Is anyone following the stay-at-home order, and is anyone enforcing it?

Here’s an easy Christmas wish list: stuff I miss doing. Going out to dinner, hosting dinner parties for friends, reading a newspaper at a coffee shop. The list is long and it got even longer on Dec. 13 when a new stay-at-home order took effect in Monterey County, and will remain in effect until at least Jan. 11.

It is not fun to be a rule follower when it means saying no to things on my Christmas list. But I am saying no because the number of Covid-19 cases is surging in Monterey County, the number of hospitalized patients is surging and ICUs are at the brink of capacity and because I want this pandemic to end so businesses can reopen, people can go back to work and school and life can return to normal. There is an end in sight, if we hunker down and commit.

That’s the mindset of Ric Encarnacion, assistant bureau chief of the Environmental Health Bureau for Monterey County, whose team of about 40 inspectors are responsible for checking on some 10,000 health-permitted businesses in Monterey County, looking for things like roaches, broken glass or chemicals. The businesses they examine include restaurants, gas stations, cannabis businesses, medical offices and more.

In the pandemic, their routine inspections have taken on a new face as SIP enforcement.

“Some people are proclaiming it’s unjust overreach, but honestly, it’s nothing new,” Encarnacion says. “The health code is the health code. There really is no excuse for not following these simple standards.”

But look around, and you’ll find a range of objections to those simple standards.

The Health Department’s most extreme action is to revoke a health permit from a business, which means the business can no longer operate. Out of the thousands of businesses they have inspected during the pandemic, they’ve only issued 11 citations – a remarkably low number, and a sign of overwhelmingly good compliance. They’re attempting to revoke only one business’ health permit, awaiting a ruling by an administrative law judge.

I find it ironic that when I call Richard Dunnuck of Aloha Coffee in Monterey to ask about possibly losing his permit, he wants to talk about following the law. “You have to abide by laws,” he says. His take is that the Health Department is discriminating against him – he tells me that he has a medical issue and a religious conviction, neither of which he will elaborate upon, that mean he does not wear a mask at all times – and he intends to sue the county. He says he is represented by the Constitutional Law Group, which has this message on its homepage: “We are in a very dark time where many components of our government are actively working to destroy our rights under the pretense of a ‘global pandemic.’” (Yes, you should cringe when you see the quote marks. It’s real.)

But it’s not your right to endanger other people in the course of doing business.

The enforcement approach from all of the agencies I spoke to is education first. The Environmental Health Bureau takes up health-permitted businesses; it’s up to law enforcement to respond to forbidden multi-household gatherings. Salinas Police Department spokesperson Miguel Cabrera says officers will cite someone for a SIP violation, only if they’re responding to another complaint first, like loud music or a suspected DUI.

The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office has filed just two complaints all pandemic long for unfair business practices – the premise being that if they stay open while the rules mean their competitors are shut down, they have an unfair advantage – against The Tuck Box in Carmel and Franco’s Norma Jean’s in Castroville.

At Plaza Linda restaurant, which has been cited twice, co-owner Ed Bonilla – who calls it a “plandemic” – blames the government for not caring. “They really don’t care about anybody else but themselves,” he says. “Since when has the government ever cared about our health? If they did, cigarette sales would be banned, soda sales would be banned, alcohol would be banned.”

They’re not banned because of those aforementioned rights.

SIP enforcement is education-first, so it’s up to us to become educated.

“We’re not at the end, we’re in the middle,” Encarnacion says. “People are tired, but we have to keep up the fight.”

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. You can reach her at sara@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/sarahayleyrubin