State sets April 15 for indoor venues
Rules issued for concerts, conferences, live events
Indoor concerts, conferences, seated live events, sports and other private gatherings can resume in California starting April 15, state officials announced on Friday. The state also signif icantly loosened its re strictions for outdoor gatherings, as California’s COVID19 test positivity rate nears a record low.
“Everything is moving in the correct direction,” Dee Dee Myers, the state’s top economic adviser, said during a news briefing announcing the new guidance.
She said there will be more to come as officials work toward retiring California’s complicated, colorcoded reopening plan: “You will begin to see a pattern. We will be less restrictive.”
There are four tiers in the state’s reopening blueprint — purple, red, orange and yellow — from most restrictive to least restrictive, based on how widespread the virus is in each county. Under the new rules, how many people can attend events will depend on the level of restrictions in practice in those places.
Indoor concerts, performances and gatherings will still not be allowed in the purple tier. But they may resume in the red tier at 10% capacity for venues of up to 1,500 people and 20% capacity for venues with a capacity greater than that. Capacity limits increase as counties move into the lower tiers.
If venues separate people into sections, people in the “fully vaccinated” section can sit shoulder to shoulder but they still must wear masks, according to state Public Health Officer Dr. Tomás Aragón.
“This is really going to be a pathway to allowing venues to meet the capacity limits,” Aragón said.
He said that the state will not oversee vaccination verification and that venues will have to rely on selfidentification by customers.
“We anticipate in the future these solutions will be digital,” Aragón said, pointing at services that will soon be able to provide electronic vaccine passports. But he added that he anticipates individuals will only have to show verification once.
Under the new guidance, outdoor gatherings of up to 25 people are allowed in the red tier, with the gathering size increasing to 50 people in the orange tier and 100 people in the yellow tier.
The new rules are a sharp turnaround from the slow pace California has taken on lifting restrictions and come as the governor urges people to continue being vigilant about wearing masks and maintaining social distancing.
Even as new cases continue to climb in parts of the country Myers said the state is working toward retiring its colorcoded system for reopening.
Aragón said state officials are still following the epidemiology of the pandemic closely, and are depending on a rigorous program of vaccinations and testing to reopen safely.
“We’re monitoring everything carefully. We are monitoring variants,” he said. “Right now, even though we have the variants of concern in California, they are very small percentages and the overall numbers continue to be good.”
The private event guidelines came to the relief of tens of thousands of small business owners who have seen their sales evaporate during a pandemic that halted the conventions and gatherings that help power the Bay Area economy.
California’s rules are now comparable to those of other states, which allow at least 50 people to attend events, with most allowing 100 to 150 outdoors according to a study by the California Association for Private Events.
The industry group with 4,800 business members had been lobbying for guidance since last fall and had been eagerly awaiting the rules.
“The recently announced limits are economically viable for our industry and will allow us to get back to work shortly,” said Amy Ulkutekin, president of the California Association for Private Events.
The guidance is a crucial step for San Francisco’s tourism industry, which was the city’s biggest economic driver before the pandemic and heavily dependent on large conventions at Moscone Center. Last year it saw an $8 billion drop in spending compared to 2019, as conventions were banned from March until now.
David Lewin, general manager of the Grand Hyatt San Francisco hotel, said the lack of conventions has been devastating. The 668room hotel had 402 employees before the pandemic and now has only 28 working.
It closed for about half of 2020 and lost around $1 million for each month it was closed.
Lewin expects event demand to rebound this year.
“I think there’s massive pentup demand for people to get together,” he said.
Ulkutekin said hundreds of small businesses in the Bay Area have closed permanently during the pandemic due to the absence of events, and thousands have shuttered in the state.
Beyond event planners, they include photographers, catering companies, musicians, DJs, bakers, makeup artists and transportation workers. The organization said before the pandemic, California’s private events industry included 93,000 small businesses and more than 3 million jobs.
“It was so much longer than we thought it would be,” said Stan Vail, owner of All Seasons Catering. “The whole food industry’s been hurt bad.”
His company’s seven fulltime employees and around 50 parttime employees were all out of work in the absence of events. Vail said the company brought five people back to the office parttime in anticipation of the guidelines but the kitchen remains closed for now.
All Seasons was aided by a Paycheck Protection Program loan of $100,000 and cooking for a nearby college, but it provided much less business than serving private events.
Vail said having below 100 people at an event will result in higher costs, and smaller events with 25 or fewer people are hard to make financially sustainable for the catering company.
The lack of guidelines, until now, has disproportionately hurt the events business compared to other industries, said Chelsea Bowman Wonnell, head of business development and local outreach for All Seasons.
“Everyone seems to be back to work and rolling except for private live events,” she said.
Restaurants, outdoor concerts, movie theaters and even dogwalkers had health guidelines before private events.
Bowman Wonnell also books weddings and has only been able to organize tiny weddings over the past year, which isn’t profitable. But there are signs of hope. In the past two weeks, before the guidelines were released, she had dozens of inquiries.
“It’s going to give light to all of us,” she said. “I think those who are still around and been creative and stuck through this will flourish. It’s going to be a big renaissance.”