More indoor businesses, including movie theaters, gyms and restaurant dining rooms may be able to reopen in Contra Costa County as soon as next week, should COVID-19 case trends continue, the county’s health officer said Tuesday.
Dr. Chris Farnitano said Contra Costa has met the state’s “red tier” criteria for one week. The county, currently in the “purple tier,” will have to show it meets those standards again on Sept. 29 to join most of the Bay Area in the less constrained red tier.
Sonoma County is the only other Bay Area county still in the purple tier as of Tuesday; Alameda, San Mateo and Solano counties made the move to the red tier this week.
Among the openings allowed in “red tier” counties are indoor gyms (at 10 percent capacity), museums and movie theaters (at 25 percent capacity), restaurant dining rooms and houses of worship and other cultural spaces (25 percent capacity or 100 people, whichever is fewer).
Businesses that have been open under purple-tier rules can expand under red tier; nail salons, skin care boutiques and tattoo parlors can resume indoor operations, and indoor retail and shopping malls can go from 25 percent to 50 percent capacity.
Farnitano told the supervisors the plan is for the county to allow as much reopening as state red tier specifications allow.
“The most important thing is to be prepared to pull back if we see the numbers going the wrong way,” he said.
Also, if current COVID-19 case trends continue, elementary, middle and high schools would be allowed to open as soon as Oct. 13 without needing waivers, Farnitano said.
It doesn’t make sense to have elementary schools held to the same timeline as high schools. Young kids need in person school more, and they are less likely to catch and transmit this virus.
@LED as a parent of HS student’s I can tell you they need in person school too.
I agree with that. I just think the case is even stronger for young kids, because they get less out of distance learning and they are less of a threat to spread the bug.
Preposterous to think kids are less likely to spread germs.
@CoCo Commenter, do you always prefer your intuitive guesses to what the experts say about empirical questions? It was reasonable to think young kids would be major spreaders of this bug back in February. We have a lot more information now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/feared-covid-outbreaks-in-schools-yet-to-arrive-early-data-shows/2020/09/23/0509bb84-fd22-11ea-b555-4d71a9254f4b_story.html
“The near-global closure of schools in response to the pandemic reflected the reasonable expectation from previous respiratory virus outbreaks that children would be a key component of the transmission chain. However, emerging evidence suggests that this is most likely not the case.”
“COVID-19 in children and young people,” Matthew D. Snape, Russell M. Viner. Science 21 Sep 2020
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/09/18/science.abd6165
“The most important thing is to be prepared to pull back if we see the numbers going the wrong way.” Which numbers are those, Chris? Election polling numbers?
Sorry, Mark Stocks – I accidentally hit “reply”. My comment should’ve been separate.
No one is more tired of the shelter in place than I am. But let us not get sick over it by opening too soon. There are too many people who still do not believe COVID-19 is real and refuse to wear masks properly. It doesn’t help we have a president who contradicts doctors while saying something else in private. children do get sick and spread this virus. Plus we have the occasional parent who sends their child to school after s/he has tested positive for it.
Be safe and be smart. .
It’s time to outlaw masks. You can’t have criminals running around in masks. They do nothing but make you look like a submissive idiot and make criminals unidentifiable by security cameras. #OutlawMasks
Too soon? It has been 6 months.
Can’t stop the world for a 99.98% survivable disease for most people.
Please, feel free to lock yourself in your basement, the rest of us need to get back to life.
Define “too soon”. We aren’t going to eradicate this coronavirus. It would make more sense at this point to put more effort and money into protecting the most vulnerable while letting lower-risk people get back to more activities. If the proportion of cases between now and herd immunity (whether from exposure or vaccination) skews young, everybody would end up better off – we would reach eventual herd immunity with fewer casualties. The current course is a high-risk bet that a vaccine will save the day in the near term. Nobody knows whether that will happen.
Lets get the kids back to school. Avoid the person not wearing a mask. Avoid watching cable news. The occasional parent sending their covid child back to school is hypothetical.
It’s taking a long time, but more people are *finally* realizing that reopening schools is not particularly risky thing to do. The data has been out there for some time, really. But now we have more info from a US context. There’s no excuse any more. It’s an experiment being run on kids that has virtually no benefit for them, just costs of unknown severity.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/feared-covid-outbreaks-in-schools-yet-to-arrive-early-data-shows/2020/09/23/0509bb84-fd22-11ea-b555-4d71a9254f4b_story.html
A side point: favoring a very long, slow epidemic curve rather than a faster one (that’s still slow enough to keep hospitals functioning effectively) is super regressive. This is harming the poor much more than those of us who can just work from home and virtue signal…
You have it exactly correct. If people were smarter( especially our so called President) we would have had this virus stopped.
