LA County restaurants, movie theaters and gyms reopen today

This time last year, Jacqueline Canter telephoned her birthday with about 100 employees hoping she could finally call them again.

“It was so heartbreaking,” the co-owner of Canter’s Delicatessen said Monday. ‘I had no idea [the pandemic] would continue for a year. ‘

She spent her last birthday weekend calling some employees to return their work to them.

“Now that we’re open, it’s definitely a good birthday,” Canter said Monday. “My birthday wish came true.”

After months of crippling COVID-19 closures, Los Angeles County has opened up a significant portion of its battered business sector, allowing the return of restaurant restaurants and the resumption of indoor activities at gyms, movie theaters and other venues.

Owners and employees hope that the latest round of reopening – led by the number of new cases of coronavirus and increasing vaccinations – will give the region’s economy a much-needed boost.

As usual, this remains a distant concept, and the institutions that are open are still subject to the limitation of how many customers can be served simultaneously, as well as the requirements for physical distance and face covering.

As LA County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer noted on Monday, “just because certain activities are allowed or certain reopening protocols are reviewed does not mean that these activities are 100% safe and risk-free.”

“We are still in the midst of a pandemic, and when there are more opportunities for interaction with people who are not in your household, the virus can transmit more,” she said during a briefing. ‘However, we have the tools to protect ourselves from increased transmission. We just have to use it and not get complacent. ”

LA’s wider reopening was made possible by advancing the purple level, the strictest category in the state’s four-level coronavirus roadmap, to the lighter red level.

A dozen other provinces – Orange, San Bernardino, Contra Costa, Sonoma, Placer, Mendocino, San Benito, Tuolumne, Siskiyou, Amador, Colusa and Mono – also officially progressed over the weekend.

Those 12, along with LA, house a total of 17.7 million Californians.

Moving from purple to red, the provinces are paving the way for: allowing 25% indoor dining at restaurants and cinemas; personally welcomes students in grades seven to 12; reopens indoor gyms and dance and yoga studios at a capacity of 10%; and expand capacity constraints at non-essential stores and libraries.

Museums, zoos and aquariums can reopen indoor operations, with a capacity of 25%.

Franks Enriquez, wife Sarah and their 1-year-old daughter, Skylynn, were looking at an 8-foot wolf pole in the Long Beach Aquarium when they saw another family approaching. They stepped back to keep distance from the other group.

“We’re still trying to be careful,” Sarah Enriquez said.

After a few months of suffocating housing, and leaving only for work or other necessary trips, the Bay Area couple felt encouraged enough by raising vaccination rates and infection levels to visit the family in Long Beach.

“I have not been there for a long time,” said Sarah Enriquez.

From 1 April, amusement parks can reopen with a capacity of 15%, with other amendments, in red-level provinces. Attractions such as Disneyland, Universal Studios, Knott’s Berry Farm and Six Flags Magic Mountain will initially be required to restrict visitors to California residents.

Outdoor sports, with fans, and live outdoor performances will also be allowed to resume on April 1, provided restrictions on capacity and concession sales are met, which vary depending on the home assignment of a home country.

Canter and her brother, Marc, said they worked until midnight Sunday to prepare the deli for its reopening.

They had to set up refrigeration equipment that had not been used for nine months, turn on the power in the main dining room, and move tables so that they were eight feet apart. They wiped tables, huts and anything else that needed to be cleaned.

When it was time to open, it rained.

“People usually come in here on a rainy day to drink soup,” Jacqueline Canter said. “But today the rain did not help us.”

Still, four ordinary men sit in huts and eat breakfast on Monday morning.

Among them was Bob Knee, 72, who has been coming to the restaurant since he was 16 years old. He ordered sausage and eggs and said eating inside was ‘normal’ again.

“It’s great,” he said.

Elizabeth Núñez, 32, a waitress, was fired from Canter’s a year ago. She stayed at home and cared for her four children – as a cook, a waitress, mother and teacher, sometimes at the same time.

“It was stressful,” she said, adding that she was happy to be back at work.

When she handed over the bill, Knee joked, “I did not order any of it.”

Núñez peeks winking and flickers a hint of a smile.

“Bob, it’s not April Fool’s Day yet,” she replied.

Cecilia Maya, 33, and Jennifer Rivera, 21, were among the patrons who ventured into the Collaborative Coffee Bar in Lakewood.

Another group, a few regulars, sit on a bench and chairs around a coffee table, while a single barista – the owner – takes orders and drinks.

Maya and Rivera did not expect the store to be open indoors, but given the morning rainfall, it was a welcome surprise.

“It did not strike me that we could sit indoors,” Maya said. “You just adapt to live like that.”

Collaborative Coffee, like many other coffee shops in the country, has created an outdoor space for patrons. But for Rivera and Maya, it just wasn’t the same.

