San Francisco, Dec 5 San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced that the city will join counties across the Bay Area to impose significant restrictions across the region to mitigate the unabated Covid-19 resurgence in California.
Due to the aggressive increase in Covid-19 cases and continuing rise in hospitalizations across the city and the region, Bay Area counties will voluntarily implement California's stay-at-home order to significantly reduce gatherings and additional activities to stabilize the virus transmission, Xinhua news agency quoted the Mayor's announcement on Friday as saying.
San Francisco and the other Bay Area counties are opting into the regional stay-at-home order that Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Thursday for regions with less than 15 per cent capacity in ICU beds.
Although San Francisco and the Bay Area have not yet met that threshold, the city in partnership with Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara and City of Berkeley, is pre-emptively implementing these restrictions to flatten the curve of confirmed cases, which continue to surge, and prevent hospitals from being overrun across the region, according to the announcement.
As of 10 p.m. on Sunday, San Francisco will close all personal services, outdoor dining, public outdoor playgrounds, outdoor museums, zoos and aquariums, drive-in theatres, and open-air tour busses and boats.
Additionally, San Francisco will halt indoor limited personal training in gyms and limit outdoor gyms and outdoor fitness classes to a maximum group size of 12 people at a time, including instructors and participants.
The city's grocery stores must reduce capacity to 20 per cent, and all indoor businesses that are open to the public, such as retail stores, must create a metering system to manage and enforce indoor customer capacity.
The city will limit any outdoor gatherings to members of the same household up to 12 people.
"Given the steep increase in Covid-19 cases in San Francisco, we must do whatever is necessary in order to get the virus under control," Mayor Breed added.
San Francisco is experiencing a continued resurgence more aggressively than what the city has witnessed to date.
Local confirmed cases have quadrupled during the last month.
San Francisco is currently averaging 142 new positive cases per day compared to the 34 per day that it averaged in late October.
Moreover, the city currently has approximately 900 confirmed cases diagnosed per week and hospitalisations have tripled over the last month.
( With inputs from IANS )
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