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San Francisco May Resume Indoor Restaurant Dining by October

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A restaurant with outdoor dining next to a closed cafe on Grant Avenue in San Francisco's Chinatown on Sep. 2, 2020.

San Franciscans may be able to dine indoors at restaurants as soon as October.

That's a part of the city's new reopening plan announced Friday, but there's a catch.

The timeline relies on San Francisco being assigned an "orange" level by the state of California under its four-tier, color-coded system to assess each county's risk, San Francisco officials say, which could happen as early as the end of September.

The state's tiers start at the highest risk level, purple, then go to red, orange and yellow, with each specifying different types of businesses and activities allowed in a county.

San Francisco is now at a red tier, the second-highest risk level. Should the city (which is also a county) be downgraded to an orange tier, city officials said they would then allow restaurants to have indoor dining at 25% capacity, up to 100 people.

If San Francisco's pandemic-related metrics, like positive cases and hospitalizations, do not remain stable, restaurant-goers will be in for a longer wait.

“Restaurants have been hit hard by COVID-19. Many have adapted with takeout and outdoor dining, but they’ve still been barely hanging on and, sadly, some have closed for good,” Mayor London Breed said in a statement. “We are laying out the next steps to make sure restaurants are ready to reopen as safely as possible."

Restaurants across San Francisco have been hammered financially by the pandemic. In Chinatown, for instance, a recent survey showed nearly 60% of restaurant jobs there have been eliminated and less than a quarter of Chinatown restaurants say they can maintain their businesses, KQED previously reported.

Restaurants have turned to app-based delivery services to stay afloat, but have often complained publicly that the fees are too high to be sustainable. Likewise, while some restaurants have expanded their outdoor dining options, many have not.

— Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez (@FitztheReporter)

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