The Bay Area officially announces the reopening of indoor businesses from March 2021. Many indoor businesses such as restaurants have reopened, and the economy is gradually recovering.

Since August 2020, California started using a color-coded risk level assessment to determine a county’s reopening status, which could be found at https://covid19.ca.gov/safer-economy/. Whether to open indoor businesses depends on the risk level of the county. classified as “minimal” (yellow), “moderate” (orange), “substantial” (red), or widespread” (purple).

With people complying with effective measures such as social distancing and large-scale vaccination, the Bay Area has dropped from the initial purple tier to the less restrictive yellow and orange tier starting in March 2021, the Bay Area officially announced the reopening of indoor businesses.

Soon after the Bay Area announced the reopening of indoor businesses, some formerly lively business districts in San Francisco are recovering. At six p.m., on a certain eating street, many restaurants were already full of customers who came to have dinner, most of whom did not wear masks.

“It seems that the bustle here has returned to the past,” said Michael Xu, a man who lives a few blocks away from this street, while eating, “I often come here to eat. In the past few months affected by the pandemic, It’s always been very deserted here, and few people come to eat.”

Fusion Delight, a popular Chinese restaurant in San Leandro, only a ten-minute drive from Chabot College, is full of customers coming to dine at dinner time. There are also some customers waiting in line outside the restaurant.

It can be seen that despite a large number of customers, the restaurant still stipulates that each table must be separated by a certain distance to ensure compliance with social distancing under the pandemic.

A waiter in the restaurant said on April 9, 2021, “Although business is not as good as before the pandemic, there are still many people who come to dine. Our desserts have all been delivered.”

Prior to this, many restaurants only offered to order food through phone or mobile app and did not allow dine-in.

In the past year, many restaurants were affected by the pandemic and suffered cruel financial interruptions. Many companies closed down as a result, and a large number of restaurant employees faced unemployment.

According to the California Restaurant Association, thousands of California restaurants close permanently, estimated 30% of restaurants that have permanently closed statewide. Before the pandemic, 1.4 million Californians worked in restaurants. Since March, between 900,000 to 1 million of these workers have either been laid off or furloughed, and many continue to wait on an unemployment payment that never comes.

If you want to know which restaurants in your area have reopened for dine-in, you can use the local website or go directly to the restaurant website or call to check. According to the most recent update, On June 15, capacity and distancing restrictions will be lifted for most businesses and activities and California is preparing to get back to normal.