Yes!! You are so right.
Opening too soon? It’s already too late for many many businesses and the employees who depended on those jobs for their livelihoods.
This reminds me of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown.
Good one! You summed up my feeling perfectly! Lol! Thx for the chuckle 🙂
After all, of 1.2 million people, 202 have died (and most of those were nursing home residents with multiple comorbid conditions).
Live Free or Die!
Wow that knowledge and belief system you have is not too wise. You are heading for disaster. Please take the precautions and be safe. The virus is right here just waiting for ya.
Consider getting flu shots this year – they’re available now and could help with the other viruses floating around.
Getting mine today.
Just wait, the UNELECTED health administrator will find a reason the data is faulty. His goal is to keep us shut down forever!
Great! New ways for people to spread their infections around. Go to a movie, get a tattoo, and breathe on each other!
If you worried dont go out, lock yourself in your home until you feel safe to go out. The rest of us however, want to get on with our lives and are sick and tired of these ridiculous lock down rules which in my honest opinion make no sense at all.
@ an iota of maturity
Its funny how people like you just want life to stop in order for the virus to stop. You do realize that with a lot of stuff closed down that people are still gathering in masses and privately. To do those things you mentioned would be better because one you are required to wear a mask and two those things now have to have low capacity in order to keep the spread down.
If you are so worried, then YOU go hide in your house. YOU quit your job. YOU make that sacrifice for YOU. Let the rest of us get on with our lives.
So, if you own a restaurant , you decide to open at 25%, numbers spike back up, CCC goes to purple and now you have to close again? No Thanks. I’ll pass.
It seems like a no win situation. As much as my employer has been able to tread water with take out, the patio, and the property managers letting us expand into the parking lot for outdoor dining, even a modest 25% inside is necessary if we make the red tier to keep going especially when the weather turns. It’s extremely frustrating knowing that people can’t follow the rules as is (I’m assuming you are stuck playing mask police as much as the rest of us industry folk), and I know their behavior is gonna get worse once they’re allowed inside. With so many adults who should know better behaving badly already (including a local news personality who can’t keep their spouse or family in line while not wearing their own mask properly), it’s hard to be optimistic.
If you worried dont go out, lock yourself in your home until you feel safe to go out. The rest of us however, want to get on with our lives and are sick and tired of these ridiculous lock down rules which in my honest opinion make no sense at all.
Everyone is tired of this. The virus has not changed. It will get ya if you do not take the precautions.
Grab 10k masks and show bay point how to wear them. Their numbers are atrocious.
OR, you could reconsider your faith in masks as a panacea… I think they probably help, but they aren’t going to outbalance the factors that make Covid spread more easily in poorer areas. Larger household sizes, fewer rooms per household, more ‘essential’ workers in close proximity to lots of other people, more people needing to share a ride or take public transit. More people with co-morbidities. The list goes on and on.
For any Covid pattern, stop and ask yourself whether your judgment about it is informed by the desire to blame someone else, or by information that has no relationship to moralizing…
this is a joke!
with flu seasons coming up this will turn “bad” and we’ll have to go back to lock down.
END THE LOCKDOWN!!
How about believing as long as the virus is here we have to follow the rules. Stay away from me if you don’t.
@ILP
do you do the same for flu season? that kills 50K people in the US alone. heck do you cover your mouth when you cough?
maybe you should stay away from the rest of us.
@ASH – You do realize we over 200,00 covid-related deaths right… and we are only 9 months in… 6 if you go by the March announcement… dude, do you I say!!! DO YOU!!!
Why don’t all of the people who think this is a scam just go on out and do their thing. I mean, people aren’t following the rules anyway… go for it I say!
Here is the school re-opening plan and anything short should be met with people in administrative roles losing their jobs:
Teachers are pooled into voluntary categories of in-person vs not. Those going in person need a physicians note clearing them to work in person.
From that pool teachers are assigned roles for in person and remote support. It’s going to be fluid and weird like baseball and the taxi lineup, but thems the rules.
Kids are given the opportunity to choose from 3 models- 100% in person, hybrid and 100% remote. They also can move fluidly between them with a certain degree of notice.
