The County of Orange, along with seven other Counties, has been removed from the State of California’s coronavirus watch list, according to the State of California’s COVID-19 site.

Now, if Orange County can keep its rate of new cases, percentage of positive tests and other watch list metrics at acceptable levels for two weeks, K-12 students could physically go back to newly spaced-out classrooms after Labor Day weekend, according to the O.C. Register.

Families leery about sending their children back to the classroom would have the option of continuing online learning, according to the Patch.

In Santa Ana the decision to reopen the schools would fall upon our two local school districts – the SAUSD and the Garden Grove Unified School District.

The reason Orange County was removed from the watch list is that the rate of local residents testing positive for COVID-19 dropped to 5.4 percent, which is below the state’s threshold of 8 percent.

Orange County can end up back on the State’s watch list if the case rate rises again or if other factors worsen including the percentage of positive tests, the average number of tests a county is able to perform daily, changes in the number of hospitalized patients and the percentage of ventilators and intensive care beds available.

To date in Orange County there have been 45,954 cases of COVID-19; 897 deaths; over 594,000 tests administered; and over 37,000 victims have recovered. In Santa Ana there have been 8,941 cases reported to date.