Orange County Restaurants To Reopen, Vaccinations In The Rain

ORANGE COUNTY, CA —Orange County will still be subject to the tight regulations of the restrictive "purple" tier of economic reopening guidelines. However, state health officials Monday lifted all regional stay-at-home orders. All state prohibitions on outdoor dining, nail and hair salons and other restrictions are now rescinded.

It's back to the color tier system we go as Orange County hopes to get a handle on the widespread coronavirus pandemic.

The regional stay-at-home order was imposed in Southern California late last year when intensive-care unit capacity dropped below 15%.

Gov. Newsom cited improving hospitals' conditions, though state officials said Monday that with hospitalization numbers trending downward, four-week projections now indicate ICU capacity will rise above the 15% threshold.

"Californians heard the urgent message to stay home as much as possible and accepted that challenge to slow the surge and save lives," said Dr. Tomas Aragon, CDPH director, and state public health officer. "Together, we changed our activities, knowing our short-term sacrifices would lead to longer-term gains. COVID-19 is still here and still deadly, so our work is not over, but it's important to recognize our collective actions saved lives, and we are turning a critical corner."

Although the state order has been lifted, individual counties can still impose stricter restrictions than the state.

But in general, lifting the state order could mean a resumption of outdoor dining and at least some services at gyms, barbershops, and nail salons, among other businesses.

A possible resumption of outdoor dining could be the biggest economic boon of the announcement.

On Sunday, the California Restaurant Association sent its members a letter announcing the pending state decision, saying, "we thought you'd like to know this good news."

Laguna Beach Chamber of Commerce's CEO Sandy Morales was encouraged at the news.

"Orange County is still in the Purple Tier," she wrote in a statement, "this will bring much-needed relief to our small business owners, especially restaurants and salons."

The news came as Orange County reported 1,330 new cases of COVID-19 and 66 additional deaths Monday, bringing the county's totals to 224,618 cases and 2,704 fatalities since the pandemic began.

An estimated 158,291 Orange County residents have recovered from coronavirus since the pandemic began last March.

As of Monday, there were 1,703 people hospitalized countywide with the disease, 447 of whom are in the intensive care unit, according to the Orange County Health Care Agency. Those numbers are down dramatically from 1,818 and 482 on Saturday.

The county's state-adjusted ICU bed availability remains zero, and the unadjusted figure decreased to 9.2%. The state created the adjusted metric to reflect the difference in beds available for COVID-19 patients and non-coronavirus patients. The county has 38% of its ventilators available.

The Southern California region remains at zero ICU availability.

OC's seven-day test positivity rate remained unchanged at 16.7%, up from 14.5% on Friday.

"It's a continuation of the trends we've seen," Orange County CEO Frank Kim said late last week. "What this tells me is that all of the indicators are consistent. The testing rate is still high, so these aren't false numbers. Hospitalizations are down, the ICUs are trending down, and the case positivity is coming down."

But, he added, "If you look at our numbers, they're still very high compared to where we were before early November and the holidays, so it's not time to celebrate yet."

The county's Health Equity Quartile Positivity Rate, which measures the cases in highly affected, needier parts of the county, declined from 24.2% last week to 21.2%.

Vaccinations at the inaugural Super POD site at Disneyland continued after wind-driven closures Tuesday and Wednesday.

So far, the county has vaccinated about 73,600, Kim said.

The county's app and website, Othena, is functioning much better after some bugs were ironed out, Kim said.

"We have a virtual queue now, so the one issue we'll get is people will get frustrated they're not hearing from us because they're number 250,000 in the queue," Kim said. "But you no longer have to smash the buttons and try to get in when 3,000 slots open up."

As of this report, 84,799 residents have scheduled vaccine appointments.

The app has logged about 464,584 registrants, Kim said.

There have been some complaints on social media from users who said they were turned away even though they had an appointment. Still, Kim said about two dozen people not qualified in the state's first tier for vaccines have shown up with appointments demanding shots. Kim says if people with appointments do not meet the current vaccine criteria, they will be turned away.

The latest Super POD site for vaccinations opened Saturday at the Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo. There are about 2,500 to 3,000 appointments registered for Soka so far, Kim said.

The county hopes to ultimately open up to five large-scale vaccination sites, but it likely won't happen until supplies of vaccines are assured.

The OCHCA reported 15,466 tests on Sunday, for a total of 2,560,248. There have been 153,862 documented recoveries.

With the post-holiday case surges and deaths, the Orange County Sheriff's Coroner's Department has had to provide trailers with freezers to store an average of about 100 bodies until funeral homes can catch up and take them, Kim said.

Supervisor Lisa Bartlett said there had been problems with hospitals getting bodies to the coroner's freezers, which have the capacity for 1,100 bodies because physicians struggle with the paperwork as they care for patients.

Other issues include caps on cremations, which the county may have to lift, and burials at cemeteries, which will have to be negotiated with union workers, Bartlett said.

The county's jails' outbreak has continued to decline, with the number of infected inmates dropping from 61 to 55 on Friday. Authorities were awaiting the results of 411 tests. The number of inmates hospitalized dropped from three to two, with Fang's death.

Outbreaks at nursing homes —defined as two or more over the past two weeks — continue with 36 skilled nursing facilities reporting outbreaks and 49 elderly assisted living facilities reporting an outbreak as of Thursday.

The delays in dropping off patients from ambulances to local hospitals increased from an average wait time 90% of the time 29 minutes, 23 seconds on Wednesday to 38 minutes, 18 seconds as of Thursday.

There are 15 Orange County residents being treated at Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa, which was set up to handle overflow from local hospitals, and 11 patients from Los Angeles County.

Mobile field hospitals, which have been set up to help medical centers triage COVID-19 patients, are in operation at UC Irvine, which added 50 beds, Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, 25 beds, and St. Jude's Hospital in Fullerton with 52 beds, Kim said.

Officials are setting up or discussing mobile field hospitals at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo and Los Alamitos Medical Center.

This article originally appeared on the Mission Viejo Patch