San Mateo County Reports 33 New Coronavirus Cases, No Deaths
SAN MATEO COUNTY, CA — San Mateo County Health reported 33 additional coronavirus cases Thursday.
The latest report brings the countywide case count to 10,655.
The county reported no additional coronavirus-related fatalities Thursday, leaving its COVID-19 death toll at 155.
There were 24 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in San Mateo County as of Thursday, of which eight were being treated in intensive care units.
Elsewhere around the Bay Area and beyond, starting this Monday, San Mateo County will launch a COVID-19 compliance unit that will warn and cite businesses that fail to follow the county's pandemic-related health order.
During a media briefing on Wednesday, County Manager Mike Callagy said that people will be able to call 211 or go online to report businesses that have not been compliant.
Callagy said the compliance unit will work with businesses to ensure that they understand what is required of them.
Under the county's health order, businesses must implement social distancing protocols, require face coverings, and provide hand sanitizer or soap and water.
Businesses must also prepare and distribute a health and safety plan to personnel.
The full health order can be found here.
California public health officials are facing pushback on the state's coronavirus pandemic reopening plan from an unlikely source: bowling alley owners and bowling enthusiasts.
Bowling alley owners across the state and their trade associations have decried California's tiered pandemic reopening system, arguing that it is killing small, family-owned businesses.
"Most of them think they've only got maybe a month or two left before they have to decide whether they want to close permanently or not," said Bob Thomas, executive director of the trade association Nor Cal Bowling Centers.
The state's bowling alley owners and bowling enthusiasts have been exasperated in recent months with the state's reopening plans, which do not permit bowling alleys to open before activities like indoor dining, gyms and fitness centers and movie theaters.
In August, a little more than a week before Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state's public health officials rolled out California's tiered reopening plan, bowlers in San Diego rallied to call attention to concerns that the industry could collapse altogether if the state didn't allow them to open.
While such rallies have not been common in the Bay Area, Thomas said Nor Cal Bowling has pleaded with state and local public health officials as well as state legislators to "just communicate with us."
Currently, a county must be in Tier 3, or the "orange tier," of the state's reopening plan to allow so-called family entertainment centers like bowling alleys and climbing gyms to reopen at 25 percent of maximum capacity.
Only three of the Bay Area's counties -- San Francisco, Alameda and Santa Clara -- are in the orange tier. State officials have described the reopening plan as "slow and stringent," with the intent of reducing the chance of another large-scale outbreak in California's largest population centers.
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There have been 866,613 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 16,806 coronavirus-related deaths in California as of Thursday afternoon according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The United States had 7,972,886 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 217,721 coronavirus-related fatalities as of Thursday afternoon.
There have been 38,786,328 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 1,096,003 deaths reported globally as of Thursday afternoon.
— Bay City News contributed to this report
This article originally appeared on the San Mateo Patch
