California extends stay-at-home order for two regions

California will extend its stay-at-home order for two regions of the state — Southern California and San Joaquin Valley — where intensive-care unit capacity is strained from an onslaught of Covid-19 patients, the state’s Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said on Tuesday.

The regional order, which Gov. Gavin Newsom first announced on Dec. 3 and was set to expire Monday, splits the state into five regions — the Bay Area, Greater Sacramento, Northern California, San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. If the remaining ICU capacity in a region falls below 15%, it will trigger a three-week stay-at-home order, Newsom said.

The order requires bars, wineries, personal services, hair salons and barbershops to temporarily close. Personal services are businesses like nail salons, tattoo parlors and body waxing, according to the state’s website. The order also bans gatherings of any size and requires “100% masking and physical distancing.”

As of Tuesday, all but the Northern California region were under the state’s stay-at-home order, Ghaly said. Moving forward, however, both the San Joaquin Valley, which comprises the middle portion of the state, and the Southern California regions will remain under the order, he said.

Those two regions will continue to be subject to the restrictions until projections from the state show ICU capacity above or equal to 15%, he said. Ghaly added that projections will be calculated and updated daily moving forward. Just because the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California regions will remain under the order, it doesn’t mean they’ll be there for the full three weeks, he said.

According to a slide Ghaly presented at a press briefing, those two regions showed no available ICU capacity. Four-week projections from state health officials have determined that ICU capacity in those two regions is not improving, Ghaly said.

“We essentially are projecting that the ICU capacity is not improving in Southern California and San Joaquin Valley, and that demand will continue to exceed capacity,” Ghaly said during a press briefing.

Statewide, Covid-19 hospitalizations have increased more than 36% over the last two weeks to 20,390, Ghaly said. ICU hospitalizations rose more than 35% over that same period.

The extension of the stay-at-home order in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California regions didn’t come as much of a surprise after Newsom warned during a press briefing Monday that it was “self evident” the restrictions will likely need to be extended.

The Democratic governor said the state sent additional teams to help hospitals in Los Angeles county, where the growing hospitalizations were especially concerning.

Counties in the Southern California region include Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and Santa Barbara, among others. The San Joaquin region includes Fresno, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, Kern and Merced, among others.