Fresno advances into red COVID-19 tier. Here’s when businesses can resume indoor service
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Fresno County is emerging into red Tier 2 of the state’s color-coded COVID-19 business opening program, clearing the way for restaurants and gyms to legally reopen to serve customers indoors and allowing other businesses to incrementally resume or expand their operations.
On Tuesday, for the second straight week, Fresno County – along with neighboring Madera and Kings counties – met the criteria established by the California Department of Public Health to advance from purple Tier 1, representing “widespread” transmission of the coronavirus within the community. Tier 1 is the most restrictive of the four tiers in the state’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy.
The tier assignments are typically announced on Tuesdays and take effect on Wednesday.
Under red Tier 2, which denotes “substantial” risk of viral spread in the county, restaurants that have been limited to only take-out, delivery or outdoor dining since January are allowed to begin serving diners in their indoor dining rooms, but with limitations including a cap of 25% capacity to allow for physical distancing, and requirements for staff to wear face coverings.
Fitness gyms and health clubs, which also had been nominally barred from indoor operations, can reopen their indoor facilities at up to 10% capacity.
In Fresno and elsewhere across the Valley, however, some restaurateurs and gym operators had ignored or defied the purple-tier restrictions and reopened indoors.
Fresno County health officials cautioned against residents becoming complacent in following recommendations aimed at keeping people from spreading the novel coronavirus from one person to another and reducing the risk of contracting COVID-19.
Those include staying outdoors because indoor activities carry greater risk of viral transmission; wearing masks in public, both indoors and outdoors; maintaining physical separation of 6 feet or more from people who aren’t in your household; avoiding crowds; and getting vaccinated against coronavirus when you’re eligible to get your shots.
“By continuing to work together, we will advance further into lower tiers of the Blueprint for a Safer Economy and open up more businesses and recreational activities,” said David Luchini, assistant director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health.
“Continue to keep yourself, your family, your friends and your neighbors safe,” Luchini added.
To advance from the purple tier into the red, counties need to meet two key measures for two consecutive weeks:
- Have an average of fewer than 10 new confirmed coronavirus cases each day as a rate per 100,000 residents over the course of a week, and
- Achieving a rate of less than 8% of residents who are tested for coronavirus coming back with positive results.
- A third “health equity” metric requires that residents in economically and socially disadvantaged census tracts have a testing positivity rate under 8.1%. That goal is intended to ensure that lower-income neighborhoods or areas with limited access to health care are not being left behind more affluent areas in a county’s response to the pandemic.
Other notable changes for businesses in the red tier include allowing movie theaters to reopen at up to 25% of capacity or 100 people, whichever is fewer; museums and zoos to open indoor attractions at up to 25% capacity; and retail stores expanding indoor operations from 25% under purple Tier 1 to 50% in red Tier 2.
Among elements of business resumption or expansion are requirements for both staff and customers to wear face masks and practice physical distancing to prevent the spread of the virus.
Live outdoor sports or events with assigned seating can also expand attendance starting Thursday under the red tier. The minor-league Fresno Grizzlies baseball team, for example, or outdoor collegiate sports at Fresno State, Fresno City College or Fresno Pacific University will be able to open their stadiums at up to 20% capacity, or suites at up to 25% with people from no more than three households.
Also new under the red tier: local school districts can begin to reopen middle and high schools for students to return for in-person instruction.
Bars that don’t serve food – many of which have been closed for more than a year – remain closed under the red-tier rules.
Tulare County was promoted into the red tier on March 16 and is entering its third week of the lessened business and social restrictions. Mariposa County is the only Valley county to have advanced beyond red Tier 2 into orange Tier 3, denoting “moderate” spread of the virus in the county.
Despite a significant decline in the number of new daily coronavirus cases, Merced County was assigned once again to purple Tier 1 of the state’s color-coded Blueprint for a Safer Economy. Of California’s 58 counties, Merced is one of only three, along with Inyo and San Joaquin counties, that remain mired in purple Tier 1.
