Although San Francisco’s reopening status didn’t shift in the latest update Tuesday, city health officials said it was time anyway to “move fast” and cut off a “very concerning” rate of spread of COVID-19 with new restrictions on indoor activities.
When the clock strikes 12:01 a.m. Saturday, restaurants will no longer be allowed to operate indoors and bars will no longer be able to serve meals, Mayor London Breed and public health director Dr. Grant Colfax announced Tuesday. Additionally, gyms and movie theaters will have to cut their capacity, and further school openings will be limited to elementary and middle schools.
“We’ve been in this for a long time now and people are tired, so people have gotten complacent,” Breed said. “As a result, because of behavior, we’re seeing an uptick. And as a result of that uptick, it’s forced our city to make some very, very hard decisions.”
The reopening rollback comes less than two weeks after city leaders put a hold on plans to expand indoor capacity at many businesses, including restaurants, but stopped short of imposing additional restrictions.
In the time since, however, cases of COVID-19 in the city have only continued to increase.
In addition to the indoor dining restrictions, capacity at gyms and movie theaters will be reduced to 25%, and no high schools that aren’t already open will be permitted to move forward.
Colfax, the city’s top health official, said the rate of spread was higher now than at the same point during the surge this summer. It is also occurring at higher rates in wealthier neighborhoods that hadn’t previously been as impacted, he said.
“This suggests much broader virus transmission and has the potential to be explosive,” Colfax said. “It is entirely plausible we face a situation where our health care system becomes overwhelmed and reverses the current progress we’ve made.”
If transmission continues at the current trajectory, Colfax said San Francisco could face 300 cases per day by the end of December, which would be more than twice as many than any previous point of the pandemic.
As of Monday, San Francisco was averaging about 82 cases per day — a per-capita rate of about 9.3/100K — more than double the number it was two weeks ago, according to data compiled by this news organization.
Colfax said the city wanted to avoid any further lockdowns — including a potential shelter-in-place order over the holidays — which is why it was implementing these steps now, though officials weren’t blind to harm done to businesses that invested to open indoors only to be shut down.
Breed called the decision “heartbreaking … but necessary.”
“I know the people of this city are tired of me asking so much of you,” Breed said. “When we make these decisions, we don’t take them lightly. We look at the science, we look at the data. We think about every single restaurant and every single school and every single business that has not collected any revenue whatsoever since this pandemic began. We understand the challenges that exist.”
