Marin County Ordered To Close More Indoor Businesses

MARIN COUNTY, CA — Gov. Gavin Newsom Monday ordered Marin County to close indoor activities at various businesses amid a continued surge in coronavirus cases.

Indoor operations must stop at fitness centers, malls, hair salons and barbershops, nail and other personal-care salons, tattoo parlors, places of worship, and non-essential office settings. The order affects 30 counties on the state's COVID-19 watch list, which includes Marin.

Newsom also ordered the statewide closure of indoor operations at restaurants, wineries, movie theaters, zoos, aquariums, family entertainment centers and card rooms, as well as the full closure of all bars. Those restrictions were already in place in counties on the state's monitoring list but the new order extended them statewide.

In Marin, the modified order affects indoor hair salons and barbershops, indoor malls and indoor office space for non-essential services. The businesses may remain open, but only if they can be modified to operate outside or by pick-up service, Newsom said. Indoor protests are also prohibited, but any such outdoor activities are still allowed.

In Marin, wineries, tasting rooms, bars, brewpubs, breweries and pubs that did not provide on-site dining prior to the March shelter-in-place order must close all operations, including outdoor settings.

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Fewer Marin industries are impacted by the order due to Marin's cautious approach and pace to reopening local businesses.

On June 26, Marin paused some planned reopenings and stopped additional reopenings until further notice. On July 5, local indoor dining establishments were forced to stop operating after the county was added to the state's watchlist.

Statewide, there have been record numbers of infections in recent days, along with increasing hospitalizations. As of Monday, Newsom said 6,485 people were hospitalized across the state due to the coronavirus. The seven-day rolling average of people testing positive for the virus was 7.7 percent.

Newsom reiterated that the state's enactment of health-restrictions was being handled with a "dimmer switch," meaning the severity of the orders can be adjusted upward or downward based on the latest virus statistics and "trendlines."

"This virus is not going away anytime soon," he said.

"I hope all of us recognize that if we were still connected to some notion that somehow when it gets warm it's going to go away or somehow it's going to take summer months or weekends off, this virus has done neither. You've seen parts of the country with very hot ... weather where you're seeing an increase in positivity rates, an increase in hospitalizations and ICUs. Here in the state of California as we're seeing triple-digit weather in many parts of our state, we're still seeing an increase in the positivity rate, the community transmission. We're seeing an increase in the spread of the virus."

Also see:

• California Coronavirus: Latest Updates On Cases, Orders, Closures
• Coronavirus In Marin County: Latest News

City News Service contributed to this report.