Once those two numbers are figured out- how many kids and how many teachers. The school MUST figure it out. Administrators are not allowed to say they can’t. If the CTA blocks it, then the contract should be null and void and the state should relax licensing requirement to bring in other teachers. As long as they pass a background check, get them in there.
I like the spirit of this, and the ideas except for the hybrid part. Hybrid is worse than going fully in-person: it just means kids are mixing with two different pools of people instead of one. It also means a similar dynamic for parents.
I like the spirit of this, and the ideas except for the hybrid part. Hybrid is worse than going fully in-person: it just means kids are mixing with two different pools of people instead of one. It also means a similar dynamic for parents.
It’s totally outrageous that teachers’ unions have basically been allowed to declare in-person education “non-essential” for months on end.
@Mike, I’m sure there are a lot of logistical things to figure out. But it has been six months. Is it really too much to expect that school districts would have this figured out by now? The effect is to put equal or greater difficulties onto the parents and kids.
The state managed to push through laws on short notice (and of course Gavin Newsom has just overruled standing laws en masse) to protect schools’ funding, for example, and deny it to charter schools with existing home-learning programs. That got done quickly! Yet we see no such ability to cut the red tape that would get in the way of pivoting to the new reality. In six months. By now a non-sclerotic system would have identified which teachers would be in-person, what space needs would have to be met off-site by partnering with venues that are shuttered due to Covid, would have real ventilator-type masks for teachers who want them, would be using outdoor spaces wherever possible, and would have a HEPA-filter purifier unit in every classroom… Saying that all of that is logistically impossible just confirms that our public schools are dysfunctional organizations.
@Mike this is the time to make new rules. To lower our expectations for education and look to the necessary role schools play in socialization. Every other industry has redefined how it delivers its product. They’ve found a way. Schools have tried to redefine with distance learning. It doesn’t work. This is an education state of emergency and all stops should be created to maintain what kids need- socialization and education.
@Mike, I get what you are saying, and I’m sure you are only understating the number of regulations that would have to be relaxed to let schools pivot in the ways they would have to.
But that’s exactly my point: it’s not impossible to cut through red tape when the situation demands it. It just requires the will to do so, and the institutional well-functioning to make that willing actual. And we don’t have that.
Laws have been changed at the snap of a finger through this whole thing. If there were the political will and the institutional functionality in place, the school system would have identified what they needed, what regulations were getting in the way, and a temporary suspension or workaround would have been greenlighted. Through the legislature or via Gavin’s pen. Putting CANNOT in all caps doesn’t really explain the necessity implied. It’s not a law of nature. Schools in other countries have adapted more flexibly.
@Mike, I get what you’re saying as far as individual schools and districts are concerned: they can’t just dispense themselves from the state’s laws and requirements. I’m talking about the whole shebang. It’s pathetic that this far into things there isn’t a much more flexible response in place – enabled at the state level.
As for lowering our expectations, I’m not sure I would have used that phrase, but what do you call online learning? If that’s not lowered expectations I don’t know what is. And I’m an educator, speaking from painful and ongoing experience.
The lockdowns are illegal. The state taking control over which industry’s can be open and which can’t is also illegal. Over the coming years there will be many lawsuits that go to high courts (I expect the 9th circuit to have a case within the next ew years and I suspect, the Supreme Court eventually as well).
Also, if we cannot force a person take off their head coverings (turbans etc..) we cannot Force people to put a covering on. I don’t care what y’all say about the “medical reasons” behind it, we ARE NOT a technocracy and we are not ruled by “experts” no matter how many of you submissive people wish we were.
@L0L
The Supreme Court will definitely have to be involved after the 9th Circuit dismisses all the cases.
The shelter in place come under health codes. No one can “force” you to wear a mask but you could be fined, socially ostracized and die from catching COVID-19. We are not ruled by “experts” but by a president who says 1 thing in private, another in public and the temerity to contradict doctors claiming to know better. .
@Doh
What’s this “we” sh!t, White Man? Perhaps YOU’RE being ruled but I certainly am not. Try thinking for yourself instead of the way you’re being instructed.
@Doh:
There’s a myriad of doctors contradicting those doctors as well.
There’s a large body of global evidence that kids (including kids well over 3 years old) are less at risk to catch this than adults, and a growing body of evidence that they are less likely to pass it on. And that’s unusual: kids generally *do* drive the spread of flu, rhinoviruses, the common-cold coronaviruses… If your theory were true it would be true for all respiratory illnesses – but it’s not.
