Three hundred and twenty five. That’s the number of days that restaurants in Alameda County were banned from serving snack bars indoors last year.
Eight months and two days. It was during this time that the San Francisco salons remained closed.
At first we thought that the closure could take a few weeks. At most one month.
But after a year of ever-changing COVID-19 shutdown requests that no one could prepare for, the impressive impact on the Bay Area business can now be counted. A Bay Area News Group analysis of a year’s blocking and closing rules found:
Indoor dining rooms have been closed in most places for 10 months or more, and table service has also been banned outdoors for more than a third of the year. The salons closed more than half of the year.
Most theaters, theme parks and bars took all year to reopen.
And while everyone suffered during a year’s pandemic blockade, the news organization’s analysis found dramatic differences between the rules in the top five counties in the region that, in some cases, kept companies closed almost twice as much as their counterparts in the county border.
That hurt a lot.
Ask Julia Lam, whose hair salon in Hong Kong, near Mission Boulevard in San Francisco, was closed by COVID restrictions for just four months. Since intermittent closings began last March, she said business has fallen 70%. Furthermore, she said she saw about half of her clientele take their business up Daly City Street, across the line from San Mateo County.
“It’s not fair,” said Lam. “We’re just a block away, what’s the difference?”
Eighty-two days. That is the difference. San Mateo County has allowed salons to remain open almost three months longer than allowed in San Francisco and two months longer than Santa Clara, Alameda or Contra Costa.
It didn’t start like that.
At the beginning of the pandemic, public health officials across the bay area were unified. At a historic press conference on March 16, 2020, six health officials came together and announced the country’s first total blockade to slow the deadly virus, which was spreading in coastal communities across the United States. His order would apply uniformly throughout the region. The burden on hairdressing salons, restaurants and retail would be enormous, but shared by everyone. A few days later, the statewide state-wide shelter order from Governor Gavin Newsom was followed, calling on all Californians to sacrifice themselves together.
But as the pandemic spread from cruise ships to church choirs and nursing home parties, the rates of infection, number of deaths and tensions in hospital ICUs varied from place to place – and eventually , the same happened with the COVID blocking rules. The state’s formula for monitoring the virus usually closes a county while allowing its neighbor to remain open. Decisions among Bay Area public health officials diverged, and as each dealt with fears, indignation and public safety, some counties postponed the reopening under state guidelines and maintained stricter rules. The gap between those who opened and those who remained closed widened.
At times it felt like a blockade relay race – one county opening and moving for a few days, another closing and falling behind for a week or two – but for business owners, all of this represented paralyzing chasms of loss.
“We would have been even more effective if we had stayed together,” said Dr. Sara Cody, public health officer for Santa Clara County, in a recent interview. “We were asking the population of Santa Clara County to continue to make sacrifices and the surrounding communities were reaping the benefits.”
In an extraordinary message to its constituents while the coronavirus was resurging in early December, San Mateo County Health Officer Scott Morrow defended his decision to go it alone and keep his county open for business, rather than joining the other Bay Area counties in closing weeks before state mandate such as filling hospital ICUs.
“I look at neighboring counties that have been much more restrictive than I am and I wonder what that bought them,” wrote Morrow. “Now, some of them are worse off than we are. Does an unbalanced approach to restrictions make things worse? “
It is a question that even he had difficulty answering. A year later, it is clear that the blockages helped to contain the virus, but with so many variables from place to place, they did not always work uniformly or in the way that people could have predicted.
Epidemiologists call the riddle “unmeasured confusion”, in which strong correlations do not always lead to precise conclusions.
San Francisco and Alameda counties, for example, were closed for longer than the other counties in the Bay Area and had the lowest infection rates among the five counties surveyed, with San Francisco reporting 3,876 cases per 100,000 residents and Alameda 4,879. But San Mateo County has been open for business across the board for longer than other counties and ranked in the middle of the package with 5,077 infections per 100,000 residents, below Contra Costa (5,541) and Santa Clara (5,745).
