Three-hundred twenty-five. That’s the number of days Alameda County’s restaurants were forbidden from serving diners indoors over the last year.
Eight months and two days. That’s how long San Francisco’s salons were shuttered.
We thought at first the closures might last a few weeks. A month at most.
But after a year of ever-changing COVID-19 shutdown orders that no one could prepare for, the staggering impact on Bay Area businesses can now be told. A Bay Area News Group analysis of a year’s worth of lockdown rules and closures found:
Indoor dining rooms were closed in most places for 10 months or more, and tableside service was also banned outdoors for more than one-third of the year. Salons were shut down more than half the year.
Most theaters, theme parks and bars took the whole year to reopen.
And while everyone suffered during the pandemic’s year-long lockdown, the news organization’s analysis found dramatic differences among rules in the region’s five core counties that, in some cases, kept businesses closed nearly twice as long as their counterparts across the county line.
That really hurt.
Just ask Julia Lam, whose Hong Kong Hair Salon off Mission Street in San Francisco was shut down by COVID restrictions for all but four months. Since the on-again, off-again closures began last March, she said business is down 70%. What’s more, she said she watched about half her clientele take their business up the street to Daly City, just across the San Mateo County line.
“It’s not fair,” Lam said. “We’re just a block away, what’s the difference?”
Eighty-two days. That’s the difference. San Mateo County allowed salons to remain open nearly three months longer than San Francisco permitted, and two months longer than Santa Clara, Alameda or Contra Costa.
It didn’t start out this way.
In the beginning of the pandemic, public health officers across the Bay Area were unified. In a joint news conference that would prove historic on March 16, 2020, six health officers stood together and announced the nation’s first sweeping lockdown to slow the deadly virus, which was spreading in coastal communities in the United States. Their order would apply uniformly across the region. The burden on hair salons, restaurants and retail would be tremendous but shared by all. A few days later, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s statewide shelter-in-place order followed, calling on all Californians to sacrifice together.
But as the pandemic spread from cruise ships to church choirs and house parties to nursing homes, the infection rates, death tolls and strains on hospital ICUs varied from one place to the next – and eventually, so did the COVID lockdown rules. The state’s formula for monitoring the virus often shut down one county while letting its neighbor remain open. Decisions among the Bay Area’s public health officials diverged, and as each navigated fears and outrage and public safety, some counties held off on reopening under the state’s guidelines and maintained stricter rules. The gulf between who opened and who remained closed widened.
At times it seemed like a relay race of lockdowns – one county opening and pulling ahead for a few days, another closing and lagging behind a week or two – but for business owners, they all added up to crippling chasms of loss.
“We would have been even more effective if we had stayed in lockstep together,” Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County’s public health officer, said in a recent interview. “We were asking the population in Santa Clara County to continue to make sacrifices and surrounding communities were reaping the benefits.”
In an extraordinary message to his constituents as coronavirus was resurging in early December, San Mateo County Health Officer Scott Morrow defended his decision to go it alone and keep his county open for business, instead of joining the other Bay Area counties in shutting down weeks ahead of a state mandate as hospital ICUs filled.
“I look at surrounding counties who have been much more restrictive than I have been, and wonder what it’s bought them,” Morrow wrote. “Now, some of them are in a worse spot than we are. Does an unbalanced approach on restrictions make things worse?”
It’s a question even he had trouble answering. A year in, it’s clear the closures helped curb the virus, but with so many variables from place to place, they didn’t always work uniformly or in the ways people might have predicted.
Epidemiologists call the conundrum “unmeasured confounding,” where strong correlations don’t always lead to accurate conclusions.
San Francisco and Alameda counties, for instance, were closed longer than the other Bay Area counties and had the lowest infection rates among the five counties surveyed, with San Francisco recording 3,876 cases per 100,000 residents and Alameda 4,879. But San Mateo County was open for business across the board longer than the other counties, and ranked in the middle of the pack with 5,077 infections per 100,000 residents, lower than Contra Costa (5,541) and Santa Clara (5,745).
