travel habits during business shutdowns and stay-at-home orders last spring in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, reported that certain types of indoor places that people go and linger for longer periods of time — such as restaurants — were likely to result in greater risk of coronavirus infection than others as a result of lifting pandemic restrictions.
As law enforcement and prosecutors in Fresno County and other jurisdictions have declared they would not enforce COVID-19 business restrictions, health officials have been forced to rely on voluntary compliance and diplomacy when working with business owners who are out of compliance.
“Certainly we’ve taken the tack through our environmental health division to reach out to businesses that are not in compliance and work with them to ask, ‘What can we do to support you? Is this an education issue, is this some other issue that we can help troubleshoot with you?’” Vohra said. “We try to partner with them as much as we can.”
Vohra said his team has talked with business owners to encourage safety. “We’ve had conversations along the lines to say, ‘Please keep your people safe, please encourage them to get vaccines whenever they’re eligible,’” he said. “All of the restaurants are eligible now (for vaccines) because they’re considered food and agriculture workers.”
By at least getting vaccinated, “instead of being vectors, (employees) will become shields against coronavirus breakouts,” he added.
Over the past seven days through Tuesday, Fresno County has had 988 new coronavirus cases, an average of about 141 new cases each day. Based on the county’s population of just over 1 million people, that calculates out to a raw rate of about 13.7 per 100,000 residents, compared to the threshold rate of seven new daily cases per 100,000 residents to move into red Tier 2 of the state’s blueprint, representing “substantial” risk of viral spread.
The state, in its weekly tier assignments, makes adjustments to exclude some cases, including those among prison inmates. On Tuesday, the state Department of Public Health reported that Fresno County’s rate of new daily cases was 12.6 per 100,000 people for the week ending Feb. 27.
“This is not rocket science,” Vohra said. “It’s not like we can’t understand the basics of how this pathogen is spread from person to person.”
Vohra advocated for increased testing of employees and customers at businesses operating indoors. “If they know who’s at high risk and when these outbreaks can occur in real time … we feel like that would give them the same information we use,” he said.
“I think if we all sit down and really plan out what’s safe and how we can filter people according to their risk and according to their test results,” Vohra added, “then I think we can lead to a much safer way of operating even while we’re in purple, and definitely while we’re in the red and even orange tiers.”
Tuesday case updates
Fresno County reported 116 new coronavirus cases since its report on Monday afternoon. Since the first local case in the global COVID-19 pandemic just over a year ago, 96,665 residents have tested positive for the virus.
Vohra acknowledged four additional fatalities attributed to COVID-19, for a cumulative death toll to date of 1,509.
In neighboring central San Joaquin Valley counties, Tuesday updates included:
Kings County: 15 new cases, 22,226 to date; no additional deaths, 229 to date. More than 7,200 of Kings County’s cases, and 17 deaths, have been among inmates at state prisons in Avenal and Corcoran.
Madera County: 18 new cases, 15,632 to date; eight additional deaths, 222 to date. More than 2,450 of the cases are associated with state prisons in the county.
Mariposa County: No new cases, 395 to date; no additional deaths, seven to date.
Merced County: 43 new cases, 29,600 to date; one additional death, 416 to date.
Tulare County: 80 new cases, 48,399 to date; three additional deaths, 776 to date.
Over the past 12 months, almost 213,000 Valley residents have been infected with the virus, whether they showed any symptoms of COVID-19 or not. Of those, 3,159 have died.
