It looked like the 49ers might fall behind most of the NFL while California continued its conservative approach to re-opening after more than two months of shelter in place orders. The league will allow teams to re-open facilities on a limited basis Tuesday. The 49ers weren’t due to be part of that re-opening due to local guidelines in Santa Clara County, but governor Gavin Newsom gave the 49ers some hope that they might soon begin re-opening their building.
Newsom during his Monday briefing said the state could be ready for live sports, without fans, by early June as long as COVID-19 cases continue trending the way they’re going.
“Sporting events, pro sports in that first week or so of June without spectators, and modifications and very prescriptive conditions also could begin to move forward,” Newsom said. “And a number of other sectors of our economy will open up – again, if we hold these trend lines in the next number of weeks.”
Newsom on Monday tweeted that COVID-19-related hospitalizations were down 7.5 percent, and ICU patients were down 8.7 percent over the previous two weeks.
Assuming those numbers continue their decline, Santa Clara County should begin to ease the shelter-in-place restrictions keeping the 49ers out of their facility.
The NFL guidelines for returning are very stringent, and don’t allow players and coaches to be among the 50 percent of personnel in the building. Not returning in this first phase wouldn’t have been too harmful for the 49ers, but extended shelter-in-place orders that began trickling into training camp or the preseason could’ve wound up forcing the club to search for other places to continue in-person work.
Newsom’s latest timeline for the resumption of sporting events appears to mean San Francisco will be able to keep up with the NFL’s plan to resume more regular activities. A forecast that projects live sports in early June seems to also bode well for NFL games either in August for the preseason, or September for the regular season, although that could change if California sees a reversal in its COVID-19 trends.