The Red Tier is here.

Tajha Chappellet-Lanier here, contemplating my new daily ritual. I could call it “One Year Ago Today,” although that’s not a particularly creative name—it involves remembering, as precisely as possible, what I was doing and thinking and feeling one year ago on this day. Most days, I look through my phone’s camera roll to jog my memory. Maybe you do too, or maybe you have other markers that help you remember.

One year ago today I spent the day driving back to Big Sur from Napa with my parents—we’d been visiting family. As we traveled south, the Bay Area counties announced their shelter-in-place orders. “I feel like we’re surfing,” my mother said. “Like there’s this huge wave of Covid gathering momentum just behind us.” We stopped for some groceries in Santa Cruz—the market was crowded and chaotic. But what I remember most was the strong sense of ambient anxiety. Like everyone was suddenly and all at once on high alert to a brand-new danger, adrenaline pumping. I’d never experienced anything like it.

Today, the wave that is Covid appears to be subsiding. Positive cases and hospitalizations, across the state and in Monterey County, are down. And the case rate has calmed to the point (4.7 per 100,000 people, as of March 16) that the California Department of Public Health will let Monterey County proceed into the Red Tier for the first time in the tier system’s history. 

The new tier assignment means less restrictive closure policies. Starting tomorrow, March 17: Indoor dining can reopen at 25-percent capacity; the Monterey Bay Aquarium can open for indoor visitors, at 25-percent capacity; allowable retail store capacity goes from 25 percent to 50 percent; grocery store capacity will go from 50 percent to full; and exercise establishments like gyms or yoga studios can reopen indoors at 10-percent capacity. That’s just a partial list.

As Weekly editor Sara Rubin explained last week, the reopenings we’re seeing this week are due in part to a new set of reopening rules. Instead of requiring a case rate below 7 cases per 100,000 in order to move from Purple to Red, the state now allows counties where the rate is under 10 per 100,000 to move into the Red Tier because we’ve hit a statewide target of 2 million vaccines administered in the zip codes that are disproportionately harmed by Covid.

Much like this time last year, we’re entering into a new phase of our pandemic experience. Then, it was hard to imagine what shutting down would look like. Now, I find myself with the opposite problem. Will we be able to reopen without setting off another spike in cases? I hope so. Guidance on stopping the spread remains the same—mask up, social distance, wash your hands and get tested if you think you may have been exposed.

Stay safe out there, we’re still all in this together.