At the beginning of July, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that counties on State’s County Monitoring List would have to close some indoor sectors and today, effective immediately, those sectors must now close State-wide. These sectors must close indoor operations in all California counites: restaurants, wineries and tasting rooms, movie theaters, family entertainment centers, zoos and museums, cardrooms, and bars. None of these sectors are currently open in Santa Clara County.
Additionally, 30 counties that have been on County Monitoring List for three consecutive days must cease even more indoor operations. These sectors are fitness centers, worship services, offices for non-critical sectors, personal care services, hair salons and barbershops, and malls. Also, indoor protests are also not allowed. Santa Clara County is not currently on the County Monitoring List but it was on the list about two weeks ago.
The Governor said that if the closed sectors can adapt to move operations outside, they can continue. He explained that outdoors has proven to be safer than indoors when it comes to COVID-19 spread.
Newsom said that he is dialing back the reopening orders because of the increases in COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. The Governor said they wish to protect hospital resources especially in rural areas of California where COVID-19 cases are growing.
California’s current COVID-19 positivity rate has grown to 7.4 percent. In the last 14 days, there were 109,910 new cases, 1,104 new deaths, and 1,482,673 tests reported.
As of today, the county attestation process has been paused and is no longer accepting requests for county attestations. The State’s website says these attestations will be paused until further notice. An attestation is the process Santa Clara County went through very recently to be able to have their new health order.
For more information on the Counties affected and a list of sectors that must close visit the State of California’s website.