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California Counties Enact Tighter COVID-19 Restrictions, Gov. Newsom Considers Another Lockdown
County officials across California authorized stricter COVID-19 restrictions on Monday, a day after the state reached 7,415 coronavirus hospitalizations, breaking the state’s previous record of 7,170 hospitalizations in July. More than 1,700 patients are in intensive care units.
Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer says, “The big unknown here is what actions were people taking over this long holiday weekend. If people engaged in high-risk activities, we’re in for a very rough time because we will have a surge on top of a surge.”
Los Angeles County enacted new rules asking its 10 million residents to stay home “as much as possible,” prohibiting them from gathering with people outside of their households for public or private occasions, except for faith-based services and protests.
Santa Clara County prohibited all high school, college and professional sports and placed a quarantine for people traveling to the region from areas more than 150 miles away.
San Francisco and San Mateo counties shifted to the most restrictive purple tier in the state’s pandemic blueprint for the economy. That forced most indoor activities to close and placed residents under curfew starting Monday night.
The new restrictions came as California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Monday, he is considering reinstating a stay-at-home order for most of California. He cited a surge in COVID-19 cases that threaten to overwhelm ICU bed capacity in most areas.
California has recorded nearly 1.2 million confirmed cases since the pandemic began last spring including more than 19,000 virus-related deaths.
On Monday, Gov. Newsom also announced that California will provide temporary tax relief for eligible businesses impacted by COVID-19 restrictions. The temporary tax relief entails an automatic three-month income tax extension for taxpayers filing less than $1 million in sales tax, extends the availability of existing interest and penalty-free payment agreements to companies with up to $5 million in taxable sales and provides expanded interest free payment options for larger businesses particularly affected by significant restrictions on operations based on COVID-19 transmissions.
In partnership with the Legislature, California will also provide $500 million in new COVID-19 Relief Grant funding for small businesses.
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