Some Valley counties could move from purple tier by Wednesday. Where does Merced stand?
The Merced County Department of Public Health reported two new COVID-19 deaths and 88 new cases, bringing the total number of fatalities and cases to 421 and 29,796 respectively since the start of the pandemic.
There are an estimated 825 county residents who are actively infected — an increase of 56 cases since Wednesday.
The number of residents hospitalized in Merced County due to the coronavirus is 20.
There were about seven people in the ICU and six remaining ICU beds as of Thursday, according to the state.
Merced County has a positivity rate of 5.6%, indicating the level of people among those tested who had a positive result.
Merced County remains in purple tier
California public health officials on Friday announced several counties that could escape the most-restrictive tier limits on businesses and allow such activities as indoor dining and fitness workouts by Wednesday.
Unfortunately, Merced County was not among them.
In a statement issued Friday afternoon, state health officials said they expect Kings and Tulare counties in the central San Joaquin Valley to advance Tuesday from the purple tier into the red tier of California’s color-coded Blueprint for a Safer Economy .
Also on that list are Lake, Monterey, Riverside, Sacramento, San Diego, San Joaquin, Santa Barbara, Sutter, Tehama, Ventura and Yuba counties.
Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of California’s Health & Human Services Agency, said the official announcement of new tier assignments for those counties would come on Tuesday and take effect Wednesday.
Based on current COVID metrics, Merced County — along with Fresno and Madera counties — remain in the purple tier and likely will have to wait at least another week.
Under the purple tier, some of the most notable limitations have included restaurants being allowed to only provide outdoor dining or to-go orders, and gyms and fitness clubs not authorized to have indoor operations.
In the red tier, restaurants can resume indoor dining at up to 25% of capacity, gyms can reopen their indoor workout spaces at up to 10% of capacity, and other types of businesses can reopen or expand their operations.
What’s keeping Merced County from making the list?
The state reached a goal of providing at least 2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to residents in some of California’s most socially and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
That vaccine benchmark triggered easing one of the key measures for counties to move from purple to red within the state’s framework — the number of new coronavirus cases surfacing each day as a rate per 100,000 residents in a county. That threshold is moving from a rate of seven new daily cases to an easier-to-achieve 10 cases per 100,000 population.
Counties must also meet a threshold of less than 8% of residents tested for COVID-19 returning positive results over a seven-day period. Counties must meet or beat both the case-rate and testing positivity benchmarks for two straight weeks to be promoted to the red tier.
In the state’s most recent tier assessments on March 9, Merced County’s case rate was 14.8 infections per 100,000 people — which is 4.8 cases above the threshold needed to reach red tier. On the plus side, however, Merced County currently has a testing positivity rate of 5.8% — which is below the 8% required by the state.
Elsewhere in the Valley, Tulare County’s case rate was 9.5 per 100,000 population per day for the week ending Feb. 27. Fresno County’s was 12.6, Kings County was 11.9 in Kings County, and Madera County was 11.4.
Thirteen counties will move immediately from the purple to red tier because they already meet the relaxed threshold for two weeks as required by the state blueprint: Amador, Colusa, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Mendocino, Mono, Orange, Placer, San Benito, San Bernardino, Siskiyou, Sonoma and Tuolumne.
Gov. Gavin Newsom last week announced that 40% of the state’s vaccine allocations would be aimed at residents living in census tracts or ZIP codes that fall into the bottom 25% of the California Healthy Places Index. The index assesses neighborhoods on a 0-to-100 scale, considering factors such as economics, education, transportation, access to healthcare, housing, and air and water quality.
More than half of Valley residents in Fresno, Kings, Madera, Merced and Tulare counties reside in neighborhoods that fall into the bottom quartile, according to a Fresno Bee analysis of HPI data.
Connected with Newsom’s announcement was that the tier threshold for counties to move from the purple tier to red in the state’s blueprint would be relaxed once the California achieved 2 million vaccine doses given to residents of areas statewide in that bottom HPI quartile. As of midday Friday, the number of shots statewide in those neighborhoods stood at 2,016,539, setting the stage for Friday’s shift.
“What this means practically is that California is making good strides on achieving the commitment to delivering doses to the hardest-hit communities across our state,” Ghaly told reporters Friday, “and making sure that our first line of protection is going to those places that have shouldered the greatest burden of disease.”
But as Ghaly said last fall when the blueprint program was introduced, counties can also move backward if case or testing rates go the wrong way.
“We continue to believe that the blueprint has some of the strongest public health protections in the nation,” Ghaly said Friday. “As we move forward, if an individual county or series of counties sees its case rate lift upward, we will of course continue to have the protection of the purple tier above a case rate of 10.”
As recently as two months ago, none of the Valley counties were anywhere close to approaching the red-tier threshold, each at more than 70 new cases per day per 100,000 population in mid-January, during the peak of a winter surge of COVID-19 infections that also sent hospitalization and death rates soaring both in the Valley and statewide.
When California reaches 4 million shots in the low-HPI neighborhoods, the state’s blueprint tier thresholds will see additional change, with slight easing of the benchmarks for counties to move from red Tier 2 into orange Tier 3, representing “moderate” risk of viral spread, and from orange into yellow Tier 4, the least-restrictive level denoting “minimal” community transmission of the virus.
“We have our next milestone, but we have quite a bit of work ahead to get from 2 million to 4 million doses,” Ghaly said.
Because the relaxed purple-to-red threshold can accelerate counties’ progress within the blueprint, schools will also see a faster path to reopening for in-person instruction. “Schools that were anticipating a move from purple to red at the 7-case rate threshold can now make those moves at the 10-case-rate threshold,” Ghaly said Friday. “So we should see more schools across the state begin coming back or making plans to come back.”