Starting Monday indoor operations may reopen at restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, and secondary schools, as on Friday L.A. County hit the health metric triggers to enter the Red Tier of regulations.
Other sectors that may now reopen include museums, zoos, aquariums, and dance and yoga studios. Indoor retail and personal care services will be able to expand capacity from 25 percent to 50 percent.
These new reopenings come with caveats. Indoor fitness operations may only open at 10 percent capacity and indoor dining is limited to up to six people from the same household.
Outdoor dining also has a six person table maximum, but can include up to three different households. All tables indoors or outdoors must maintain 8 foot distance and all indoor dining rooms must have a HVAC air purifying system in good working order.
Movie theaters may reopen at 25 percent capacity where each group is seated with at least 6 feet of distance in all directions between any other groups.
“Just because certain activities are allowed and current reopening protocols are revised, it does not mean that those activities are safe and without risk to keep yourself, your family, your friends and neighbors,” said Muntu Davis, health officer at the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
Health officials emphasized that outdoor activities remain safer than indoor activities, and while they expressed optimism that case counts will continue to decrease, they urged everyone to continue abiding by distancing and masking measures.
“If conditions worsen strong state or local mandatory measures may be necessary again. We’re hoping that won’t be the case,” said Davis. “We urge everyone to exercise great caution and good judgment in the next critical weeks and months.”
On Monday vaccine eligibility will be expanded to include those working in janitorial and custodial services, public transit workers, those in congregate correctional facilities, and people with medical conditions and disabilities that put them at high risk of illness from Covid-19.
With the addition of these new groups over 5 million people will be eligible to be vaccinated in L.A. County, representing roughly half of the County’s population.
So far more than 2.7 million doses of the vaccine have been administered countywide.
There will be a dip in supply for the next two weeks as Johnson & Johnson deals with production issues, however officials expressed hope that supply from both Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer will increase significantly by the end of the month.
Officials did not commit to opening the vaccine to all members of the public by President Biden’s May 1st goal, as the County does not know what its vaccine supply will be week to week.
“I think certainly we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to expand to offering vaccines to everybody, but that will very much be dependent upon the supply,” said Paul Simon, LACDPH chief science officer. “We’re hopeful again that will be increasing significantly and we’re pretty confident we have a provider network now that is very robust and can do a lot more than it’s currently doing.”
Clara@smdp.com
