Marinscope
Restaurants around Marin County had a special reason to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day last week, the first time in a year many of them welcomed patrons back for indoor dining.
It was a special holiday for Sam’s Roadhouse as the corned beef and cabbage diners were flying out of the kitchen. That’s big change from this time last year, when St. Patrick’s Day celebrations were put on hold by the COVID-19 shutdown. Sam’s and other restaurants were forced to close their doors. All the corned beef in the kitchen might have gone to waste had loyal patrons not come to the rescue to buy the meat from Sam’s for parties at home.
Restrictions due to COVID-19 area easing in Marin County, with COVID-19 vaccines being dosed out and rates of confirmed cases of COVID slowing. Marin County is expected to move from the Red Tier to the Orange Tier this week. County officials report more than 45 percent of residents have received at least one vaccine dose. There have been 11,266 confirmed cases fo COVID in Marin, including 144 in the past two weeks.
Indoor dining returned at Creekside in downtown San Anselmo on Monday the 22nd after a full year of takeout-only service. The next day, the restaurant hosted a benefit fundraiser for the San Rafael High School Bulldogs’ class events and programs.
“It has been one year since Marin County joined six Bay Area counties in the nation’s first shelter-in-place order for COVID-19,” Marin County Public Health Officer Dr. Matt Willis said in his regular public address on Friday. “As we look back at that order as written, it’s remarkable to see what we did and did not know at that time. First, we didn’t know how long this would last. We wrote the order as a three-week shelter-in-place to temporarily change our routine to help halt the spread. We’ve been functioning under some kind of stay-at-home order for the past year. … We’re far from being out of the woods with this pandemic. There are many unknowns, but things are looking better.”
The developments have brought a renewed hope and a sense of normalcy to Marin.
Willis told the Board of Supervisors this week that Marin could move into the less restrictive orange tier by March 24. “We are now in our first week of orange tier numbers,” he said during his weekly briefing on the pandemic. “We need two weeks of success in the less restrictive tier before we’re moved into that tier. We anticipate we’ll be moving into the orange tier next week.”
What comes with a move into the orange tier? Increased density allowances for most businesses, including hair salons, retail shops, libraries, personal care services, all at 50% capacity; restaurants, places of worship and movie theaters at 50 recent capacity or 200 people, whichever is fewer; hotels and gyms and fitness centers at 25 percent capacity (up from 10 percent); bars and breweries are allowed outdoors under the orange tier. Office space associated with non-essential work would be permitted to open, though Willis cautioned that “we still recommend wherever possible for people to work remotely.”
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