Still in California’s strictest COVID-19 tier, Yuba-Sutter reopening may take a while
Two small, rural counties made a push in the spring to be among the first in California to reopen from the coronavirus shutdown, with local leaders arguing then that the state’s unprecedented response to the pandemic might have been warranted in the state’s urban hubs, but not in their less densely populated region.
“In the north state, our communities have met the scientific criteria for re-opening and we’re not going to wait for San Francisco and Los Angeles in order to reopen,” Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City, said at the time.
Sutter and Yuba, adjacent sister counties sharing a bi-county public health office and with a combined population of under 200,000, weren’t the first in which government leaders criticized state-imposed restrictions, or to implore Gov. Gavin Newsom to let them press ahead of larger counties during the state’s first attempt at reopening.
But they did become the first two to openly defy the rules from the Newsom administration by amending their own local public health order in violation of the state. Yuba-Sutter gave itself the green light for indoor restaurant dining, shopping malls, hair salons and more to reopen in early May, when all of those businesses and activities were banned statewide.
The main justification for the defiance: COVID-19 activity was low in Yuba and Sutter counties, local officials said, so it didn’t make sense to maintain tight restrictions that were strangling the local economy. Sutter County Board of Supervisors Chairman Ron Sullenger at the time said the combined bi-county total of just 50 confirmed cases nearly two months into the pandemic showed that spread of the virus there was limited.
Five months later, Yuba and Sutter are on the brink of 3,000 total residents infected by the highly contagious disease. Nineteen have died. And because their recent viral activity remains classified by state officials as “widespread,” both jurisdictions remain subject to the tightest restrictions possible within a new reopening framework that’s allowed seven of their eight closest neighbors to proceed.
“Around half of our local infections are still originating from social gatherings — that has been a challenge these last few months,” bi-county public health officer Dr. Phuong Luu told The Sacramento Bee by email Thursday. “Residents and businesses have really stepped up, especially in wearing facial coverings in public, but practicing those tenets at home, when our guards are more likely to be down, seems to be a challenge.”
Public health leaders in the capital region have expressed similar sentiments for months, blaming spikes in coronavirus spread primarily on get-togethers between friends and extended family members, especially around holidays.
In Week 4 of the state’s new tier-list system, Yuba and Sutter are among just six counties across Northern California and the Bay Area still in the purple stage. Purple tier status means restaurant dining, church worship, gyms and more must stay closed to indoor activities.
The new reopening system has four tiers, with criteria for each based on calculations for new cases per 100,000 residents and the percentage of tests that return positive. From most to least restrictive, the tiers are purple, red, orange and yellow. Tiers dictate which types of businesses are allowed to reopen, and how strict modifications like capacity limits must be.
Yuba and Sutter counties watched nearby Butte, Sacramento and Yolo counties all get promoted to the red tier Tuesday. Placer reached red status earlier this month. Three counties sharing a boundary with Yuba — Nevada, Sierra and Plumas — are two full steps ahead in the orange tier. Only Colusa County, west of Sutter, is also purple territory.
In those seven promoted counties, as well as at the statewide level, new infections and test positivity have declined consistently and significantly since early-to-mid August. It’s been slower going for Yuba and Sutter.
Will ‘intertwined’ Yuba, Sutter change tiers in sync with each other?
To make the biggest leap, from purple to red, a county has to notch back-to-back weeks with no more than seven new daily cases per 100,000 residents, and no more than 8% of lab-processed tests coming back positive.
The California Department of Public Health reported Yuba County meeting both of those criteria in this week’s update, which looked at data for the week ending Sept. 19, the first time either county has done so in the four weeks under the new system.
Technically, from the state’s perspective, that would qualify Yuba to move forward into the red tier as early as next week if its numbers stayed low.
But Luu, the counties’ public health officer, doesn’t plan to let the pair advance to the red tier separately from one another.
“Dr. Luu has advocated to CDPH that both counties move along the tier system together since the communities are so intertwined,” Yuba County spokeswoman Rachel Rosenbaum told The Bee on Thursday.
Yuba went from having the highest test positivity among all 58 counties, at 9.4% for the week ending Sept. 12, to middle-of-the-pack with its 3.3% rate seven days later. And it cut daily infections by more than half, from 10.1 to 5.0 new daily cases per 100,000 residents, state data show.
But just across the county line, Sutter reported 8.9 new daily cases per 100,000, and its test rate positivity was two points higher than Yuba’s at 5.3%. A week earlier, Sutter had 9.3 new cases per day and 6.5% positivity. Sutter still has yet to record its first week of meeting both of the red tier qualifications.
Luu explained that Sutter County has more congregate care facilities, such as skilled nursing homes, than Yuba County. Those types of long-term health care facilities have been hotspots for COVID-19 outbreaks nationwide.
“Recently Sutter County has had several clusters of cases in these facilities contributing to the case count,” Luu said. “... it’s actually been a bit of a dance. Yuba County has been doing well in lowering the daily case count, but was struggling for some time to lower the test positivity.”
Sutter and Yuba still recovering from statewide surge
Through Wednesday evening, Sutter and Yuba counties have reported just over 2,900 combined coronavirus cases and 19 related deaths during the pandemic.
After the two counties tried to reopen ahead of California’s requirements in early May, Newsom scolded them in a daily news conference and state regulators descended on the region issuing warnings to noncomplying businesses for a few days.
Though she’d issued it, Luu quickly grew worried, mainly due to noncompliance that was becoming evident throughout the community. On May 6, just two days after the amended local health order took effect, she wrote a warning saying it had “become clear a number of businesses are not enacting required protocols to ensure the safety of the community.”
Other local officials stood by it. But a prolonged standoff between county and state didn’t materialize: the state shifted its plan to a “regional variance” model permitting those counties and several others to go ahead and accelerate into the later stages of reopening.
The statewide plan took shape around mid-May and unraveled by late June, bringing economic reopening to a halt early in the summer, due to skyrocketing coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and intensive care unit admissions. Those figures led July and August to become California’s two deadliest months of the pandemic.
Sutter and Yuba were no exception to the surge. A COVID-19 data dashboard from the bi-county health office shows its “active case” total staying below 30 from the start of the pandemic in March all the way through June 11.
By June 12 — the same day Newsom let states in numerous self-attested counties reopen a variety of indoor businesses including bars and restaurants — Yuba-Sutter had 32 active cases. Two and a half weeks later on July 1, the active case total swelled to 125. By Aug. 1, it was 634.
“I am very, very concerned. Our doctors and nurses are stressed,” Luu told The Bee in July. “Our healthcare system is being stressed.”
Even with Luu’s concern and soaring COVID-19 numbers, the Sutter County Board of Supervisors penned a letter to Newsom in early July opposing the decision to shut non-essential businesses back down, writing that it seemed “unjust to close certain businesses at this economically perilous moment without evidence they are a significant factor in the spike in cases.”
Luu said then, as she did again this week, that roughly half of the cases were being traced to social gatherings. But she also said roughly the source of about 40% of the two counties’ infections was unknown early in the summer, a figure that’s been slimmed down closer to 25% as of this week, according to the county dashboard.
The balance between physical health and safety and the health of economy remains a challenging one amid the ongoing pandemic.
“We have a lot of different industries in our bi-county region – from agriculture and manufacturing to restaurants and beauty salons – and we work to address them all,” Luu said Thursday.
This story was originally published October 1, 2020 at 1:25 PM.
