10 California counties move to looser COVID-19 reopening tiers. Many could move next week
With statewide COVID-19 rates still dropping and the vaccination pace improving, 10 California counties had their restriction tiers loosened Tuesday in a weekly update from state health officials.
Kern, Nevada and Stanislaus counties moved from the strict purple tier into the red tier.
Six others — Lassen, Marin, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Trinity and Yolo — moved from red to the looser orange tier.
An inaccurate spreadsheet entry in last week’s update resulted in Marin County not initially been marked by the California Department of Public Health as eligible for promotion this week, but the error was corrected and the county advanced in line with state requirements.
Additionally, small Sierra County moved from the orange tier to the loosest tier, yellow, through an adjudication process with the state.
The red tier allows indoor business operations including restaurant dining, gyms and movie theaters to reopen at limited capacity. The orange tier expands capacity for those sectors while also allowing a few types of indoor entertainment businesses, such as bowling alleys, to open. The yellow tier loosens capacity requirements even more.
School districts in red, orange and yellow tier counties are also incentivized to offer on-campus instruction for grades K-6 plus at least one middle or high school grade by April 1. Districts and charter schools risk losing a percentage of COVID-19 safety funding from the state for each school day they are not offering in-person learning at those grade levels starting in April.
Many public K-12 districts have either opened or set opening dates for late March or early April.
The bulk of California, 39 of its 58 counties, are now in the red tier, according to CDPH. Eight counties combining for less than 10% of California’s population — Fresno, Glenn, Inyo, Kings, Madera, Merced, San Joaquin and Yuba — remain in the purple tier.
Five of those eight purple counties — Fresno, Glenn, Kings, Madera and Yuba — notched one week meeting red-tier requirements and could therefore advance as early as next week. That leaves Inyo, Merced and San Joaquin counties as the three worst-positioned counties in the state’s COVID-19 risk assessments.
A dozen red-tier counties met orange criteria this week and can be promoted next week if their numbers hold steady. Those are: Alameda, Butte, Colusa, El Dorado, Imperial, Los Angeles, Modoc, Napa, Orange, Santa Cruz and Tuolumne counties.
The remaining red tier counties — which include Sacramento, San Diego and Sutter — stood pat, not moving closer to the orange tier nor losing ground and risking demotion to purple.
The six promoted out of the red tier Tuesday joined Mariposa, Plumas and San Mateo counties in the orange tier.
The state’s two smallest counties, Alpine and Sierra are in the yellow tier.
Promoting to a looser tier requires two consecutive weeks meeting that tier’s requirements, which are based on coronavirus infection and test positivity rates.
The metrics required for moving from the purple tier to red are an overall test positivity below 8%, “health equity” positivity in disadvantaged neighborhoods below 8% and fewer than 10 daily cases per 100,000 residents, all for two consecutive weeks.
For the move from red to orange, the thresholds are 5% test positivity, 5.2% health equity test positivity and fewer than four daily cases per 100,000. For orange to yellow, it’s 2% test positivity, 2.1% health equity and less than one daily new case per 100,000.
These metrics are assessed on a delay to account for reporting delays. Tuesday’s update surveyed numbers from the week that ended March 13.
When the state reaches 4 million vaccine doses administered in the lowest quartile of California’s Healthy Places Index, CDPH will loosen the case rate for the orange tier from four per 100,000 to six per 100,000, and for yellow from one per 100,000 to two per 100,000. CDPH made a similar change when the low HPI quartile surpassed 2 million vaccine doses March 12.
On Tuesday, the state reported the bottom quartile at about 2.9 million doses received. At the recent pace, it would take a little less than two weeks to reach 4 million.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has suggested in recent weeks that CDPH is working to develop a “green” tier, suggesting full or nearly full removal of restrictions, but no official details on that tier level have been shared by the agency.
COVID-19 in California by the numbers
All metrics of coronavirus activity in California — from infections to hospitalizations to intensive care unit admissions to COVID-19 deaths — are trending in the right direction, each at their lowest rates in months after sharp decline from the winter surge.
