LA, San Francisco improve for broader business reopening

LOS ANGELES (AP) — When Angeleno Wine Co. reopened its tasting room, co-owner Amy Luftig Viste teared up seeing old friends reunited for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic had shuttered so many businesses that it left major cities looking like ghost towns.

Even with limited capacity, animated conversations flowed from the tables set among barrels of aging wine and echoed off the brick walls of the winery hidden in an industrial section on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles.

“It felt like the winery had come alive again,” Luftig Viste said Sunday, the day after it reopened after being closed all but two weeks over the past 13 months.

The din in the small space is destined to get louder when capacity is allowed to double to 50% as Los Angeles and San Francisco lead the way toward a broader reopening of California businesses.

On Tuesday, they became the first major urban areas in California to meet infection thresholds to move into the least-restrictive tier for reopening, allowing indoor bars to welcome people again, larger crowds to cheer on Major League Baseball’s Dodgers and Giants, and expanded capacity at restaurants, movie theaters, amusement parks, gyms and other establishments.

A total of seven of the state’s 58 counties are now in the so-called yellow tier, which is the final stage of a phased reopening plan before a projected return to business as usual June 15. The five other counties are all remote areas of Northern California.

It’s a remarkable turnaround for LA considering it was ground zero for infections and deaths when California was the nation's epicenter of the virus outbreak just a few months ago.

The two cities have weathered the pandemic differently but are emerging at the same time after a statewide shutdown in March 2020 emptied...