Public health officials in six Bay Area counties and the city of Berkeley released a new shelter-in-place order Wednesday, loosening some restrictions on outdoor activities and businesses such as construction and golf, as well as some forms of childcare, as the region inches towards normalization amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The updated order largely upholds the existing social distancing mandates and restrictions on nonessential business that have ground the region to a virtual halt since mid-March. The new rules are scheduled to take effect Monday, when the current order expires, and will last through at least the end of May, applying to everyone in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, San Francisco and Marin counties.
In some key ways, the Bay Area’s revised order is looser in its limits on social interactions than the stay-home mandates imposed by state officials. That points toward a potential near future in which public life across California reopens unevenly from region to region, with certain parts of the state allowing residents more freedom to move around or return to work than others.
“We are in a period of transition, of modification,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday of easing stay-at-home orders, though he added a warning: “We can undo our progress in a very short period of time.”
California reported 2,380 new cases of coronavirus — its highest single-day rise since the pandemic began — though just 126 of those cases were confirmed in Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Statewide, 78 people died from COVID-19, while the number of people hospitalized with the illness ticked up modestly, by 1.2 percent, Newsom said.
The loosened restrictions in the Bay Area mostly apply to outdoor activities. All construction will be permitted, with safety protocols that will depend on the size of the project; landscaping and gardening work can resume, and retail nurseries will be allowed to reopen. Bars and restaurants will stay closed, even if they have outdoor seating.
Golf courses will be allowed to reopen, though there was some confusion as to whether tennis games can resume — Contra Costa County’s order states that they can, while those in other counties were more vague.
“A pandemic of this scale is unprecedented,” Santa Clara County Health Officer Sara Cody said in a statement. “We are progressing steadily as a region, but we must reduce restrictions on activity gradually or we will put the lives of many community members at risk.”
The news of the loosened restrictions was greeted enthusiastically from those who have done without business or pleasure over the past six weeks, such as 75-year-old golf lover Rudy Castaneda, who said he has felt “deprived of one of the joys I have in retirement life.”
“I can’t wait to get out there,” said Castaneda, a former hair salon owner in San Jose. “I’ll take whatever they give me — I’ll play one hole.”
For his son-in-law, Rick Solano, who runs a landscape maintenance business in San Jose and complied with the March 13 order to shut down, the past six weeks have delivered a financial blow. Solano said he planned to contact his customers to let them know he is back in business Tuesday — though for some, it may not be necessary.
“They must have been watching the news, too,” Solano said. “They’re already texting me.”
The new order also allows children of essential workers or people conducting permitted outdoor business to gather in “stable” groups of 12 or fewer within childcare settings, as well as “educational or recreational institutions or programs,” including summer camps. The change is meant to allow more employees to go back to work by providing childcare, and groups of children or adults from separate households are still barred from gathering outside of those specified settings — meaning play dates or group childcare for most non-essential workers remain prohibited.
To keep those groups stable and avoid potentially spreading the virus among families, the children must not switch groups, and groups cannot intermingle, according to the Santa Clara County order, which mirrors language in other counties.
Still, even that limited provision goes further than California’s shelter orders in allowing gatherings of children, and it’s not yet clear how state and local governments might resolve those differences.
Asked about the Bay Area’s new shelter rules at his daily press conference Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said state officials are discussing the childcare provision. But Newsom did not indicate whether the state would move to override the local order, saying the matter “is a point of clarification that we will be advancing.”
“Broadly what they put out today was very consistent with the state guidelines, and they have been incredible partners,” Newsom said of Bay Area public health officials.
Golf is another potential point of conflict. While the new Santa Clara County order allows it to resume, golf is not included in the state’s list of critical workforce sectors. Other California jurisdictions already had moved to allow golf; Napa County, for example, modified its stay-at-home order to reopen courses and allow all construction to resume early last week.
While Newsom said California is “just a week or two away from significant modifications on our stay-at-home order,” his comments Wednesday also hinted that the process of reopening public life may not look the same throughout the state.
As California moves toward reopening certain types of retail stores in the next several weeks, the state will give business owners guidance on how to do so safely — guidance that Newsom said would vary depending by type of retailer “and in some cases by geography based on local conditions.”
Newsom acknowledged that officials in some regions, such as the Bay Area, have moved to “challenge a few of those parameters” of the state’s order, while others “want to go much, much further.” But he said any part of California that wants to “move a little bit more aggressively than the rest of the state” in resuming public life will need to have extensive coronavirus testing in place, as well as the capacity in local hospitals to handle any surge of patients.
“We went into this together,” Newsom said. “I want to come out together with a certain baseline of expectations … and then make accommodations for variance along those lines.”
Counties also will need to set up a “community surveillance” system along with state authorities to track the virus, Newsom said. Seven of California’s 58 counties have those systems in place, he said, while five more are getting them set up. State health officials and the governor’s office did not respond to follow-up questions asking what counties have those agreements or what they entail.
Any future loosening in the Bay Area, meanwhile, will be based off five indicators, county health officials said Wednesday. Those factors, which dovetail with the six that Newsom has laid out for statewide reopening, include a major expansion of coronavirus testing, as well as enhanced capacity to isolate people who become infected and quarantine others who may have been exposed to the virus.
Before considering new reopening measures, the region also will have to see a flattening or decline in the number of new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations, sufficient space to care for patients in intensive care units, and a minimum 30-day supply of personal protective equipment for health care workers.
“I wish I could give you a set timeline and tell you when this would end,” Cody, the Santa Clara County health officer, said at a press conference Wednesday. “My family asks me, my friends ask me. We don’t have a date.”
