Although San Francisco has not made its way onto the state’s coronavirus watch list, it is pausing further reopening in solidarity with its Bay Area neighbors where the virus is spreading more rapidly.
That means the city will again divert from the initial reopening schedule laid out by Mayor London Breed last month, which would have allowed indoor dining and outdoor bars to resume operations on Monday. But “the virus does not know county lines,” Dr. Grant Colfax, the county’s director of public health, said at a virtual Tuesday news conference, noting that the situation in San Francisco is “precarious” and that “the virus is still out there, and there is more of it than ever before.”
“If any Bay Area county is in trouble, we are all in trouble,” Colfax said. “When we examine the health indicators, the regional picture, and what we are learning about the reproductive rate of COVID-19 in our community, we are forced to conclude that it would not be responsible to move forward with indoor dining or outdoor bars to begin on July 13.”
Although San Francisco hasn’t seen the uptick in cases that many other Bay Area counties have in recent weeks, indicators there are still rising. Colfax pointed to two, in particular: Hospitalizations, which have risen 25% in a week, and new cases per 100,000 residents. Currently an average of 6.1 of every 100,000 San Franciscans is testing positive for the virus each day; the city wants to keep that below 1.8 per 100,000.
The announcement came at the same time as Santa Clara County announced plans to move forward with reopening all businesses except those deemed “high risk” beginning on Monday. Outdoor bars and indoor restaurants in San Francisco were set to reopen on the same day until the city pulled the plug on Tuesday. Late last month, the city also scuttled plans to reopen salons, barbershops and tattoo parlors, which remain closed.
“Unfortunately what we are seeing, we have no choice. We are living in COVID,” Breed said. “I want to be clear this is not a decision we are approaching lightly. We know that in order to protect public health we are creating other challenges. In San Francisco, as we see changes in the data, as soon as we can allow places to reopen, it will be at the top of our list.”
Santa Clara County came off the state’s watch list Monday and moved forward with plans to reopen next week. There were still three Bay Area counties on the list Tuesday afternoon: Contra Costa, Marin and Solano. San Francisco has yet to appear on the list, but Colfax stressed the interconnectivity of the region.
San Francisco added another 28 confirmed cases to its count Tuesday and is averaging 61 per day over the past week, well below the spikes seen in Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa counties, where the seven-day averages have risen to 163, 160 and 129 cases per day, respectively. Per-capita, however, San Francisco’s total case count (447 per 100,000 residents) is higher than Alameda (408.5), Contra Costa (334.3) and Santa Clara (275) counties.
Although there are some alarming indicators in San Francisco, hospitals aren’t nearing capacity and continue to accept transfers from other counties, including some patients from the outbreak at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County.
Officials applauded most San Franciscans staying home over the Independence Day weekend but noted that there were still dozens of celebrations where people weren’t wearing masks. Any effect of the July Fourth gatherings likely won’t be seen in case and hospital data for another two or three weeks, Colfax said.
As for scaling back reopening and even reenacting another shelter-in-place order, like other counties in California, Colfax said “we are not at that point today” and was optimistic that abiding by the current restrictions would be enough to avoid moving backward.
