Three hundred and twenty-five. This is the number of days Alameda County’s restaurants have been banned from serving indoors over the past year.
Eight months and two days. This is how long San Francisco’s salons have been closed.
At first we thought the closures might take a few weeks. At most one month.
But after a year of constantly changing orders for the closure of the COVID-19 that no one could prepare them for, the staggering impact on the Bay Area businesses can now be told. In a Bay Area News Group analysis of the closing rules and closures for a year:
Indoor dining rooms were closed in most places for ten months or longer, and table service was also prohibited outdoors for more than one-third of the year. Salons are closed more than half of the year.
Most theaters, theme parks and pubs took all year to reopen.
And while everyone suffered during the years-long closure of the pandemic, the news organization’s analysis found dramatic differences between the rules in the region’s five core provinces, which in some cases kept businesses nearly twice as long as their counterparts across the country. has.
It really hurt.
Just ask Julia Lam, whose Hong Kong hair salon from Mission Boulevard in San Francisco is limited to COBID, but only for four months. Since the over-and-over closures began last March, she said business has been declining by 70%. What’s more, she said she saw half of her clients train their business down the street to Daly City, just across the San Mateo County line.
“It’s not fair,” Lam said. “We’re just a block away, what’s the difference?”
Eighty-two days. That’s the difference. San Mateo County allowed salons to remain open nearly three months longer than San Francisco allowed, and two months longer than Santa Clara, Alameda or Contra Costa.
It did not start that way.
At the outset of the pandemic, public health officials across the Bay were united. At a joint news conference that would prove historic on March 16, 2020, six health officials stood together and announced the country’s first comprehensive exclusion to slow down the deadly virus, which has spread to coastal communities in the United States. Their order will apply uniformly throughout the region. The burden on hair salons, restaurants and retail will be huge, but everyone shares it. A few days later, Gov. Newsom’s government-wide shelter-in-place order follows and calls on all Californians to sacrifice together.
But as the pandemic spread from cruise ships to church choirs and parties to nursing homes, the infection rates, death tolls and stress on hospital needs varied from place to place – and ultimately the COVID lock-in rules. The state’s formula for monitoring the virus often shuts down one province while keeping its neighbor open. Decisions among Bay Area public health officials differ, and while each navigates fears and outrage and public safety, some provinces are holding the reopening under state guidelines and maintaining stricter rules. The gap between who opened and who then stayed widened.
Sometimes it seemed like a relay match – one province advanced a few days, a week or two ended and stayed behind – but for business owners, they all produced crippling complaints.
“We would have been even more effective if we had stayed together on a final step,” said Dr. Sara Cody, public health officer in Santa Clara County, said in a recent interview. “We have asked the people of Santa Clara County to continue making sacrifices and surrounding communities have reaped the benefits.”
In an extraordinary message to his constituents when the coronavirus was on the rise in early December, San Mateo County Health Officer Scott Morrow defended his decision to do so alone and keep his province open for business, instead. to join the other provinces in the Bay Area to close the weeks leading up to a state mandate as hospital ICUs were filled.
“I look at surrounding provinces that were much more restrictive than I did, and wonder what it bought,” Morrow wrote. ‘Some of them are in a worse place now than we are. Does this exacerbate an unbalanced approach to constraints? “
It’s even a question he had a hard time answering. A year later it is clear that the closure of the virus helped, but with so many variables from place to place, it did not always work uniformly or in the way people predicted.
Epidemiologists call the mystery ‘unmeasured confusion’, where strong correlations do not always lead to accurate conclusions.
San Francisco and Alameda counties, for example, were closed longer than the other Bay Area counties and had the lowest infection rates among the five counties surveyed, with 3,876 cases per 100,000 inhabitants and Alameda 4,879. But San Mateo County has been available for business longer than the other counties, ranking in the middle of the package with 5,077 infections per 100,000 inhabitants, lower than Contra Costa (5,541) and Santa Clara (5,745).
No matter what the differences are, the closure has a huge impact on business owners and workers in the Bay Area. With indoor eateries for over 300 days in most provinces, how would that not happen?
Lay down, recruit, dismiss. To order tents and heaters, build ‘parklets’ for eaters, buy 100 pounds of chicken – just to close again. And what about restaurants without a place to eat outside?
“It feels like it’s been closed for a year,” Edgar Saldana said of his family’s Mexican restaurant, Los Moles, in Emeryville province in Alameda, with little room for outdoor tables on the narrow sidewalk in front. “We just feel like it’s dead.”
Even if Saldana had a larger patio, Alameda County would have kept it closed for the past six months. Across the bay in San Mateo County, the dining room was open outside for two months longer.
Just three miles from Saldana’s Emeryville restaurant, his family’s sister restaurant in El Cerrito, opposite Costa, with its newly built patio in the parking lot, allowed him to stay open seven weeks longer, an advantage that enabled him to have more staff. to hold and sell. more ropes and moles of mango. But it is challenging to stop the weather-and-weather closures in every province, he said.
“You start promising employees more days and hours and as soon as they get used to it, blow, no matter, it’s closed again,” Saldana said.
While businesses such as restaurants and salons went through several closures, the news organization’s survey found the best predictability for non-essential stores. After the state opened the way for retail stores to reopen with reduced capacity in June, they were allowed to remain open throughout the pandemic – even during the winter boom during the holidays.
In December, Amy Sidhom was one of a dozen restaurant owners in Danville who protested by staying open when Contra Costa County, along with the provinces of San Francisco, Alameda and Santa Clara, announced a new closure of the dining room outside to to stop the boom after Thanksgiving.
After her story of defiance came in the news, residents outside the city flooded the restaurant in what they said was an act of solidarity with the government.
“They supported a political statement when we were just trying to sell waffles and eggs,” she said.
When one of Sidhom’s servers asked a woman in line to put on her mask, the woman brought her indignation to Facebook and called the staff ‘fake’ because they were not really against it. ‘
At the same time, in Yelp reviews, Sidhom is dissatisfied by people who “make ugly, aggressive comments” and say she does not care about health and safety. The setback was so severe that Crumbs stopped serving after a weekend of out-of-service service, Sidhom said.
“People misunderstood,” she said. “They thought we were against everything and not.”
A study released earlier this month by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that infection rates rose six weeks later in provinces opened to indoor and outdoor eateries and the death toll rose two months later.
The study did not prove that public restaurants caused more COVID cases, but Cody, the public health officer in Santa Clara County, is confident that the closure has had a significant impact on reducing the spread of viruses. Early on, Cody was widely praised for her leadership in the shelter-in-place missions, but over time, she became the target of protests and personal threats.
‘Do I think our approach in Santa Clara County was more protective and saved lives? 100 percent, yes, ”Cody said earlier this month. ‘Otherwise I would not have been beaten. Yes and yes. “
The epidemiologist from UC San Francisco, dr. Monica Gandhi, said that she does not look at just one data point to determine the effect of a policy, not the number of days that are open or closed, nor the rate of infection. She well researched the effect of the pandemic on homelessness, drug overdose and lost time learning in schools.
“California is the happy state,” Gandhi said. “But I think we all saw – and we have to be sharp to say – we did not have the result we were hoping for.”
Now, a year later, businesses across the Bay Area are picking up the pieces. With infections declining, business owners are in the race to get vaccinated hoping the locks are finally behind them.
Lamb from the Hong Kong hair salon in San Francisco is convinced that many of her clients are taking their business across the province. But 74-year-old hairdresser Edith Moore of Ditto’s Salon in Daly City says they did not come to her. On a recent weekday morning, her salon was empty. “We’re just waiting here,” she said.