Mendocino Co. moving to more restrictive purple tier — Newsom moves preemptively as COVID surges nationwide

By Adrian Fernandez Baumann | November 16, 2020

In early Sept. the County began to provide official information from the state about about the official time, percentage of tests conducted daily that come back positive, and the number of new cases per day. The state uses the average number of new cases per day per 100,000 people, on a seven day lagging average, and the positive cases as the determiners of which "tier" the county sits in. It's important to note that because Mendo has about 87,000 people, the average number per 100,000 people per day is different from the actual average number of new cases.

UPDATE 5:30 p.m. — Here’s our latest:

County confirms purple tier begins Tues. — most school openings nixed — indoor dining, gyms & religious services banned — retail occupancy restricted (with graphs)

ORIGINAL
WILLITS, 11/16/20 — Mendocino County will be moving back in to the “purple tier” of COVID-19 restrictions, as yet another surge of the virus afflicts the nation and California. The purple tier is the most restrictive and include prohibitions on indoor dining, indoor church services, and gyms among many other things.

Governor Newsom is expected to make a statement on the matter at his noon press conference. Though the rules had previously stipulated that two weeks of a more than 7 cases per day per 100,000 residents (the qualification of purple tier) would be the trigger to kick a county back into the more restrictive tier, Newsom is expected to change that rule today — the trigger will now be just one week of “purple level” case positivity. Pursuant to that change Mendocino will be brought back into purple, potentially as early as this afternoon.