LOS ANGELES — California has met its initial target for administering more COVID-19 vaccines in the hardest-hit and most disadvantaged areas. The milestone marks the state's effort to more equitably distribute the doses and also clears the way for significant economic reopenings.
With 2 million doses now having gone into the arms of residents living in targeted communities statewide, officials are set to loosen the criteria necessary for counties to exit the strictest category of California's four-tier reopening blueprint.
The change allows some large urban counties, such as Orange, to exit the proscriptive purple tier for the first time in months and others, including Los Angeles and San Bernardino, to do so for the first time since the color-coded system was unveiled in late August.
Moving into the less strict red tier means those three counties — along with nine others, according to a Los Angeles Times' data analysis — will be permitted to resume indoor dining at restaurants and movie theater showings at 25% capacity, welcome students in grades 7 through 12 back for in-person classes, reopen indoor gyms and dance and yoga studios at 10% capacity, and expand the maximum allowable capacity at nonessential stores and libraries within the next few days.
Museums, zoos and aquariums also can reopen indoor operations in the red tier, at 25% capacity.
Amusement parks can also reopen at 15% capacity with other modifications in red tier counties starting April 1. Long-closed attractions such as Disneyland, Universal Studios, Knott's Berry Farm and Six Flags Magic Mountain are weeks away from again welcoming visitors — who must be California residents — after being closed for nearly a year.
How widely to reopen ultimately is up to local health officials, however, as they can adopt rules that are stricter than the state.
While some counties have clamored throughout the pandemic for wider latitude to more widely reopen their economies, others have adopted a slower approach.
Officials in L.A. County, the nation's most populous, confirmed they will widely align with the state's red-tier rules once the region officially advances. Wider reopenings will be possible starting Monday, they said.
"This milestone is the result of businesses and individuals working together and doing their part to prevent COVID-19 from spreading," county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a statement. "It will be up to everyone — businesses and residents — to continue driving down transmission and to follow safety directives closely to keep everyone as safe as possible by preventing increases in cases. When even relatively small numbers of businesses and individuals fail to adhere to the safety precautions, many others experience tragic consequences."
County Supervisor Hilda Solis called the move "welcome news, especially as many of our small businesses have borne the brunt of the financial fallout from this pandemic, and as our students struggle to keep up with distance learning."
"We have achieved this milestone and moved down to the red tier because as a county, we worked hard, looked out for one another and came together to defeat the dark winter surge," she said in a statement. "Although we are taking steps to reopen some of the hardest-hit sectors of our economy, that in no way means we can drop our guard now. We owe it to our neighbors, our local businesses and our children to remain vigilant so that the reopenings are safe and long-lasting. Wearing masks and physical distancing remain critical."
The accelerated advancement in L.A. and elsewhere is made possible through a revision to California's reopening road map that was unveiled last week.
In a bid to address inequities in its vaccine rollout, the state is now earmarking 40% of available supplies to be administered to residents in the neediest areas, as identified by a socioeconomic measurement tool called the California Healthy Places index.
Specifically, those doses would go to communities in the lowest quartile of the index — which includes roughly 400 ZIP Codes throughout the state in places such as South Los Angeles, the Eastside, Koreatown, Chinatown, Compton, southeast L.A. County, the eastern San Fernando Valley, Santa Ana, and a number of heavily Latino communities along the 10 Freeway corridor between Pomona and San Bernardino.
As part of the new targeted strategy, the state set goals of administering first 2 million doses in those areas, then 4 million. After reaching each mark, California aims to redraft its reopening road map to make it easier for counties to more widely resume economic operations.
The state system categorizes counties into one of four color-coded tiers based on a few factors: testing positivity rates, a health equity metric intended to ensure that the positivity rate in poorer communities is not significantly worse than the county's overall figure, and, crucially in terms of wider reopenings, case rates.
Originally, counties had to record a rate — adjusted based on the number of tests performed — at or below 7.0 new coronavirus cases per day per 100,000 people to move from the purple to the red tier.
With the state having met its 2-million dose goal, counties with a case rate of up to 10 new cases per day per 100,000 people are now eligible to advance. Counties still need to log two consecutive weeks of sufficiently low case rates to move forward.
A dozen counties have met that criteria: Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Contra Costa, Sonoma, Placer, Mendocino, San Benito, Tuolumne, Siskiyou, Colusa and Mono.
Eleven more — San Diego, Riverside, Sacramento, Ventura, Tulare, Santa Barbara, Monterey, Sutter, Yuba, Lake and Tehama — have recorded one week's worth of red-level data and would need to hit the mark again next week to progress.
Should they do so, that would swell the number of nonpurple counties to 47, home to a combined 90% of the state's population.
When the state reaches its goal of administering 4 million doses in the hardest-hit areas, the threshold to move into the even-more-lenient orange tier would be relaxed from a requirement of under 4 daily new cases per 100,0000 residents to under 6. Entering the least restrictive yellow tier would necessitate an adjusted case rate below 2 daily new cases per 100,000 people, compared with the current requirement of less than 1.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week that the state is also working on a new green tier "in anticipation of this bright light now at the end of this tunnel," though he didn't specify what that would look like.
"As we start to reopen, as we get to 10, 15, 20 million vaccinations, get closer and closer (to) herd immunity, then we will start to make it clear that these tiers were temporary," he said. "They're not permanent, and there's something beyond orange and yellow."
Over the last week, providers throughout California have administered an average of almost 188,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses per day — pushing the cumulative total to just under 11 million shots, according to data compiled by the Times.
Currently, Californians who are 65 and older, or work in the specified fields of food and agriculture, education and child care, and health care and emergency services, are eligible to be vaccinated.
Starting Monday, an estimated 4.4 million residents with certain disabilities or underlying health conditions will be able to join the line, too.
Officials say they expect that the supply of available doses will remain crunched over the next few weeks, though they're hopeful supplies will be more robust in the spring.
Amid optimism over the vaccine rollout, health officials continue to urge caution, saying California can ill afford to let its guard down and risk another resurgence of a disease that has already killed more than 55,000 people statewide.
Taking steps to stymie transmission of the virus — including wearing masks in public, regularly washing your hands and avoiding crowds, particularly indoors — remain vital, officials and experts say.
The state's metrics are heading in a promising direction, though. Over the last week, California has reported an average of 3,881 new coronavirus cases per day, a roughly 33% decrease from two weeks ago, Times' data show.
Hospitalizations also have fallen dramatically from the peak of the fall-and-winter surge. On Wednesday, 3,477 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized statewide, with 961 in intensive care. Both those figures are the lowest they've been since mid-November.
"This disease continues to be deadly. This disease continues to be ubiquitous," Newsom said. "It is not taking spring break off. This disease is not going to take the summer off. It will only be extinguished by each and every one of us doing what we must to mitigate the spread. That's why it's so important we don't run the 90-yard dash."
