Merced County remains in purple COVID tier; 10 other California counties advance to red

California promoted 10 counties from the strict purple tier to the looser red tier of COVID-19 restrictions Tuesday — but Merced County was not among them.

Merced and other Valley counties, including Fresno, Stanislaus and Madera, remain in purple Tier 1, the tier with the most stringent limitations on what businesses can be open, and to what extent they can operate indoors or outdoors.

According to the Los Angeles Times COVID data tracker, Merced County on Tuesday remained No. 1 among 58 counties in the state for new cases, with 142.3 new cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days. Nearby Fresno and Stanislaus counties were Nos. 5 and 6 on that list, respectively.

Merced County as of Monday had a positivity rate of 6.4%, indicating the level of people among those tested who had a positive result. That’s an increase from 5.6% Friday.

Of the counties in purple tier, Merced County as of Monday had 14 cases per 100,000 residents. Merced County needs to reach and sustain at least 10 cases per 100,000 population before it can move into red tier, among some other key metrics.

Where the rest of the state stands

The state health department already promoted 13 counties to less restrictive tiers over the weekend, and signaled late last week 13 more were projected to move from the strict purple tier to the looser red tier Tuesday.

However, three of the latter 13 had case rates spike back above the red-tier threshold and therefore did not move up: Kings, San Joaquin and Yuba will stay in the purple tier, according to the weekly tier update from the California Department of Public Health.

The promotion from purple to red allows indoor restaurant dining and a number of other types of businesses, including gyms and movie theaters, to reopen for indoor operations.

Lake, Monterey, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Sutter, Tehama, Tulare and Ventura counties joined Sacramento in upgrading from purple to red. The reopening rule changes take effect Wednesday.

CDPH on Sunday promoted Amador, Colusa, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Mendocino, Mono, Orange, Placer, San Benito, San Bernardino, Siskiyou, Sonoma and Tuolumne counties from purple to red. Those changes area already in effect.

Eleven of the state’s 58 counties remain in the tightest restriction level: the three held back Tuesday, along with Fresno, Glenn, Inyo, Kern, Madera, Merced, Nevada and Stanislaus. Of those, Kern, Nevada and Stanislaus recorded red-tier metrics for the first necessary week, and will therefore be eligible to advance as early as March 23 if their case rates stay below the threshold.

Tier status is also a critical component of the state’s school reopening plan. Districts in red, orange and yellow tier counties face losing 1% of their portion of a $2 billion statewide COVID-19 safety fund for each school day they’re not offering in-person instruction for at least grades K-6 as well as one middle or high school grade, starting April 1.

Also April 1, according to recently updated guidelines, sports and live performance events can proceed outdoors, with up to 100 fans in attendance in purple-tier counties and up to 20% of a venue’s normal capacity in the red tier. Amusement parks are required to stay closed in the purple tier but can open at 15% capacity in the red tier, also effective starting in April.

It takes two consecutive weeks of meeting all necessary criteria — fewer than 10 daily cases per 100,000 residents; a test positivity rate below 8%; and, for counties with more than 106,000 residents, a “health equity” positivity rate below 8% in socioeconomically disadvantaged ZIP codes — to depart the purple tier.

Sacramento County in this week’s update had a test positivity rate of 3.2%, health equity positivity of 5.2% and a daily case rate of eight per 100,000.

The three counties that missed out Friday met both positivity requirements but had their daily case rates rise back above 10 per 100,000: Yuba at 12.1, Kings at 11 and San Joaquin at 10.5. The two-consecutive-week requirement means none of the three can move into the red tier until March 30 at the earliest.

Tuesday’s update from the state health department also promoted San Mateo County from the red tier to the looser orange level, which allows looser capacity limits as well as some indoor entertainment businesses like bowling alleys to open.

Another five counties could move from red to orange as early as next week: Lassen, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Trinity and Yolo.

The weekend promotions and some of Tuesday’s expected moves were prompted by a recent rule change: California loosened the cutoff for the case rate metric from seven daily cases per 100,000 to 10 per 100,000 once the state reached 2 million vaccine doses administered in disadvantaged areas, defined as the bottom quartile within the state’s “Healthy Places Index.”

The criteria will loosen again, for the move from red to orange, once that bottom HPI quartile reaches 4 million doses. The tally was at 2.3 million as of Tuesday’s state data update.

California COVID-19 by the numbers

Coronavirus activity in California has fallen hard from the intense and deadly winter surge.

Test positivity, viewed by health officials as a key metric for monitoring the true spread of COVID-19, was reported Tuesday at 1.8% for the preceding seven days — the lowest rate of the entire pandemic. CDPH data show this metric peaked during the surge at 17.2% on the last day of 2020.

Hospitalizations are down substantially as well. The state Tuesday reported about 3,050 virus patients in hospital beds including 827 in intensive care units. Each is the lowest total in more than four months, down from early January peaks of about 22,000 hospitalized and 4,900 in ICUs.

Deaths, which are the last metric to decline from a surge, have also cratered.

The state recently updated its online data trackers to sort COVID-19 fatalities by death date rather than the dates on which they were reported. Though this change shows the past three weeks as “pending” because of the time it takes to confirm deaths, it also shows that the second and third weeks of February saw daily rates of 0.2 and 0.1 deaths per 100,000 residents, down from the peak of 1.7 per 100,000 in December.

To date, California has confirmed more than 3.53 million COVID-19 cases and recorded 55,372 deaths from the disease.

Latest on vaccinations

CDPH in a Monday update, three months to the day since the first shots were injected in the state, said California has surpassed 12 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine administered. The total as of Tuesday exceeded 12.6 million.

State health officials say about 4.34 million people have been fully vaccinated and another 4.19 million partially vaccinated. That means about 21% of California’s total population, and 28% of its adult population, is at least partially vaccinated.

The CEO of Blue Shield of California, the insurer hired by the state as its third-party administrator for vaccinations, said late last week that the state expects weekly supply from the federal government to rise from its current rate of about 1.6 million doses to about 2.5 million in April.

The state on Monday opened vaccine eligibility for those ages 16 to 64 with qualifying medical conditions or disabilities as well as those who are pregnant. California also recently expanded priority to include public transit workers, janitors and the homeless.

President Joe Biden during a televised address last week directed states to make the COVID-19 vaccine eligible to all adults no later than May 1.

About 31 million adults live in California. CDPH on its vaccination webpage estimates that phases 1A and 1B — health workers, long-term care home residents and staff, Californians ages 65 and older plus a few other sectors of essential workers — combine for roughly 15 million.

Residents with preexisting health conditions make up about 4.4 million, CDPH says, though it is unclear whether that estimate includes overlap.

Citing a need to increase equity, the state earlier this month began doubling its allocations into the lowest HPI quartile — disadvantaged communities for which data show COVID-19 rates are high but vaccine administration early in the rollout had been disproportionately low.

A little less than two weeks ago, state Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said the bottom quartile had received about 17% of the doses that had been administered compared to 34% for the top quartile.

The gap has narrowed: data updated Tuesday show the bottom quartile at 18.6% and the top quartile at 31%.