Marin County cuts indoor dining to 25% as coronavirus cases rise; Napa, Solano signal California could roll back their business reopening

Marin County is asking local restaurants to voluntarily reduce indoor capacity again to 25% to avoid a state mandate to do so, as indoor activities appear to be a major source of a recent rise in local COVID-19 cases.

Marin currently is in the orange, second-least-restrictive tier of California’s four-color reopening plan for its 58 counties during the coronavirus pandemic. That level allows restaurants to expand indoor dining to half-capacity. But a spike in cases since late October is estimated to push Marin down into the red tier by the end of this week, and that level does restrict indoor dining to 25% capacity, according to the county public health officer.

“If we stay in the red tier on the 24th of November, we would be forced by the state into the red tier. And we would have to be in red tier for at least three weeks before we could move out,” Matt Willis told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. “Our hope is that we can adjust our policies and practices so that we can stay below that level and we can avoid that being imposed upon us by the state.”

Downshifting indoor occupancy in Marin didn’t sit well with Lito Saldana, who owns Los Moles Hecho en Casa restaurants in San Rafael, Emeryville and El Cerrito as well as 5 Tacos and Beers eateries in Albany and planned for Walnut Creek.

“We couldn’t even survive with 50%, and now it will be even worse,” he told the Business Journal on Wednesday. “Now, the rain is coming, and people already don’t want to sit outside in the cold.”

His Marin restaurant at 912 Lincoln Ave. has indoor seating for 80, but half-capacity cut the indoor tables from 19 down to eight. While the El Cerrito location has a parking lot for outdoor seating, that’s not an option in the other locations, Saldana said. The cities of San Rafael and Emeryville allowed for use of a couple of parking spaces out front for seating, giving the Marin location four tables in the street and three on the sidewalk.

But sales are down 60% during the pandemic from before, and take-out orders only amount to 20% of business at the San Rafael restaurant. Of about 200 employees Saldana employed before March, around half were furloughed. The company got money in the second round of federal Payroll Protection Program loans to bring back many of the workers, but that money ran out.

Saldana takes issue with the claim that restaurants are a key source of COVID-19 virus transmission and thinks that large stores need to be addressed too.

“Do they want to hurt small businesses?” he asked. “We need to get together as small businesses and fight. We need to go to them together and say, ‘If you close us, you need to close everybody.’”

Driving the recent rise in Marin cases are indoor experiences and a demographic shift.

“For the first time since April, we had more cases among white residents than among Latinx residents,“ Willis said. ”Latinx“ is the gender-neutral term for people of Hispanic descent.

The cause of concern is a "second wave“ in cases seen since the second half of October not just locally but also in other Bay Area counties, statewide, nationally and globally, Willis said.

Between Oct. 15 and Nov. 4, Marin cases averaged nine daily. But cases in the four succeeding days were 22, 19, 14 and 24, and that’s the trend Willis said could cause the state to push Marin into the red tier if local action isn’t taken.

Willis noted that county health officers can be more restrictive than the state but not less. For example, other Bay Area counties still in the orange tier — Alameda and Santa Clara — already have limited indoor dining to 25%, instead of the 50% allowed at that level. Contra Costa also had limited indoor dining to quarter-capacity while it was in the orange tier, but that didn’t stop the county from being moved back into the red tier on Tuesday, one of 11 counties to move back into more-restrictive tier that day.

And San Francisco also had limited restaurant seating inside to 25%, even though it is in the yellow, least-restrictive tier, which allows full indoor reopening. But on Tuesday the city said it would close all indoor dining as of this Saturday, according to the Bay Area News Group.

Elsewhere in the North Bay, county health officers in Napa and Solano counties on Tuesday alerted their boards of supervisors to rising local case metrics and the possibility that Napa could revert to the red or even purple tiers, and Solano back to purple, according to the Napa Valley Register and video of the meetings.

Two weeks ago, the state informed Solano that its case metrics would push it back into the purple tier, the most restrictive level of the California Blueprint for a Safer Economy, launched in late August. In that tier, indoor dining is not allowed.

The county ramped up testing, and the adjusted case rate came back under an average of 30 cases daily — until last week, Bela Matyas, Solano public health officer, told the Solano supervisors. This week, the county case rate was on track to be average 50 daily, which would garner another state warning of a downgrade.

“Businesses operating is not resulting in these surges,” Matyas said about his observations from local clusters of cases. “It’s personal behavior in their own environments.”

He told the Solano supervisors that residents he’s talked to have more fear of transmission from strangers than from their family and friends.

“It doesn’t emotionally resonate with them that these are the people who are putting them at the greatest risk,” Matyas said.

Watch his presentation here:

Purple is where Sonoma County has been stuck since the new statewide reopening plan started. Sundari Mase, the county health officer, is expected on Wednesday to ask state health officials to recalculate COVID-19 metrics using thousands of unreported negative test results of area residents, according to The Press Democrat. The goal is to move the county up from the purple tier.

Another tactic public health officers around the Bay Area have rolled out to control transmission of the virus are guidelines for holiday travel and gatherings, as Thanksgiving approaches. On Monday, Sonoma and Marin counties joined several other Bay Area counties in calling for residents to avoid indoor social gatherings, travel outside the county and activities that bring them in contact with others.

Willis said typical patterns of holiday gatherings “is simply not safe.”

“People have to start making choices about their holiday pod and not to participate in holiday gatherings with multiple households,” Willis said.

The Bay Area counties’ guidance calls for this during the holidays: hold events outside, have no more than three households, meet together for no more than two hours, self-quarantine for 14 days after return from a trip to an area with elevated case metrics, and get tested before and after the trip.

Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, construction and real estate. Before the Business Journal, he wrote for Bay City News Service in San Francisco. He has a degree from Walla Walla University. Reach him at jquackenbush@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4256.

Update, Nov. 12, 2020: This story was updated with comments from restaurant owner Lito Saldana.

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