国际英语新闻:U.S. San Francisco to adopt California's regional stay-at-home order to contain COVID-19

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- U.S. San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced on Friday that the city will join counties across the Bay Area to impose significant restrictions across the region to mitigate the current surge in COVID-19 cases.

Due to the aggressive increase in COVID-19 cases and continuing rise in hospitalizations across the city and region, Bay Area counties will voluntarily implement the state of California's regional stay-at-home order to significantly reduce gatherings and additional activities to stabilize COVID-19, the announcement said.

San Francisco and the other Bay Area counties are opting into the regional stay-at-home order that Governor Gavin Newsom announced Thursday for regions with less than 15 percent capacity in ICU beds.

Although San Francisco and the Bay Area have not yet met that threshold, the city in partnership with Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara and City of Berkeley, is preemptively implementing these restrictions to flatten the curve of COVID-19 cases, which continue to surge, and prevent hospitals from being overrun across the region, according to the announcement.

As of 10 p.m. local time on Sunday, Dec. 6, San Francisco will close all personal services, outdoor dining, public outdoor playgrounds, outdoor museums, zoos and aquariums, drive-in theaters, and open-air tour busses and boats.

Additionally, San Francisco will halt indoor limited personal training in gyms and limit outdoor gyms and outdoor fitness classes to a maximum group size of 12 people at a time, including instructors and participants.

The city's grocery stores must reduce capacity to 20 percent, and all indoor businesses that are open to the public, such as retail stores, must create a metering system to manage and enforce indoor customer capacity. The city will limit any outdoor gatherings to members of the same household up to 12 people.

"Given the steep increase in COVID-19 cases in San Francisco, we must do whatever is necessary in order to get the virus under control," said Breed.

San Francisco, along with California and the United States, is experiencing a surge in COVID-19 more aggressively than what the city has experienced to date.

Local COVID-19 cases have quadrupled during the last month. San Francisco is currently averaging 142 new COVID-19 positive cases per day compared to the 34 per day that it averaged in late October. Moreover, the city currently has approximately 900 COVID-19 cases diagnosed per week and hospitalizations have tripled over the last month.