New Orleans bars are now banned from serving customers indoors under state coronavirus rules, after the city’s percentage percentage rose more than 5% for the second straight week.
The new restrictions, which city officials said will take effect on Wednesday at 11 p.m., come a day before New Year’s Eve.
Until Wednesday, Orleans Parish was the only parish in the state with a coronavirus low enough to allow bars to serve customers inside and that had allowed them to.
But new data released by the Louisiana Department of Health Wednesday showed that for the week ending Dec. 17, 5.5% of coronavirus tests for Orleans Parish residents were positive. The week before, 5.3% of the tests in the parish were positive.
Under the restrictions of the state’s coronavirus, parishes cannot allow bars to serve customers indoors if the parish’s positivity rate exceeds 5% for two consecutive weeks.
Bars are still allowed to serve go cups and allow customers to sit outside, under state regulations. However, both bars and restaurants must stop serving alcohol by 11pm
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Many parishes in the state had already seen their percentage positive rate rise above 5% when Governor John Bel Edwards established it as the threshold for allowing full operation of bars as he returned the state to Phase 2 of his reopening plan amid of an increase in the number of coronavirus cases last month. Others soon followed suit, leaving New Orleans – which had kept bars closed longer than elsewhere in the state – with rates just below the limit that would cause additional restrictions.
Although city officials have been warning of an increasing number of coronavirus cases for weeks, Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s government did not put in place additional restrictions during that time.
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The positivity rate calculated by the state is based on the date a test was administered, rather than when it was reported to the state, and is only reported with a one-week delay. The calculations the state uses to determine the positivity rate exclude some tests, such as tests processed by laboratories that do not report negative results to the state, making it impossible to replicate them with the data publicly available on the website of the Ministry of Health.
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