Orange County Stays In Orange Tier, LA County Relaxes To Yellow

ORANGE COUNTY, CA —Orange County's coronavirus case rate failed to drop low enough to reach the less restrictive Yellow Tier in Gov. Gavin Newsom's Blueprint for a Safer Economy Tuesday. The county will remain in the orange tier of the state's reopening plan according to the weekly averages.

Once the epicenter of the nation's coronavirus outbreak, Los Angeles is now the first Southern California County to qualify for the state's least restrictive tier for reopenings thanks to plummeting COVID-19 rates. Notably, that means a reawakening of LA's famed nightlife after a year of pandemic closures. Meanwhile, Orange County remains solidly in Orange, with some regained indoor and outdoor activities. It could be another two weeks before the county meets the necessary criteria to reopen further. Already, restaurants are serving customers indoors and at Orange, bars are serving clientele outdoors. Orange County's cities are looking toward summer activities, planning movies in the park, outdoor concerts, and in some cases, fireworks, like in Dana Point.

Though two of the three categories for the yellow tier in the metrics were met, the county's weekly average of daily new cases per 100,000 residents improved from 2.6 to 2.4. Graduation into the yellow tier requires that the case rate must get below 2 per 100,000 people. A county must maintain metrics for a tier for two weeks before graduating to a less-restrictive level.

Read: Los Angeles County Qualifies For Widespread Reopenings

The overall test positivity rate improved from 1.4% to 1.3%. And the county's Health Equity Quartile rate, which measures positivity in hotspots in disadvantaged communities, declined from 1.9% to 1.4%.

"The numbers are looking good," Orange County CEO Frank Kim told City News Service. "And they're getting better. We're back to decreasing case rates."

The case rate as of Tuesday, for example, had fallen to 2.3 per 100,000 residents.

The county may get to the yellow tier soon, Kim said.

"It's possible now," he said. "Before the case rates plateaued at 2.8 and 3, but now I'm seeing then decrease. A week ago it was 2.7 and it's come down to 2.3, so it's moving in the right direction."
One thing that's holding the county back is its testing average. At 288.2 tests per 100,000 people, it is just below the state average of 355, Kim said. One reason Los Angeles County was able to reach the yellow tier was testing at a much higher rate than the state average and it gets extra credit for that, Kim said.

The county's average last week was 308.8 per 100,000 residents. Another 6,161 tests were logged Tuesday, pushing the total to 3,688,884.

State officials have told the county it will receive $4.5 million to encourage more inoculations, so county leaders are now discussing how to best spend it to get more residents to get a jab in the arm.

"I'm not in favor of going out and buying a bunch of gift cards so the question is how do you provide that incentive," Kim said.

About 1.6 million Orange County residents have received at least one shot of the vaccine, and 1,073,205 have been fully vaccinated, he said. Over the next week or so, officials will start deciding when to close super Points of Dispensing sites or PODS, and potentially shift into a more focused effort with mobile clinics, Kim said.

Orange County's COVID-19 hospitalizations fell out of triple digits for the first time in months Monday and remained there on Tuesday, while the county also reported just 72 new infections and logged nine more fatalities, with one dating back to December.

The hospitalizations increased from 95 on Monday to 97, and the number of patients in intensive care went up from 21 to 26. Tuesday's figures pushed the county's total to 254,116 cases, with the death toll rising to 4,978.

The county had 38% of its ICU beds and 76% of its ventilators available.