As coronavirus rates spike, Placer, Yuba, Sutter will likely have to close businesses
Placer, Yuba and Sutter county health officials are warning restaurants to prepare to halt interior dining in the next few days, a result of fast-rising COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
All three say the upswing in infections will land them on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “watch list” in the next few days, which automatically triggers a state mandate that restaurants no longer serve diners indoors, and that other higher-risk facilities such as bowling alleys and move theaters close.
Placer officials say the formal order will occur within a week. Yuba and Sutter officials say they expect to be listed by the state on Thursday or Friday, requiring closures then.
Those three counties will join Sacramento County, which as been on state’s watch list for two weeks and was required to end indoor restaurant dining last week. Restaurants can still offer outdoor dining.
Yolo County is not on the state watch list, but officials there closed indoor restaurant dining last week voluntarily, saying they expect to be placed on the state list soon and felt it was better to attempt to lower their rising infection rate sooner than later.
The turn-around comes amid a surge of new cases throughout the greater Sacramento region and growing fears that local hospitals could soon be inundated with more patients than they can handle.
Some counties, meanwhile, report it is taking longer for people to get test appointments and at times more than a week to receive results.
Here is an update from around the region:
Placer County COVID-19 surge
County health chief Aimee Sisson told the board Tuesday the county has begun to tell restaurants to prepare for the indoor dining ban and said it is expected to happen some time in the next seven days.
“Given current (infection) trajectory, businesses are advised to begin transition to outdoor operations if they have not done so already,” she said. “I believe it will be in the next week.”
Placer as well is seeing “delays in test processing at commercial labs as testing demand has increased,” Sisson said. That in turn is slowing the county’s efforts to track down new clusters and outbreaks and to get people quarantined.
Sisson said the county has warned the state about its predicament. “We and numerous other counties have communicated our concerns regarding the turnaround time to the state,” Sisson said.
Yuba-Sutter alarm bells
Two months ago, officials in Sutter and Yuba counties defied Gov. Gavin Newsom’s shutdown orders, saying they believed they could handle the coronavirus and keep bars, restaurants and other businesses open at the same time. It didn’t work out the way they hoped.
Sutter and Yuba now have some of the fasting rising virus infection rates in California over the past two weeks, and the counties’ health officer is sounding the alarm.
On Monday, after a weekend surge in hospitalizations, the counties’ health officer Dr. Phuong Luu publicly implored residents to wear masks and the county warned bars and restaurants they likely will have to close by the end of the week.
Luu said she’s particularly concerned about a doubling in hospital cases.
“I am very, very concerned,” she said. “Our doctors and nurses are stressed. Our healthcare system is being stressed. Please do your part to take care of our community, to take care of our fragile healthcare system.”
Yolo County imposes fines
With coronavirus cases rising, Yolo County on Tuesday passed an urgency ordinance giving county code officers the authority to fine businesses up to $10,000 for refusing to comply with state and county safety measures, including not requiring patrons to wear masks and allowing indoor dining.
The ordinance, which goes into effect immediately, is the first such crackdown by a county in the Sacramento region. Officials said code officers will talk with non-compliant businesses first, before issuing a fine.
“The recent rapid spike ... necessitates an increase in enforcement,” Gary Sandy, chair of the county Board of Supervisors, said.
Fines could range from $250 to $10,000 for businesses, depending on how egregious their actions are deemed by code officers. Fines for individuals would range from $25 to $500.
Yolo County has seen a surge of 353 new coronavirus cases in the last two weeks, far exceeding the self-imposed limit of 55 cases every two weeks that Yolo set in its self-attested plan to reopen.
County spokeswoman Jenny Tan said the new COVID-19 cases are “all over the board,” including clusters traced to “social gatherings, family gatherings, employer worksites and churches.”
Yolo was not on the state watch list as of Tuesday morning, but last week took the unusual step of voluntarily ordering restaurants to cease on-premise indoor dining.
The state puts counties on the monitoring list automatically whenever the 14-day increase in cases surpasses 100 per 100,000 residents; in Yolo’s case, this works out to a two-week threshold of 223 new cases.
El Dorado County
New cases in El Dorado County have spiked over the past several days and the percentage of tests returning positive is also rising at a fast pace.
The county counted 84 new infections over the past week as of Monday, a 6.8 percent positive rate, which is considerably higher than the week prior, when 33 people tested positive, a 2.5 percent positivity rate.
In May and early June, El Dorado’s test positivity was closer to 1 percent. The World Health Organization lists a 5 percent positivity rate or higher as troublesome.
Most of El Dorado County’s recent surge in cases has stemmed from people gathering indoors with others outside their immediate household, and people not wearing face coverings when inside public buildings for “an extended period of time,” El Dorado County spokeswoman Carla Hass said Tuesday.
The county has fared comparatively well to this point in the pandemic, remaining the most populous in the state with no confirmed COVID-19 fatalities and as of Monday evening reporting just two hospitalized cases. More than 190,000 people live in El Dorado.
Adherence to social distancing and mask protocols, washing one’s hands and avoiding in-person gatherings is going to “make the difference between whether or not El Dorado County remains open and economically viable or not,” Hass said.
Another spike can be expected after the July 4 holiday weekend brought “huge amounts” of visitors to the Lake Tahoe area.
“We won’t know the outcome of this past weekend for a couple of weeks,” Hass said.
Hass also said El Dorado’s staff of about 30 trained contact tracers is “meeting some resistance” from people who don’t want to provide the necessary information to track down where they may have gotten sick. The county is trying to raise public awareness about the importance of contact tracing via fact sheets on its website and a hashtag campaign on social media, “#AnswerThePhone.”
She stressed the importance of the public taking personal responsibility of their actions to limit spread of the virus.
“It’s hard to imagine that people are not aware that masks are mandatory, that physical distance is required. This is no longer about awareness. This is about the action of taking personal responsibility to comply with those mandates in order to keep our residents safe and economy whole.”
Sacramento County test centers closed
Sacramento County health officials said Monday they will shut five coronavirus testing sites this week in under-served communities due to a growing shortage of testing materials.
County health chief Dr. Peter Beilenson said the last of the five centers, one in Natomas, will be open on Tuesday, then all five will shut down indefinitely.
“It’s a big hit,” Beilenson said. “UC Davis, which does the tests for us, doesn’t have the materials. There’s a shortage nationally.”
The five centers, which opened a month ago, are in lower-income neighborhoods, including some were the virus appears to have begun to spread:
This story was originally published July 7, 2020 at 1:18 PM.
