The San Francisco home order, which was expected to be suspended on January 7, 2021, has been extended “indefinitely,” Mayor London Breed and Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax announced on Thursday. In addition, officials say, the city can maintain its lifestyle at home even after the state suspends it, depending on “key health indicators”. This means that activities, including outdoor dining, will remain banned in San Francsico for an unforeseen period of time.
The announcement came as a surprise to those who attended Colfax’s final year speech, which was delivered on December 29. Although he warned that New Year’s Eve meetings could be “catastrophic” for the region’s COVID-19 case rate, he also said that the increase in positive coronavirus tests was stabilizing. He gave, we should note, no indication that the city expected its current blockade – that the region voluntarily entered on December 6 and was made official by the state on December 16 – would continue into the next week.
In a press release sent by the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management on December 31, officials wrote that “due to ICU regional capacity limitations and the steady increase in cases, San Francisco does not expect the Bay Area to reach state limits to suspend order “until January 7. This is probably a reasonable expectation: the state requires the entire Bay Area region, which includes the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara, Monterey, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Solano and San Francisco, as well as the city of Berkeley, to demonstrate that 15% of the hospital beds in its intensive care unit are free of charge. Currently, while San Francsico has about 32% availability, the region as a whole is 7.5%.
The announcement of the stay-at-home extension was a disappointment to Laurie Thomas, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association’s local dining lobby. “This is not the news we expected to hear,” she said Thursday morning, even though acknowledging that “given the 7.5 percent regional ICU capacity number published yesterday,” she knew the bay area it was “unlikely to be released from that request on January 8.”
That said, Thomas says he is happy that the announcement was made now, unlike next week, when many assumed the order would be suspended. “We appreciate the city’s effort to provide companies with earlier notice for planning purposes,” says Thomas, and “we appreciate the recently approved COVID federal relief bill,” but “we continue to emphasize that we need more financial relief. the city of San Francisco, the state of California and the federal government. “
In addition, officials say, a public health order implemented on Dec. 17 that requires “anyone who travels, moves or returns to San Francisco from anywhere outside the bay area” to be quarantined for 10 days has been extended after the initial end date of January 4. It is a decision that “responds to the significant prevalence of coronavirus across the state and country,” say the authorities, and aims to protect “against the spread of a new variant of the virus recently detected in the United Kingdom, Colorado and California.”
Even after the number of beds in the region’s ICU allows the order to stay at home to be suspended, the city can still be closed, say Breed and Colfax. “As soon as the State suspends the regional stay order at home,” the SF “will reevaluate the key health indicators to determine whether they support the relaxation of current restrictions on business and activities and resume the measured reopening process,” they say. In other words, even after the state says activities like outdoor dining can be resumed, San Francisco can continue to restrict restaurants to delivery and delivery.
One reason San Francisco can keep the home stay system in place is that, so far, it seems to be working. “Although cases continue to increase, they are increasing at a slower rate than when the requests were implemented,” the city said in a statement. “As a result of our collective actions, more than 400 deaths may have prevented it.”
“We have been proactive in placing the order to stay at home and travel quarantine to protect the Franciscans and in the hope that, acting quickly, we could flatten the curve and reopen faster,” says Breed. “This seems to be working, but we need more time to determine if we are going in the right direction and that the December holidays are not delaying us. There are flashes of hope and now is not the time to give up. “
See the full announcement of the extension to stay at home here: