Tulare County moves out of purple tier for COVID. Where do Fresno, other counties stand?
For the first time in months, restaurants in Tulare County will be permitted to start serving meals inside their dining rooms, as California promoted the county Tuesday out of the most restrictive tier of the state’s COVID-19 business-reopening program.
But neighboring Kings County, which state health officials forecast would join Tulare County this week in red Tier 2 of the color-coded Blueprint for a Safer Economy, remained in purple Tier 1 as its rate of new cases did not meet the threshold for advancing.
The state’s tier system is based on the risk for the coronavirus to spread from person to person within a county. Tier 1, the purple tier, represents “widespread viral transmission, while Tier 2 denotes “substantial” spread of the virus in a county.
Fresno County and two other Valley counties, Merced and Madera, also remained in purple Tier 1, the tier with the most stringent limitations on what businesses can be open, and to what extent they can operate indoors or outdoors.
Tulare County is the only Valley county to satisfy all three of the major criteria to move from purple to red: achieving a rate 10 or fewer new daily cases per 100,000 residents; having fewer than 8% of people getting tested for COVID-19 to come back with positive results; and a health equity score of less than 8% testing positivity in low-income or disadvantaged neighborhoods in the county.
A move into the red tier means that restaurants can reopen for indoor dining at up to 25% capacity, while gyms and fitness clubs can open indoors at up to 10% of capacity. Under purple Tier 1, restaurants are limited to take-out or outdoor service only, while gyms were allowed to open operate outdoors. Throughout the Valley, however, some businesses had reopened indoors in defiance of the state’s blueprint rules.
This marked Tulare County’s second week of meeting or beating the thresholds, clearing the way for it to move into the less restrictive tier. The task was made easier last week when California achieved a goal of providing 2 million doses of coronavirus vaccine to residents in low-income or disadvantaged neighborhoods across the state. With that, the new-case threshold was eased from seven new cases per day per 100,000 residents in a county to 10 per 100,000.
Tulare County had been mired in the purple tier since the blueprint program was introduced in late August. With its promotion to red, Tulare County joins Mariposa County as the only Valley counties to escape from the purple-tier limitations. Mariposa County was promoted from red Tier 2 into orange Tier 3, representing “moderate” viral spread in the county, on March 9..
“The declining number of cases is welcome news for Tulare County, with local businesses now able to safely expand operations,” Dr. Karen Haught, Tulare County’s public health officer, said in a statement issued Tuesday. “However, it is still critical and extremely important for everyone to continue to practice health and safety measures.”
“We all must continue to protect ourselves and others from COVID-19 infection—wear a mask, practice physical distancing, limit gatherings with others outside of the household, and get vaccinated when the vaccine is available to you,” Haught added.
Among the key changes in the red tier are:
- Restaurants can open for indoor service at 25% capacity.
- Fitness gyms can reopen indoor operations at 10% capacity.
- Retail stores can expand from 25% to 50% capacity.
- Movie theaters can reopen indoors at up to 25% capacity.
- Middle schools and high schools can reopen.
Fresno, other counties still waiting
Fresno, Kings, Madera and Merced counties have already met two of the three criteria to escape from purple to red, but remain held back by case rates that are higher than needed to advance.
When the relaxed case-rate threshold was announced on Friday, state officials said they expected Kings County to also move from purple to red this week if the trends remained steady. However, the county’s daily new-case rate for the week ending March 6 was at 11 per 100,000. That’s better than the 11.9 cases per 100,000 rate reported last week, but still higher than the 10-per-100,000 needed to advance in the tiers.
In Fresno County, the state reported 11.9 new cases each day per 100,000 residents, compared to 12.6 per 100,000 a week ago. County health department officials had been hopeful that the case rate would fall far enough this week to start the two-week clock, but that didn’t happen.
Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer, expressed frustration recently about a stall in the pace of improvement in new cases. Two months ago, the county’s rate hovered above 75 new cases each day per 100,000 residents, and fell steadily throughout late January and early February before leveling off in recent weeks.
“We’re painfully close, but still not meeting the threshold that the state is requiring,” Vohra said Tuesday. “We’re one of about a dozen counties in California still in the purple tier.”
“I’m afraid that our rapid drop is slowing down and may be flattening out,” he added. “The bottom line is, we’ve got to get community transmission as low as possible. That requires all of us to make that extra effort – go get tested, stay home if you’re sick, and continue to wear the (face) masks and do the social distancing. … I know we’re all exhausted and sick of hearing those messages.”
“We are vaccinating at a very fast clip, so at some point we are going to turn the tide on this pandemic,” Vohra said. “It just requires a little more effort on everyone’s part. Hopefully this plateau won’t demoralize us so much that we just give up.“
The statewide picture
Across California, 11 counties remain in the purple tier, compared to 34 a week ago. At the same time, the number of counties in red Tier 2 more than doubled, from 20 last week to 42 on Tuesday.
Along with Tulare County, other counties that moved from purple to red since last week are Amador, Colusa, Contra Costa, Lake, Marin, Mono, Monterey, Orange, Placer, Riverside, Sacramento, San Benito, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Siskiyou, Sonoma, Sutter, Tehama, Tuolumne and Ventura counties. Some of those counties were allowed to advance over the weekend, after the case-rate threshold was relaxed on Friday.
In addition to Fresno, Kings, Madera and Merced counties in the central San Joaquin Valley, the remaining purple-tier counties in California are Glenn, Inyo, Kern, Nevada, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Yuba – all counties that are in the the more rural interior areas of the state.
Four counties are in orange Tier 3: Mariposa, Plumas, San Mateo and Sierra. Only one county, sparsely populated Alpine County on the California/Nevada border south of Lake Tahoe, is in yellow Tier 1, the least restrictive tier denoting “minimal” risk of spreading the virus.
This story was originally published March 16, 2021 at 12:28 PM.