Regardless of the discrepancies, however, the closings have had profound impacts on business owners and workers across the bay area. With restaurants closed for more than 300 days in most counties, for example, how could they not?
Firing, rehiring, firing. Order tents and heaters, build parklets for customers, buy 45 kilos of chicken – just to close again. What about restaurants with no space for outdoor dining?
“It looks like it’s been closed for a year,” said Edgar Saldana of his family’s Mexican restaurant, Los Moles, in Emeryville in Alameda County, which has little space for outdoor seating on the narrow sidewalk in front. “We feel like you died.”
Even if Saldana had a larger yard, Alameda County would have kept it closed for six months last year. Across the bay, in San Mateo County, outdoor dining was open for two more months.
Just three miles from Saldana’s Emeryville restaurant, her family’s sister restaurant in El Cerrito, Contra Costa County, with its newly built outdoor patio in the parking lot, was allowed to stay open for another seven weeks, a benefit that allowed it keep more employees and sell more sopes and mango mole. But keeping up with repeated and intermittent closings in each county has been a challenge, he said.
“You start promising employees more days and hours and immediately when they’re getting used to it, boom, never mind, it’s closed again,” said Saldana.
While companies like restaurants and beauty salons have suffered several waves of downtime, the news organization’s survey found greater predictability for non-essential retail stores. After the state cleared the way for retail stores to reopen with reduced capacity in June, they were allowed to remain open during the pandemic – even during the peak of the winter holiday.
In December, Amy Sidhom was one of a dozen restaurant owners in Danville who protested by staying open when Contra Costa County, along with San Francisco, Alameda and Santa Clara Counties, announced a new open-air restaurant closure. to prevent the post-Thanksgiving increase.
After his story of defiance hit the news, people outside the city flooded the restaurant in what they believed to be an act of solidarity against the government invasion.
“They were supporting a political statement when we were just trying to sell waffles and eggs,” she said.
When one of Sidhom’s servers asked a woman in line to put on her mask, the woman took her outrage to Facebook, calling the team “fakes” for “not really being against it”.
At the same time, Sidhom was criticized in Yelp reviews by people “making obscene and aggressive comments”, saying that she did not care about health and safety. The reaction was so strong that Crumbs stopped serving dinner after a weekend serving outdoors, said Sidhom.
“People got it wrong,” she said. “They thought we were against everything and we weren’t.”
A study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month found that in counties that opened for meals indoors and outdoors, infection rates increased six weeks later and death rates increased two months later.
The study did not prove that open restaurants caused more cases of COVID, but Cody, a public health officer in Santa Clara County, is confident that the blockages have had a significant impact in reducing the spread of the virus. At first, Cody was widely praised for her leadership in shelter orders at the site, but over time, she became the target of protests and personal threats.
“Do I think our approach in Santa Clara County was more protective and saved lives? 100 percent, yes, ”said Cody earlier this month. “Otherwise, I would not have taken the beating I suffered. Yes Yes Yes.”
UC San Francisco epidemiologist Dr. Monica Gandhi said she does not look at just one data point to determine the effect of a policy, nor the number of days open or closed, nor the rate of infection. She took a good look at the pandemic’s effect on homelessness, drug overdoses and wasted time learning in schools.
“California is the happy state of the blockade,” said Gandhi. “But I think we all saw – and we have to be sharp enough to say – that we didn’t get the result we were hoping for.”
Now, a year later, companies across the bay continue to pick up the pieces. With infections in free fall, the race to vaccinate makes business owners hope that blockages are finally behind them.
Lam, from the Hong Kong Hair Salon in San Francisco, is convinced that many of his clients have done business outside the county. But hairdresser Edith Moore, 74, of Ditto’s Salon in Daly City, says they did not seek her out. One morning on a recent weekday, his lounge was empty. “We are just waiting here,” she said.