Two Bay Area counties have moved from purple to red under the Governor’s new color coded system for monitoring Covid.
Yesterday Governor Newsom provided an update on the state’s new system for tracking Covid cases. It’s a color-coded map of the state’s counties that replaces the old County Monitoring List. The new system splits counties’ progress with the virus into four different tiers: from purple, meaning the most severe Covid case count, to yellow, meaning a county has minimal Covid cases. (There is no green.) The plan also lays out guidelines for how businesses and schools can operate at every tier.
Newsom announced that five counties were moving from the state’s purple tier into the less stringent red tier. That includes two Bay Area counties: Santa Clara and Santa Cruz.
In total six counties in the Bay Area are in the purple and four are in the red.
Under this new plan counties can only move to a new tier if they’ve met that color’s criteria for two weeks. Newsom said that delayed action is important because after a holiday weekend like the one we just had, we often see a surge in transmission a few weeks later.
NEWSOM: As a consequence, we’re very cautious in terms of our approach as we move forward.
The state will be giving an update every Tuesday as to counties’ progress in this color-coded system.