No matter the discrepancies, however, the closures had profound impacts on business owners and workers across the Bay Area. With indoor dining closed for more than 300 days in most counties, for instance, how could they not?
Laying off, rehiring, laying off. Ordering tents and heaters, building “parklets” for diners, buying 100 pounds of chicken — only to shut down again. And what about restaurants with no space for outside dining?
“It pretty much feels like it’s been closed for a year,” Edgar Saldana said of his family’s Mexican restaurant, Los Moles, in Alameda County’s Emeryville, that has little room for outdoor tables on the narrow sidewalk out front. “We just feel like it died.”
Even if Saldana had a larger patio, Alameda County would have kept it closed for six months of the past year. Across the bay in San Mateo County, outdoor dining was open two months longer.
Just three miles from Saldana’s Emeryville restaurant, his family’s sister restaurant in Contra Costa County’s El Cerrito, with its newly built outdoor patio in the parking lot, was allowed to remain open seven weeks longer, a benefit that allowed him to keep more staff and sell more sopes and mole mango. But keeping track of the on-again, off-again closures in each county has been challenging, he said.
“You start to promise employees more days and hours and right away when they’re getting used to it, boom, never mind, it’s closed again,” Saldana said.
While businesses like restaurants and salons endured multiple waves of shutdowns, the news organization’s survey found the most predictability for non-essential retail shops. After the state cleared the way for retail shops to reopen with reduced capacity in June, they were allowed to stay open throughout the pandemic — even during the holiday winter surge.
In December, Amy Sidhom was one of a dozen restaurant owners in Danville who protested by staying open when Contra Costa County, along with San Francisco, Alameda and Santa Clara counties, announced a new closure of outdoor dining to thwart the post-Thanksgiving surge.
After her story of defiance hit the news, out-of-towners flooded the restaurant in what they believed was an act of solidarity against government overreach.
“They were supporting a political statement when we were only trying to sell waffles and eggs,” she said.
When one of Sidhom’s servers asked a woman in line to put on her mask, the woman took her indignation to Facebook, calling the staff “fakes” for “not really being against this.”
At the same time, Sidhom was bashed in Yelp reviews by people “making lewd, aggressive comments,” saying she didn’t care about health and safety. The backlash was so bad that Crumbs quit serving diners after one weekend of outdoor service, Sidhom said.
“People misunderstood,” she said. “They thought we were against everything and we weren’t.”
A study released by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month found that in counties that opened for indoor and outdoor dining, infection rates rose six weeks later, and death rates increased two months later.
The study didn’t prove that open restaurants caused more COVID cases, but Cody, Santa Clara County’s public health officer, is confident the lockdowns made a significant impact on reducing the virus spread. Early on, Cody was widely praised for her leadership on the shelter-in-place orders, but as time went on, she became the target of protests and personal threats.
“Do I think that our approach in Santa Clara County was more protective and saved lives? 100 percent, yes,” Cody said earlier this month. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have taken the beating I did. Yes, yes, yes.”
UC San Francisco epidemiologist Dr. Monica Gandhi said she doesn’t look at just one data point to determine the effect of a policy, not the number of days open or closed, nor the rate of infection. She’s taken a good look at the pandemic’s effect on homelessness, drug overdoses and lost time learning in schools.
“California is the lockdown happy state,” Gandhi said. “But I think we’ve all seen – and we have to be incisive enough to say – we didn’t have the outcome we were hoping for.”
Now, a year later, businesses across the Bay Area are left picking up the pieces. With infections plummeting, the race to vaccinate has business owners hoping the lockdowns are finally behind us.
Lam from the Hong Kong Hair Salon in San Francisco is convinced many of her customers took their business across the county line. But 74-year-old hairdresser Edith Moore from Ditto’s Salon in Daly City says they didn’t come to her. On a recent weekday morning, her salon was empty. “We’re just here waiting,” she said.