The case metrics on which Tuesday’s tier assignments were based cover the week ending March 20. For Valley counties, the state reported:
- Fresno County: A rate of 8.2 new daily coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents, down from 9.6 per 100,000 the previous week. For testing, 3.8% of tests came back as positive for the virus during the week, down from 4.5 the previous week.
- Kings County: A daily case rate of 7.9 per 100,000 residents, down from 9.8 the previous week. About 3.3% of coronavirus tests came back positive for the week, down slightly from 3.4% in the prior week.
- Madera County: A daily case rate of 4.8 per 100,000 residents, down from 6.1 the previous week. In testing, 2.3% of tests returned positive results, down from 2.7% the prior week.
- Mariposa County: A daily new-case rate of 2.4 per 100,000, unchanged from the previous week. Also unchanged was the test-positivity rate, at 1% of rests returning positive results.
- Merced County: A rate of 9.2 new daily cases per 100,000 residents, down from a rate of 12.9 per 100,000 a week earlier. Testing positivity was 4.4%, down from 5% the previous week.
- Tulare County: A daily new-case rate of 4.8 per 100,000, down from 6.3 the previous week. In testing, 2.3% of people tested had positive results for the virus, compare to 3% in the prior week.
Fresno County and its neighbors still have some work ahead to achieve future advancement into the next tier, the more lenient orange Tier 3. A county needs to bring its new-case rate down to fewer than four per day per 100,000 residents, and the testing positivity rate must be less than 5%.
The case-rate threshold to get into the orange tier can be relaxed once California achieves a statewide goal of 4 million vaccine doses to residents in the most economically, socially and health-challenged ZIP codes in the state’s Healthy Places Index, or HPI. When that happens – potentially within weeks – the bar will immediately be raised to 5.9 or fewer new daily cases per 100,000 residents.
On Tuesday, the state Department of Public Health reported that almost 3.5 million doses had been delivered in those targeted HPI ZIP codes.
The daily new-case rates in Madera and Tulare counties already fall below that relaxed orange-tier threshold. Madera County would not be able to advance, however, until it has spent at least three weeks in the red tier.
Staying in the red tier is not a certainty once a county has entered it. If case rates or testing positivity rise back into the purple-tier level for two straight weeks, the state can demote a county back into the more restrictive level. Fresno County, for example, flirted with the purple-red threshold in its new-case rates throughout October before backsliding to the purple tier in November.
California’s blueprint and its system of tiers was introduced in late August 2020 to provide a uniform statewide structure, on a county-by-county basis, for incremental reopening of businesses and activities after months of on-again, off-again closures and openings of different business sectors from the spring through the summer as COVID-19 cases surged and waned.
Fresno, Kings, Madera, Merced and Tulare counties all started in purple Tier 1. In October, Fresno, Kings and Merced counties all advanced into red Tier 2 before backsliding to purple in November.
In early December, the entire San Joaquin Valley from Stockton in the north to Bakersfield in the south were put under a regional stay-at-home order, superseding the blueprint tiers as COVID-19 cases, hospitalization and deaths spiked over the holiday season.
Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area and the greater Sacramento region also spent time under regional orders. Those orders – which included limiting restaurants to only take-out or delivery orders and put additional caps on the capacity of retail stores – were lifted in January as projections showed a reduced impact of the virus on hospitals and the capacity of their intensive-care units to treat the most seriously ill patients.
Statewide, three counties are in purple Tier 1 of the blueprint, representing “widespread” transmission of the virus in the community: Merced, Inyo and San Joaquin.
In addition to Fresno, Kings, Madera and Tulare counties, 32 other California counties are now in the red Tier 2, denoting that “substantial” spread of COVID-19 continues in the county. That includes two other counties that advanced from purple to red this week: El Dorado and Yuba.
Sixteen California counties in addition to Mariposa are in orange Tier 3, described as counties with “substantial” viral transmission. Moving from red to orange this week are Alameda, Butte, Colusa, Los Angeles, Modoc, Orange, Santa Cruz and Tuolumne counties.
Only two sparsely populated mountain counties are in yellow Tier 4, the least restrictive tier of the blueprint representing “minimal” transmission of COVID-19 in the community: Alpine and Sierra counties.
This story was originally published March 30, 2021 at 10:24 AM.