“I feel like [outdoors] people just watch you and ask, ‘Are you leaving?’ said Rivera. ‘Binnekoel, you’re just chewing. Here I can camp. ‘

The two friends said they feel safe in Collaborative, which has distance seating for a maximum of nine people.

When owner Robert Lopez, 30, saw the news that some provincial businesses could open limited-capacity indoor seating, he immediately went to his cafe and how he could reorganize to accommodate people safely.

He arranged the seats himself on Sunday and added a few in the couch, another small table nearby and a single bench with a table on the other side of the cafe.

By morning, the few seats in the coffee bar are available. According to Lopez, he likes to provide shelter from the morning rain.

But the atmosphere was down. It’s hard to feel a sense of excitement or hope, even with the positive changes, he said.

He is worried about his customers. Did they feel comfortable? What about those who order to go?

“What if the thing we hope for is immediately taken away?” Lopez said in an interview after closing his store. “It got me out of here. You want to be excited and hopeful, but you just do not know. It leaves you in a place where your safety is not there.

“It makes you feel almost lonely.”

In recent years, he has felt distrustful of government officials. He questions whether they really understand the problems of adjusting each time with notice.

For Lopez, however, safety is still important. An uncle of his is in a fan fighting for his life and some of his friends have died of COVID-19.

Until government officials and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention say it’s OK to get together in larger numbers without spreading the coronavirus, he will not feel he has it clear.

“There’s always the ‘What if? ‘, He said. “It will never go away.”

Haqumai Sharpe was in an LA Fitness in Inglewood on Monday morning and was eager to go to the gym after not visiting one for a year. Sharpe, 47, regularly visits the gym at least four to five times a week; but during the exclusion, he moves his workouts to tennis and runs near his Inglewood neighborhood.

After being vaccinated, Sharpe felt comfortable going back to the workout indoors, although he made sure to arrive before noon so he could find a somewhat isolated area to lift weights.

“It’s been a while,” he said. “I just missed my routine.”

For Frederic Osho, life without the gym was awful.

“I put on weight,” he said. “I was depressed.”

Osho tried to exercise at home, but he missed the social element of exercise around other people and struggled to stay motivated.

Although LA waited until Monday for its redevelopment at the red level, other provinces – notably San Bernardino and Orange – opened their doors as soon as they were allowed on Sunday.

Virginia Ramirez, a hostess at Belgian Waffle Works in Arrowhead Lake, said the dining room of the popular family restaurant was closed Sunday morning. “We’re really busy,” she said.

Robert Garcia, the manager on duty, was eager to dine inside at Social Costa Mesa, a trendy new American restaurant.

“Business is strong right now,” he said of the clinking of tableware and customers’ chatter. ‘I can not complain. We are happy to have what we are going for. ”

But other businesses have said customers are returning more slowly.

“It’s not a matter of when the government says you can open up, it’s when people re-establish the routine,” said John Connor, owner of Tudor House, a historic dining theater in Lake Arrowhead.

The recent broad rise to the red level was made possible after officials revised California’s reopening blueprint in light of achieving a self-goal of administering 2 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in the state’s most disadvantaged communities.

Provinces are sorted into one of four color-coded levels based on a number of factors: new coronavirus rates, the rate of positive results among those tested, and a measure of health equity aimed at ensuring the positive case in poorer communities not significantly worse than the country’s overall figure.

It was previously that provinces had to record a case rate, adjusted based on the number of tests done, with or below 7.0 new cases of coronavirus per 100,000 people to move from the press to the red level. However, as the state reached its initial vaccination target on Friday, provinces with a case of up to 10.0 new cases per day per 100,000 people could now be eligible, provided they record two consecutive weeks of qualifying data.

As a result, another 13 provinces – Sacramento, San Diego, Riverside, Ventura, Kings, Lake, Monterey, San Joaquin, Santa Barbara, Sutter, Tehama, Tulare and Yuba – are ready to join the red level this week as they criteria money.

Government officials will update province-specific statistics and level allocations on Tuesday.

Despite the wider reopening, this is not the time for Californians to drop their hats, officials say. Dr. Mark Ghaly, the secretary of health and human services, said during an information session on Friday that there is still reason to be wary of participating in newly permitted activities, such as eating indoors in restaurants, as any place where people do not wear masks not. all the time carries a risk of infection.

The persistent risk of eating indoors in restaurants is one of the reasons LA County is demanding that those who eat together live in the same household. However, it is permissible for people from up to three households to eat outside at the same table.

“As we begin to see some hard-earned reopening, we need to be just as vigilant as ever,” LA supervisor Hilda Solis said Monday. “Continuous decline in cases is by no means a guarantee, and if we are not careful, we could easily fall into the press level again or worse, experience a new revival.”