This is also too general to be explained by helicopter parenting, which is a much more local phenomenon. The Bay Area is the epicenter of ridiculous parental hovering over toddlers… they can’t even play on kiddie playgrounds without their parental avatar mediating every interaction with another kid.
I still do not know of anyone who has gotten Covid-19 (and I know a lot of people)
Hondo Lane, consider yourself lucky if you don’t know anyone who has had Covid and knock on a huge piece of wood. I do know several, but none in the bay area but some of my friends know locals who have had it. I’ve got 2 friends who have lost close relatives but in southern states. Not pretty.
LOL you all still watching the Anna & Chris Show?? I gave up watching that rerun back in May. The majority of population in Contra Costa County could careless what color the county is this week and lost any interest in what CCHS announces.
The real question is how many parents will allow their kid back in school with no proven vaccine available?
BTW this actually is not “school” that parents would be sending their children to; this is the new K-12th Grade glorified Public Baby Sitting Centers around the state.
04 November will get ALL BETTER, all of a sudden . . . .
So is Nancy Pelosi’s daughter the Chief Marketing Officer at Zoom? I kinda appears that way. Mrs. Pelosi has her nephew keeping the schools closed while her daughter’s company has made a fortune off the schools being closed. That some serious mafia state going on..Fact check me
ANYONE THAT IS COMMENTING THAT SCHOOLS SHOULD NOT BE OPENING “TOO FAST” MUST NOT HAVE KIDS CURRENTLY PARTICIPATING IN “DISTANCE LEARNING” I SAY THAT BECAUSE I HAVE A DAUGHTER IN 8TH GRADE AND THIS HAS HAD A DEVISTATING EFFECT ON MY DAUGHTER. IF A PARENT WANTS TO SHELTER THEIR KIDS 24/7 WITH THIS BS DISTANCE LEARNING SO BE IT BUT MY KID NEEDS TO BE IN SCHOOL, ON SITE, AT LEAST PART TIME. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. COVID 19 HAS TURNED INTO A POLITICAL TOOL WIELDED BY POLITICIANS. HAS ANYONE NOTICED THAT THE TERM FOR DEATHS GRADUALLY WENT FROM COVID DEATHS TO COVID “RELATED” DEATHS? ALL I HEAR IS FOLLOW THE SCIENCE…FOLLOW THE SCIENCE…WHAT FREAKING SCIENCE? THIS THING STARTED BACK IN MARCH AND WHAT EXACTLY HAS SCIENCE ACTUALLY TOLD US? WELL ALL I REALLY HEAR ABOUT IS SOME STUPID VACCINE THAT BTW IS NOT A MIRACLE CURE PEOPLE. IT PROBABLY WON’T EVEN BE AS EFFECTIVE AS THE FLU VACCINE WHICH IS PROBABLY ONLY 40-50% EFFECTIVE ANYWAYS. SCIENCE COULDN’T EVEN GIVE US A STRAIGHT ANSWER ON WHETHER THE VIRUS WOULD PHASE OUT IN THE SUMMER BECAUSE OF HEAT. OBVIOUSLY, IT DIDN’T BUT TRY TO FIND ONE SINGLE STUDY ABOUT IT BACK IN MAY OR JUNE. I HAVE YET TO SEE ANY PIECE OF HARD EVIDENCE THAT SHOWS THIS BS LOCKDOWN HAS HELPED STOPPED THE SPREAD OF THE VIRUS AND THEY HAVE HAD PLENTY OF TIME SO IT IS TIME TO OPEN UP THE DAMN SCHOOLS CCC!!!!
If your kid is there, can she show you how to turn off the cap lock?
RANT !
Wow… I’m so sorry you actually have to be a parent. Have your daughter’s friends over if you aren’t worried about getting infected… do you I say.
@Susan I.
Sounds like Savagette is being a parent who wants the best for her daughter, and YOU’RE actually sorry about that. Yikes!
Good advice Susan I. That’s exactly what our family has been doing for weeks. It’s called identifying an acceptable level of risk based on the data.
Dont get your hopes up. The numbers will be going up in two weeks since the protests started again today.
Some relatives went to a party in another state. 19 out of 20 of them got Covid. The only one that didn’t, had a mask on while attending it.
I have a friend who had 17 relatives over, nobody wore a mask.
One wound up in the hospital a day later with Covid 19, Nobody else got sick or tested positive. That was a month ago.
A mask does not protect the wearer from Covid. Cool story, though.
ikr! While nurses are the sacrificial lambs!
How about my InShape health club on Clayton Rd, Concord?