As of 12:01 pm on Saturday, January 23, COVID’s restrictions will be loosened. Bars and restaurants will increase from 25% to 50% of capacity and museums and theaters may reopen.
The Safer at Home restrictions issued on December 26 by the Shelby County Health Department, according to which citizens should limit activities outside their homes to essential work and activities, will be lifted.
Companies that closed on Safer at Home’s request included the Memphis Zoo and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
The zoo said it will reopen on Saturday.
According to Health Directive No. 17, no company is specifically closed, but all must adhere to safety restrictions, including masking, social distance and capacity requirements.
As the business will be opened, the guideline depends on increasing the responsibility of each person, including not attending large meetings and limiting meetings at home.
According to the directive, schools are strongly encouraged to suspend contact sports.
Although bars and restaurants can increase their capacity, a space of six feet between tables is still required. Customers are limited to six people per table. The establishments must still stop serving at 10 pm.
Smoking is still prohibited in closed places, but under the new rules, establishments will be able to dance outdoors, as long as the dancers are separated by six feet and belong to the same household.
The stricter rules came into force the day after Christmas, when the weekly positivity rate was well over 12%. In the ensuing increase, daily cases reached almost 1,000 three times between late December and January 10, a pandemic record so far in Shelby County.
Last week, the numbers started to stagnate and fall.
The restaurants welcomed the news that they had greater internal capacity to accommodate customers, but some restaurants that closed their doors under the 25% capacity restriction were unsure how long it would take to reopen.
On Wednesday, January 20, the Department of Health announced 237 new cases and no new deaths, a level not seen in Shelby County since mid-October. These improvements, plus the pace at which vaccines are being administered, have led the Department of Health to loosen restrictions.
On Thursday, January 21, the department announced that it will announce the location where it will administer second doses to people who received their first vaccines in the last week of December or early January.
Hundreds of members of the public were vaccinated in the week of December 27 without an appointment on days that the Department of Health had designated for first respondents. Subsequently, he closed the line and started demanding badge numbers for the first respondents or proof of age for people aged 75 and over.
On January 8, he launched the registration link for the first dose consultations that would begin the following week. In less than 24 hours, consultations were scheduled until the end of January, leaving few resources for people who wanted a word the second time except to wait.
Many of those who wait are elderly.
“The scarcity of information has caused a lot of distress in a segment of the population that already has enough to worry about,” said Karen McCarthy, a resident of Shelby County, who added that “growing old is bad.”
This week, the Ministry of Health said it plans to give a second dose, starting in late January, to about 9,500 people. He also said the delay on when and where it went, because negotiations for the site contract were still in progress.