Entire Sacramento region moved to most restrictive COVID-19 tier amid growing state emergency
The entire Sacramento region has regressed to California’s strictest shutdown status, the purple tier, after state health officials invoked what is effectively a hard stop on economic reopening Monday due to surging coronavirus numbers.
Thirty-nine of the state’s 58 counties were demoted in total, with 28 moving to purple, including the entire six-county Sacramento region — El Dorado, Placer, Yolo, Sacramento and the Yuba-Sutter bicounty area.
The purple tier means a number of businesses and activities including restaurant dining, gyms, movie theaters and places of worship are required to close for indoor operations. Those had been permitted with mask requirements and hard capacity limits in the red and orange tiers.
Sacramento County was already demoted to purple last week, but the remaining five counties will have just one day to implement changes and shut down affected businesses. El Dorado County had been in the orange tier seeking a status adjudication to avoid demotion to red. The remaining four capital region counties were in the red tier, with Placer County being demoted there last week from orange.
The state’s mask mandate has also been updated. Masks are now required whenever one leaves their house, with very few exceptions, the state health department said in its updated reopening “blueprint” guidelines.
COVID-19 activity has exploded in California in November. The state has reported an average of 7,000 new daily cases over the past two weeks, up from a little over 4,100 to start the month. Total hospitalizations and cases in intensive care units with the disease have shot up 52% and 46%, respectively, in those two weeks.
The surge has been especially sharp in the capital region. Placer County on Monday morning reported it had 70 positive cases in its hospitals, an all-time high and up from 43 in its last update from Friday.
Sacramento County, which set two daily records last week for new infections and on Monday surpassed 30,000 all-time cases, had its hospitalized case total soar from 77 on Halloween to 177 last Friday. That figure is 172 as of Monday. Forty-eight COVID-19 patients are in Sacramento County intensive care units. That number has quadrupled in less than three weeks.
Placer’s COVID-19 data dashboard shows its test positivity rate, as a weekly rolling average, soaring from 4.0% to 5.5% in just five days. In Sacramento, it went from 3.1% to 4.6% in a week.
In Yolo County, hospitalized patients with coronavirus quintupled from three to 15 in five days.
“The rapid rise in cases over the last couple of weeks is very concerning,” Yolo County Health Officer Dr. Aimee Sisson said in a prepared statement. “We need to act now to slow the spread of coronavirus or we may soon find our hospitals, like those in other parts of the country, overwhelmed.
“I understand that people are tired of COVID restrictions and want this pandemic to be over,” she continued. “But we can’t simply wish it away.”
Some government leaders have not been as receptive.
State Assemblyman James Gallagher, whose district includes all of Glenn, Sutter, Tehama and Yuba counties and who has been one of the most vocal opponents of Newsom’s stay-at-home order and business restrictions, rebuked Monday’s emergency action.
“The Governor and state bureaucrats can color code counties and change rules as they go, but the basics remain the same: We are all free people who can exercise our freedom responsibly,” he wrote. “The Government can only take what you let them. I don’t think you should close your business, church or school.
Gallagher is a Republican from Yuba City, the seat of Sutter County. Sutter and adjoining Yuba County, which share a bi-county health office, were on track to be demoted to the purple tier this week even under the old rules, state data show.
Sutter County health officials in their most recent local data update on Friday reported 52 new cases, a new single-day record for the county. The threshold to move between the purple and red tiers is an average of 7.0 new daily cases per 100,000 people. Sutter has a little over 100,000 residents, meaning Friday’s case total was about seven times higher than the state-set limit.
The California Department of Public Health called the state’s recent increase an “unprecedented surge in (the) rate of increase of cases,” and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office in a statement said the state is “pulling an emergency brake” to halt the spread.
The state made changes to the tier list process as well. It’s now more continuous, tiers can change daily rather than on a weekly basis and the state says it can move counties back more than one tier at a time if necessary. Counties previously had three days to implement the changes; but, because of “the extreme circumstances requiring immediate action, counties will be required to implement any sector changes the day following the tier announcement,” CDPH writes.
With Monday’s moves, more than 94% of California by population will be in the tight purple-tier requirements. Thirteen counties making up a little over half of the state’s populace were already in the purple tier prior to Monday’s major update.
California over the weekend officially surpassed 1 million lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19. More than 18,250 Californians have died of the disease, including at least 684 in the six Sacramento-area counties.
This story was originally published November 16, 2020 at 12:37 PM.
