Soon, Californians will have a new goal in the state’s layered reopening structure: green.
Governor Gavin Newsom said on Wednesday that the state is adding a green layer to the reopening plan, which assigns colored labels to counties based on the spread of the virus and the types of activities allowed.
“We are literally working on a green layer,” said Newsom during a visit to a vaccination site in Southern California, “and it has been a few months now, in anticipation of this bright light at the end of this tunnel. We are working on it. Let’s start socializing this. “
When the layer system was announced last August, there were four color-coded levels: purple, for counties at the most restrictive level, in addition to red, orange and yellow. Newsom said at the time that the state had deliberately left out a green layer. “We don’t believe there is a green light that says, ‘Go back to the way things were or to a pre-pandemic mentality,” he said.
During Wednesday’s briefing, Newsom reported the decline in the number of cases and hospitalizations across the state, marking a dramatic turnaround after the rise of winter.
The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in California is at its lowest level since mid-November, shows the state’s latest data report. Across the state, 3,744 patients with COVID were in hospitals on Monday, down from a peak of 21,597 on January 4. In the bay area, hospitals accounted for 500 patients with COVID-19 in the latest report.
“We are in a completely different place than we were six and eight weeks ago,” said Newsom. But he asked people to remain vigilant against the virus. “We are still seeing a lot of lives lost. This disease remains deadly. This disease remains ubiquitous. You are not taking spring break. This disease will not take away the summer. “
He said that, unlike other state governors, he would not lift masking mandates or capacity limits in public places anytime soon.
“California wants to double our progress, and we want to spend the next few weeks so that when you get to this magical place that we’re all waiting for, and that’s the immunity of the herd, we can see an appearance of normality returning to our day to day- day, ”said Newsom.
Newsom also said that he expects California to achieve its goal of administering 2 million doses of vaccine to vulnerable communities by Friday, which would open red-level status for most counties in the state, including Sonoma counties. and Contra Costa in the bay area. All other counties in the Bay Area are already in the red layer.
Last week, California officials said they would loosen the metrics required for counties to move from one level to another, linked to the number of low-income residents who received vaccines across the state. Newsom said that the current capital vaccination rate in the state is 1.9 million.
Aidin Vaziri is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected]