Although hopes were high this week, Sonoma County on Tuesday once again failed to qualify to reopen business and industry more broadly under the state’s community reopening plan in the midst of the pandemic.
Despite a sharp decline in coronavirus cases and locally related hospitalizations in recent weeks, Sonoma County’s new daily case rate per 100,000 residents – a key measure of virus transmission – remains slightly above the state limit to advance from the more advanced stage. restrictive of the reopening regime in four parts of the state.
“Hang in there, we’re so close,” said county health officer Dr. Sundari Mase. “We are about to enter the red level”, a less restrictive stage that will, among other things, allow restaurants to finally eat indoors again after a hiatus since the end of last summer.
The county has been stuck at the purple level, reserved for areas between California’s 58 counties with wide circulation COVID-19, since the state launched its Safer Economy Project reopening roadmap in late August.
For local residents and businesses, the tight restrictions have been painful. There is continuous isolation and virtual education at home for most students and massive financial bleeding in many companies.
Experts from the business community estimated last week that between 75 and 100 companies in the county, many of them small, went bankrupt during the pandemic that started last March. Although a large group returned to work, more than 30,000 people were forced to leave work in the yearlong battle against the pathogen that killed more than 300 local residents and infected more than 28,500 people.
Peter Rumble, CEO of the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber, said he received several messages from members of the chamber on Tuesday that they were disappointed by the county again being deemed ineligible to resume further business activities.
But on the positive side, there is another realistic scenario that could develop later this week to qualify the county to reopen its economy even further.
Last week, Governor Gavin Newsom announced a statewide vaccination campaign for the poorest neighborhoods in California – home to 8 million residents. State officials said that once the COVID-19 vaccines went into the arms of 2 million people living in these disadvantaged communities, they would make the key viral transmission benchmark for reopening a little higher.
Once the 2 million vaccination limit is reached, a county in the purple layer like Sonoma would need a daily virus infection rate of no more than 10 per 100,000 residents, above 7. Sonoma’s case rate on Tuesday it was 9, and the adjusted level was 8.2 per 100,000, which would qualify the county to expand the community’s reopening, as long as the virus test’s positive rates do not increase.
State public health officials confirmed on Tuesday that in such cases, a purple-level county could move to red level the day after the state reached the inoculation limit of 2 million in impoverished communities – none in Sonoma County. . On Monday, the state vaccinated nearly 1.9 million of its poorest residents, according to the state’s online vaccination panel.
“The ray of hope is through vaccination,” said Rumble, hoping that state health officials will soon reach their vaccination goal. “It makes sense for us to start looking at vaccines as the key to how we can operate safely and get back to what is not normal, but something that takes us out of the pure blockade scenario.”
The county’s campaign to immunize residents against COVID-19 continues to be hampered by the tight supply of vaccine doses. Still, 11.6% of adults in the county of about 490,000 people were fully vaccinated, while 28% received one of the two vaccines required with two of the three vaccines approved by federal authorities.
For the time being, in the Bay Area, only Sonoma and Contra Costa counties are still at the purple level of reopening. On Tuesday, the day that the state does its weekly assignments to counties in reopening stages, 34 counties across the state remained in the difficult purple stage.
Neighboring counties in the Bay Area, Napa, Marin and Solano, have advanced to less limited stages. However, outside the region to the north of us, Mendocino and Lake counties join Sonoma in the purple layer.
Once Sonoma County moves to the red-reopening stage, local restaurants will be able to resume indoor dining with 25% of the customer’s capacity and several other businesses could expand operations. For example, gyms can resume indoor exercises with a 10% capacity and supermarkets can expand from 50% to full capacity. For now, restaurants and breweries are required to continue with the food, drink and outdoor food service.
Meanwhile, county public health officials on Tuesday reported three more deaths from coronavirus complications, bringing the number of pandemic deaths to 306. The last three deaths occurred on March 2, 4 and 5.
The three victims were a woman and a man, both over 64 who lived in the general population. The third was a man between 18 and 49 years old, also living in the community instead of a retirement home for the elderly.
Of the 306 deaths in general, 168, or 55% of them, were local residents of specialized nursing homes and assisted living centers. Even virus-related deaths and new infections among nursing home residents – who have suffered the most deadly impact of the pandemic disease – have dropped dramatically in recent weeks.
With the significant progress that county residents have made in eliminating the virus, Mase said “instead of being discouraged, we should continue with all mitigation measures (from the coronavirus) and all the things that people are doing”.
You can contact editor Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or [email protected]. On Twitter @pressreno.