Santa Cruz County Health Officials: County about 4 weeks from moving into Stage 2 extension

Watch the news conference here.

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY, Calif. (KION) At a news conference to provide an update on the county's response to COVID-19, Santa Cruz County health officials said they are about four weeks away from moving into the extended Stage 2 of reopening.

San Benito County announced Wednesday that it was approved to move into the Stage 2 extension that allows dine-in restaurants and walk-in shopping to reopen.

“If we see a worrisome trend that we suddenly had six cases in the last 14 days and now it’s 24, that is telling us this moving in the wrong direction, and that would be an indicator of dialing back,” San Benito County Health Officer Dr. David Ghilarducci said.

In Santa Cruz, take Spokesman Bicycles for example, they're only allowing one person to come inside at a time and are mostly doing curbside pickup. The owner of the shop said they're not ready to re-open completely.

“I’m apprehensive to have the doors ope,n and just have people walking around touching everything. Don’t know when that will be, but maybe June or July before we’re comfortable with that,” Owner Matt Potter said.

Health officials said it will take more testing and contact tracing to move in the direction of extended stage two. Volunteers can sign up to be contact tracers, and beginning next week, they said there will be contact tracing training run by the state.

“Without testing and tracing capabilities we cannot keep our case counts low. The more you’re able to find new cases, and then contact trace to quickly contain whatever small outbreaks you have,” Health Services Director Mimi Hall said.

Santa Cruz County currently has 15 contact tracers, but will need 45. The health director said they will get that one training is done because they have already had 100 volunteers sign up.

Monterey County says they still have too many cases to advance to Stage 2.