Sacramento could enter looser orange COVID tier within weeks. It depends on vaccines
Sacramento could advance into the orange tier of COVID-19 restrictions in about a month, the county’s public health officer said Thursday.
“My best guess estimate is that probably sometime late April we will be able to meet the criteria for the orange tier,” Dr. Olivia Kasirye said on a Zoom call with reporters Thursday morning.
Kasirye said there are a number of variables that could impact the timeline for moving into that tier level, which would loosen capacity limits for indoor businesses, as well as at outdoor sports events and live performances.
One key variable is that the state health department will loosen the threshold for one of the three main metrics used in tier assignments once the state hits a vaccine milestone.
When the state reaches 4 million doses administered to Californians in the bottom quartile of its “Healthy Places Index,” the California Department of Public Health says it will raise the orange-tier cutoff from four daily COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents to six per 100,000.
The state made a similar change when the bottom quartile hit 2 million doses, which accelerated Sacramento and numerous other counties’ upgrades into the red tier last week.
CDPH reported Thursday that the bottom quartile has now received close to 3.1 million doses, 13 days after it hit 2 million. That pace puts the guidelines on track to loosen around the first week of April.
The change to the structure will be retroactive, meaning Sacramento can still get a week of credit for meeting orange criteria if it falls below six cases per 100,000 before the 4 million vaccine threshold is hit.
In the state’s latest weekly assessment this Tuesday, CDPH reported Sacramento County’s daily case rate at 7.4 per 100,000
The county met the other two tier requirements — an overall test positivity rate below 5% and positivity below 5.2% in its lowest HPI quartile ZIP codes — in this week’s update at 2.9% and 4.2%, respectively.
Sacramento County on its own public health dashboard reports its daily case rate at 6.8 per 100,000 for the week that ended last Sunday. During the winter surge, it peaked at more than 60 per 100,000.
Kasirye said this number is still dropping as it has all February and March, with the county and California as a whole showing strong recovery from the December and January surge.
But the rate of decline has slowed some, making it difficult to predict when daily cases may fall below six per 100,000.
Once the county meets that mark, it must stay there for two consecutive weekly updates from CDPH in order for the county to join the orange tier. The county would need to record its first week meeting all criteria by the weekly update on April 20 in order to move to orange before the end of the month.
The discrepancy between the state’s reported rate of 7.4 and the figure of 6.8, Kasirye explained Thursday, is that the state incorporates a longer delay in assessing the numbers in order to account for possible data reporting issues.
Yolo County entered the orange tier in this week’s update and El Dorado can go orange as early as next week if its COVID-19 numbers remain low.
In addition to capacity changes, such as restaurants’ indoor dining rooms being allowed to open 50% full rather than 25%, the orange tier also allows a few types of indoor entertainment businesses to reopen.
To date, nearly 97,000 Sacramento County residents have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least 1,593 have died of the disease. Restrictions and closures for businesses have been in effect for the vast majority of the past year.
