El Dorado County lets local stay-home directive expire, Tahoe travel ban still in place
Citing a low volume of confirmed coronavirus cases and saying that the “vast majority” of residents and businesses have done well in adhering to state and local orders, El Dorado County’s public health officer on Tuesday announced the countywide stay-at-home directive would expire Thursday.
The local order will not be extended, but residents will remain “guided primarily by the Governor’s Order,” the county said in a news release. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order still calls for residents of all counties to stay home except for essential reasons; for businesses deemed nonessential to remain closed and for restaurants to suspend dine-in service; for people to keep 6 feet of social distance between anyone not in their immediate household; and prohibiting gatherings of any size.
Public health officer Dr. Nancy Williams on March 19 issued a stay-at-home order for El Dorado County that was set to expire April 30. Hours later, Newsom instituted his statewide stay-at-home order, which continues to have no set end date.
“I am extremely pleased with how cooperative the vast majority of El Dorado County residents, businesses and California residents in general have been in complying with state and local health orders and directives,” Williams said in a prepared statement. “This cooperation has resulted in very positive results, with only 43 confirmed and five active cases in the County as of April 27, 2020.”
No fatalities from COVID-19 have been reported in El Dorado County as of Tuesday morning, according to its public health website.
Williams said, however, the county’s order to restrict nonessential travel to the unincorporated portion of the Lake Tahoe Basin will remain in effect. The county’s emergency ordinance allowing for fines to visitors at short-term rental housing will also stay in place, she said.
Williams also wrote that executives at the two main hospitals in El Dorado County, Marshall Medical and Barton Health, “do not believe that a careful, phased-in approach to relaxing of stay-at-home orders would put them at undue risk.”
“For these reasons – the steps we took early on in the pandemic, the low number of cases in our County, the preparations of our health care providers for a surge in patients should it occur, and the overall compliance with both the Governor’s Order and my directive – I am letting the County’s stay-at-home directive expire,” she continued.
The county Board of Supervisors will hold a special meeting at 1 p.m. Tuesday, with agenda items including “an update from County Counsel regarding the County’s obligation to adhere to orders from the Governor” and an update from Williams on “her plan for a phased re-opening approach.”
The agenda also says the board will provide direction to staff about further actions to be taken, “including whether to send a letter to the Governor requesting approval to relax his current stay-at-home orders in El Dorado County.”
Tuesday’s meeting will be held virtually via Zoom teleconferencing and is open to public participation.
El Dorado County is the first in the state to announce it will let its countywide stay-at-home order expire before the statewide order is listed, though a few sparsely populated counties including Alpine, Glenn, Inyo, Siskiyou and Tuolumne either never issued their own mandatory stay-home orders or allowed their orders to be superseded by Newsom’s order in March.
Four other counties’ orders — those of Amador, Madera, Riverside and San Diego — are set to expire Thursday, but public health officials have not yet announced whether those orders will end, be extended or be amended.
Another two counties, Mariposa and Tehama, appear to not have full stay-at-home orders in effect, but instead have orders prohibiting large gatherings. Both of those orders expire Thursday as well, with no word yet on extension.
Public health officers’ orders in the capital region’s three remaining counties — Sacramento, Placer and Yolo — currently last through Friday. Yolo officials say the county will modify and replace its shelter-in-place order, after Tuesday afternoon’s Board of Supervisors meeting but before the Friday expiration.
Local officials across several rural Northern California counties have in recent weeks called on Newsom to allow them to begin gradually reopening, pointing primarily to the economic damage suffered by several weeks of shutdown. Leaders from Butte, Colusa, Glenn, Sutter, Tehama and Yuba counties on Monday penned a letter to Newsom asking permission to began to loosen their stay-at-home orders.
Butte County’s public health department on a website dedicated to COVID-19 says it is already planning efforts to reopen, but for the moment “remains subject to the State’s Stay-at-Home Order, and does not currently have authority to modify or lift the State order to be less restrictive.” The two-county Yuba-Sutter public health officer’s stay-home order is set to expire Sunday. Colusa’s stay-at-home order expires May 8.
What has Newsom said?
Newsom has recently countered that rural parts of California face a different set of risks from the coronavirus than more densely populated urban hubs like Los Angeles County, where more than half of the state’s COVID-19 fatalities have come as of Monday. But they do still face danger from the disease, Newsom has maintained.
“So if you’re living in a community where you think, ‘Well, we’re immune, we’re OK, we’ve got this. We’re not LA, we’re not some of these other counties in the state of California,’ I hope you’ll disabuse yourself of that and consider the fact that some of the most challenging parts of the state remain some of our rural parts of our state,” Newsom said early last week.
He pointed to “testing deserts” in rural parts of California, as well as lower hospital capacities, as the challenges those areas face.
This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 7:42 AM.
