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Supervisors to consider relief for bars, restaurants
Demonstrators at Central Park on Saturday called on the Davis Joint Unified School District to establish a plan to reopen schools. DJUSD officials have held multiple meetings over the last two weeks to discuss reopening parameters.
BY ANNE TERNUS-BELLAMY Enterprise staff writer Yolo County is considering waiving some fees for restaurants and bars in order to ease the financial burden many are facing trying to stay afloat during the pandemic. Before the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday is a fee-waiver proposal that would require up to $200,000 in General Fund money to replace fees paid by those businesses to cover the cost of environmental health inspections. Currently 518 businesses are permitted by the county’s environmental health department to provide sitdown dining, and the $404,340 they pay in fees funds the county’s food safety program, which includes routine and follow-up inspections required by the state. Annual fees range from $410 for bars to $789 for large restaurants and $931 for restaurant-bar combinations, according to county staff. During the pandemic, environmental health staff have continued to perform food-safety inspections even as many businesses have been limited to take-out and delivery or dine-in at reduced capacity. In December, the board directed county staff to devise a plan that would provide some relief to those businesses. Staff did so, designing a program that links the amount of fee waived to how much revenue each business has lost due to COVID-19. Businesses that have lost 50 percent or more of their revenue would
SEE BARS, PAGE A4
Monkeys develop promising immune response in lab BY ANDY FELL Special to The Enterprise In a promising result for the success of vaccines against COVID-19, rhesus macaque monkeys infected with the human coronavirus SARSCoV-2 developed protective immune responses that might be reproduced with a vaccine. The work was carried out at the
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VOL. 124, NO. 11
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School board unveils rules to reopen BY JEFF HUDSON Enterprise staff writer During marathon meetings on Tuesday and Thursday, Jan. 19 and 21, the Davis school board burned a bit of midnight oil as the trustees approved a series of motions, as well as special instructions to staff regarding further work, that provide much of the framework regarding what school will be like when local students start returning to classrooms at some point in the future. At this point, it isn’t yet possible to say precisely when students will start returning. The reopening of Davis school campuses is going to be dependent on Yolo County leaving the
County’s current restrictive Purple Tier status under the state’s system that ranks the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the school board’s plan, the County must move down at least as far as the less restrictive Red Tier (or lower), and then stay out of Purple Tier for at least two weeks, before the school district starts calling students back to classrooms. In an email to parents sent out at 4 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 22, Superintendent John Bowes outlined the multiple conditions that the Davis school district will need to meet before the reopening of classrooms commences: First, Bowes listed the conditions in the school district’s
control that must be met. ■ Establish asymptomatic COVID-19 testing for students and staff on or near each campus; ■ Set up classrooms for 6-foot or greater distancing, and install MERV-13 filters and air purifiers; ■ Ensure safety protocols are in place per Cal/OSHA COVID19 requirements; and ■ Define processes for notification, quarantine and contact tracing. Next, Bowes listed the conditions outside of the school district’s control which must also be met. ■ Yolo County must be in the Red Tier for two weeks (or a lower tier);
BY ANNE TERNUS-BELLAMY Enterprise staff writer Yolo County’s surge in COVID-19 cases continues, with 1,082 new cases reported since last Sunday and a record-high 47 county residents hospitalized with the virus on Saturday. With an average of nearly 155 new cases a day, the county remains deeply purple on the state’s color-coded, tier-based system governing what businesses can reopen and when. The ability of restaurants, places of worship, fitness centers and others to resume indoor services remains weeks away at the very least. Yolo County’s test positivity rate, on the
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other hand, continues to decline, and at 5.8 percent on Saturday, easily meets the metric of 8 percent or less required for moving to the less-restrictive red tier. The county must meet all metrics, however, including adjusted daily case rate and test positivity rate to move forward. The test positivity rate began declining rapidly last week when the state began adding all asymptomatic testing done by Healthy Davis Together to its data system. Previously only positive test results were included in the CalREDIE system and included in the county’s online COVID-19 dashboard. Testing by Healthy Davis Together is limited to those who live or work in the city of
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Davis, but the majority of new cases in Yolo County — as has been the case throughout the pandemic — are occurring among residents of Woodland and West Sacramento. The city of Woodland, which accounts for about 27 percent of the county’s population, has reported 42 percent of the total COVID-19 cases. West Sacramento, which has just under 25 percent of the county’s population, has 28 percent of the county’s total cases. But Davis — with 31 percent of the county population — has reported less than 15 percent of the county’s total cases. Yolo County’s health officer, Dr. Aimee
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County ends week with record cases, hospitalizations
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■ Teachers and staff who are being asked to return have had access to both doses of an FDAapproved COVID-19 vaccine, and are provided with up to two weeks for recovery following the second vaccine. Bowes went on to explain that the state’s tiered monitoring system for COVID-19 requires Yolo County (like every California county) to remain in the Purple Tier as long as the county has more than seven new cases per 100,000 (per week) or a test positivity rate of more than 8%. Yolo County is in Purple Tier (meaning “widespread” community transmission of the
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