San Francisco is expected to return to the state’s orange reopening level on March 24, but London Mayor Breed said on Tuesday that the city is likely to adopt some stricter restrictions than state guidelines allow.
It was not clear how the city planned to be more rigid than the state’s orange level guidelines, which allow breweries to open indoors at 25% capacity, music and sports venues to open outdoors at 20% capacity and bars that do not serve food to operate outdoors. The city is hold a webinar on Thursday in the guidelines.
“We want to be careful because, as we start giving people the vaccine, we also know that we are still in this pandemic. We don’t want to go back, ”Breed said. “I know that this San Francisco Department of Public Health – despite some objections from people I know are struggling with their business – has been very conservative.”
Breed said non-essential offices will be allowed to reopen under the orange level, indicating “moderate” spread of the coronavirus, and the city is likely to expand the capacity of in-house restaurants and gyms. The state allows restaurants to operate at 50% capacity and gyms at 25% in the orange layer. It still encourages office workers to remain remote.
“So we’re probably going to provide some additional expansion of things that we’re already doing and add office space. But in the end, we will probably continue to be more conservative than the state allows, to ensure that I never have to come up here and close our city again, ”said Breed, who attended a Western Addition health center. to get an injection of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on Tuesday.
San Mateo County became the first Bay Area county since autumn to return to orange level on Tuesday, the day before the one-year anniversary of the region’s first functioning shelter.
The cases declined as more people received vaccines. San Francisco reported about 75 new cases in the past seven days, a 26% drop from the previous week.
It was not clear whether many workers would return to the main office buildings after San Francisco reached the orange level. Many tech companies, such as Salesforce and Facebook, said employees can work remotely until at least the summer. Others, like Twitter, said employees can stay remote forever.
Google, which postponed its return to offices until September, said on Tuesday that no plans had changed.
Wells Fargo has opened a few retail branches, which are an essential business, but said his office plans will not change for at least six weeks. Most of the bank’s 266,000 global employees, including about 7,000 in San Francisco, are working from home.
“Until at least May 1, we will continue with our current operating model, which includes around 200,000 employees working from home and maintaining security measures in locations that remain open. We will notify all employees well in advance of making any significant changes and continue to create a careful, phased plan to return to the workplace, ”said Ruben Pulido, spokesman for Wells Fargo.
Other companies did not have immediate information about the reopening plans or did not respond to requests for comment.
Roland Li is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] @rolandlisf