Orange County officials are worried that case rate numbers and the state’s new health equity metric won’t allow the county to move to the next, less restrictive tier in California’s color-coded COVID-19 monitoring system anytime soon, making it difficult for many local businesses to survive.
The state started to publish health equity data for each county on Oct. 6. The equity figure measures the test positivity rates in the county’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, which are determined by being in the lowest quartile in the census tracts used by the state’s Healthy Places Index.
