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Here’s what can reopen when L.A. County moves into the less restrictive red tier

With coronavirus cases and hospitalizations declining in Los Angeles County, the state may soon allow the nation’s most populous county to move into a less restrictive tier in California’s coronavirus plan, allowing more businesses to reopen to the public.

Under the state’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy, counties that meet certain thresholds on test positivity and adjusted COVID-19 case rates will become eligible to move from the purple tier — the strictest among the state’s four-level reopening road map — into the slightly less restrictive red tier.


That would mean limited reopening of indoor dining and movie theaters, among other changes.

To qualify, the county needs to hit a daily rate below seven new cases per 100,000 residents, and a test positivity rate at or below 8%, for two straight weeks. L.A. County is quickly approaching those figures, county public health Director Barbara Ferrer said Wednesday.

More than two-thirds of California’s 58 counties are in the purple tier, including all of Southern California. Seven counties made the transition to the red tier this week, including San Francisco.

Both Los Angeles and Orange counties are moving in that same direction, data show. Case rates remain higher in Riverside, Ventura and San Bernardino counties.

“It is very possible that we’ll enter the red tier as early as next week,” Ferrer said in a briefing Wednesday, when the county’s adjusted case rate was 7.2 new cases per 100,000 people and the test positivity rate was 3.5%.

Ferrer said if the county is able to remain in the red tier for at least two weeks, in-person learning would be permitted to resume for students in seventh through 12th grade — but that’s a complicated issue. “We’ve already begun planning for this,” she said.

Meanwhile, state sources said later Wednesday that after 2 million vaccines have been distributed in California’s most vulnerable areas, counties will become eligible to move into the red tier more easily — when they are seeing fewer than 10 cases per 100,000 residents, rather than seven new cases or less.

If L.A. County reaches the required numbers to move into the red tier, state guidelines would allow for the reopening of additional sectors, although the county public health department may issue guidelines that are stricter than the state’s.

Here’s what can reopen if L.A. County — and other SoCal counties — enter the red tier:

Note that many businesses are required to have safety modifications in place to proceed with reopening.

Here’s what stays the same from the purple tier to the red tier:

To proceed into the next phase of reopening, the orange tier, counties must hit a daily adjusted rate of fewer than 3.9 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents, along with a testing positivity rate of less than 4.9%. 

Only two California counties are in the orange tier as of early March, both of them rural: Alpine and Sierra.