Los Angeles County health officials announced Sunday, Nov. 22, they were suspending outdoor dining effective at 10 p.m. on Nov. 25 for a minimum of three weeks as five-day, new Covid-19 case counts rose above the 4,000-case threshold they’d set. (They increased to 4,097.)
“The persistent high number of cases requires additional safety measures that limit mixing in settings where people are not wearing masks,” L.A. County Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a statement. “We hope individuals continue to support restaurants, breweries and wineries by ordering for take-out or delivery.”
The new restrictions are on top of orders issued on Nov. 20 by California’s L.A. and Orange counties asking all non-essential workers to stay inside their homes between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Officials previously said restaurants must reduce outdoor dining capacity to 50% (with 10 p.m. being the cutoff for in-person service).
Outdoor mini-golf, go-karts and batting cages had reportedly been allowed to continue with capacity limited at 50%, according to a Nov. 20 order, which is to continue for at least a month, according to Eater. With cases on the rise, it’s unclear what further changes will be made.
LAist adds that the Safer-at-Home order is more of a strong suggestion for non-essential workers. There’s no word on how the county plans on enforcing such measures, which they previously instituted for a period in March. (Los Angeles County, by the way, hasn’t been out of the state’s most restrictive, purple reopening tier since it was created earlier this year.) These tougher rules are coming after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Nov. 16 that he was pulling the “emergency brake” on activities within the state as new Covid cases continued to surge.