CDPH reported Tuesday statewide test positivity for the preceding seven days was 1.7%, continuing to improve on an already-record low. Prior to the surge, the best seven-day rate had been 3%, in early October.
Health experts look at test positivity as an indicator of virus spread, better than raw case numbers because it controls for fluctuations in testing.
The state on Tuesday reported 2,586 patients in hospital beds statewide with COVID-19, the fewest since Nov. 1, Of those, 635 were in ICUs, the fewest since Oct. 26. Each figure has declined almost every day since early January, when the totals peaked around 22,000 hospitalized and 4,900 in intensive care.
Deaths are the last to decline from a surge, doing so in correlation with hospitalizations and ICU rates but trailing those trends by a few weeks.
CDPH recently began classifying COVID-19 fatalities by date of death rather than date of reporting. With this change, the past three weeks are marked as “pending,” but the latest week before that — the final week of February — saw an average of just under 18 deaths per day across California.
That’s down from nearly 700 deaths per day during the deadliest period of the surge, in late December.
To date, about 3.55 million Californians have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least 56,596 have died, CDPH reported Tuesday.
Latest on vaccines: 10 million at least partially vaccinated
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday 10 million California residents — 26% of its total population and about a third of its adult population — have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
About 5.1 million are fully vaccinated.
Newsom announced last week California plans to do away with vaccine priority groups by around early May, making all adults in the state eligible for their jabs. Currently, vaccines are reserved for residents ages 65 and older, those 16 to 64 with qualifying health conditions and essential workers in several sectors. Total, those groups comprise roughly half of California’s 31 million adults.
The CDC also reports 74% of Californians 65 and older are at least partially vaccinated, and 45% of them fully vaccinated, each ahead of the national rate.
Sacramento area: Cases, deaths, hospitalizations slowing
The six-county Sacramento region has reported more than 154,000 lab-confirmed cases and at least 2,265 virus deaths over the course of the pandemic.
Sacramento County has reported 96,377 cases and 1,582 resident deaths from COVID-19. The county has reported 34 deaths in the past seven days, compared to 27 the previous week and 33 the week before that.
By date of death occurrence, December and January were by far Sacramento County’s two deadliest months of the pandemic. Health officials have confirmed 389 deaths for December and 325 for January, followed by at least 151 for February. At least 29 died in the first two weeks of March.
Prior to December, the county’s deadliest month of the pandemic was August, at 181.
The countywide hospitalized total has dropped from 119 to 86 in the past week, with the ICU total mostly steady, going from 19 to 18.
Placer County health officials have confirmed a total of 20,603 infections and 248 deaths. Placer has reported 16 deaths in the past week.
State data showed 32 virus patients in Placer hospitals including seven in ICUs as of Tuesday, down from 40 and nine one week earlier.
Yolo County has reported 13,122 total cases and 191 deaths. The county has confirmed one death in the past week.
Yolo had two hospitalized virus patients as of Tuesday’s state data update, including one in an ICU.
El Dorado County has reported 9,374 positive test results and 107 deaths. The county has added two deaths in the past week.
The county has suffered 102 of its COVID-19 deaths in the four months since Thanksgiving, compared to just five during the first eight months of the pandemic.
State data on Tuesday showed El Dorado with one hospitalized virus patient, not in an ICU, same as one week earlier.
In Sutter County, at least 9,060 people have tested positive for the virus and 102 have died. Officials have reported two Sutter resident deaths in the past week.
Yuba County, which shares a health office with Sutter, has reported 5,912 infections and 40 dead. Yuba did not report any deaths in the past week.
The lone hospital serving the Yuba-Sutter bi-county region — Adventist-Rideout in Marysville — had six hospitalized virus patients as of Tuesday’s update, down from nine a week earlier, with the ICU count holding at one.
This story was originally published March 23, 2021 at 7:08 AM.
