San Diego Businesses Prepare To Re-open -- Again

Speaker 1: 00:00 Is it the light at the end of the tunnel or a shot in the dark governor? Gavin Newsom's abrupt ending of the state stay at home. Order is a beacon of good news in the midst of what experts have dubbed the darkest months of the virus. Now, many San Diego businesses are scrambling to provide outdoor dining haircuts and other services to an eager public state. Officials say the move back to the purple tier is based on trends that show virus rates declining and hospitalizations easing over the next month. But with so much about the rate of vaccinations and the variance still unknown, much of the optimism remains cautious. Joining me is Lori Weisberg who covers tourism and the hospitality industry for the San Diego union Tribune. And Lori. Welcome. Thank you. What immediate effect has the lifting of the stay at home order had on San Diego businesses? Speaker 2: 00:55 The biggest change we're seeing is that restaurants that have been limited to just take out and delivery can now reopen for outdoor dining only not indoors yet. And another big change for businesses that have been shut down completely were hair salons, nail salons, barbershops, personal care services. They can be open indoors with what the state says is modifications, you know, capacity limits, but, um, they were completely shut down. So they they're, they're reopening. And another change on that. People may not be aware of. I think even during the shutdown orders, hotels, weren't allowed to accept guests for anything other than essential workers. They are now reopened for business for, you know, any kind of travel, um, zoos, aquariums, museums can reopen, um, that, that that's outdoor only though. So we already heard an announcement from the San Diego zoo Safari park that they will reopen Saturday. Um, and then we're waiting and announcement from SeaWorld. Okay. Speaker 1: 01:53 Are some of the people that you spoke with surprised by the state's decision Speaker 2: 01:57 Restaurants themselves got a little bit of a heads up, so they got word like a day or two before that this was, was coming. And they'd been through this drill so many times. I think that there's still some wariness about reopening and then having to shut down again. However, I think this time around, I think it's such a, there's been such a blow back on, on these on again, off again, orders that there's a feeling that we may not see another shutdown again for a while. So, um, so I think there's a sense of relief that they can start to gradually reopen the restaurants in particular, a number of big restaurant charters had put some of their venues, what they call hibernation and they were just going to wait it out. I think now you're going to see a whole awakening from that hibernation and, uh, uh, I should point out that many of them say that they cannot survive on outdoor dining alone. Speaker 1: 02:50 Yeah. What was the governor's decision based on, he talked about projections Speaker 2: 02:56 Looking at, um, hospitalization rates rates, um, and they're projecting that in about four weeks out. They think they're going to see these, uh, ICU rates and the capacity rates increase substantially the, when they did put the stay at home order, um, it was if you had anything 50 per 15% or less, um, availability that it would, um, that the you'd have to go to the stay-at-home order. They're now projecting that within a month. We'll, we'll see those occupancies rise and there'll be 33% around, a little more than 33% by February 21st. They seem to be eager to open that even, even though it's four weeks away, they seemed willing to take that Speaker 1: 03:39 Risk. You mentioned how tenuous some of the restaurant operations are because of this whole pandemic experience. Do we have any sense how much San Diego's restaurants and hospitality services have lost because of the lockdown? I think, Speaker 2: 03:56 Um, a lot of your fast casual places that can survive on takeout are known more for takeout can do well. The bottom line is most of them that aren't heavily reliant on delivery. Normally I'm take out say that, um, they were lucky to be breaking, eat, breaking even many have losses and profits profits are rare. I talked to one restaurant tour who told me yesterday that he hasn't taken a paycheck for himself since December of last year. So that was kind of a mantra that I heard yesterday was, you know, we, we can't survive on outdoor alone. Speaker 1: 04:29 What are County officials saying about when we might be able to move into that less restrictive tier and maybe have in-person indoor dining and all of those things that the businesses are looking forward to? Speaker 2: 04:43 So those are that's based on certain metrics and based on our latest coronavirus numbers, it looks like it could be a while based on these 14 day positive test rates and a number of cases per 100,000. And so to get to the red tier, you can't be at anything other than you have to have a seven day positivity rate of no higher than 8% and no more than seven cases per 100,000. Uh, as of recently, we were at 60.6 cases per 100,000. So they've estimated that we would need to average about 239 cases a day to reach that. And right now we're in the thousands, Speaker 1: 05:24 San Diego County officials are quick to warn the public though that despite this limited reopening that we have a long way to go, what are they warning people about? And what do they need us to do? Speaker 2: 05:38 The same thing, no gatherings with people of different households, masking, socially distant don't break, you know, businesses don't break the rules, um, because it's going to take quite a while before we can reduce the current case rate, significantly enough to reach the red tier, which is still restrictive, but it's, we need to have far fewer cases per day. Speaker 1: 06:02 I've been speaking with San Diego union Tribune, reporter Lori Weisberg, and Lauren. Thank you so much. Speaker 2: 06:08 No, thank you.