San Francisco will allow nail and hair salons, along with hotels and gyms, to reopen indoors with limited capacity on Monday, nearly six months after coronavirus shelter-in-place orders closed the businesses.
The move to reopen accelerates San Francisco’s plans for reopening during the pandemic, and even then, customers must wear masks at all times while indoors or outdoors, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Dr. Grant Colfax, San Francisco’s director of public health, said in a statement:
Given our local trend in COVID indicators, low-risk, limited-capacity indoor activities may resume. We will continue our gradual reopening as it allows us to monitor the spread, manage its immediate challenges and mitigate the long-term impact on our city.
The reopenings come after months of criticism from salon owners and gym owners who argued they could resume business indoors safely, as well as religious leaders who complained about not having indoor services.
Although many San Francisco salons will be opening next week, one salon that will not be opening next week is Erica Kious’s eSalon.
“I am actually done in San Francisco and closing my doors, unfortunately,” she told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on Wednesday.
Kious said Wednesday that she felt hesitant to go back to her home of 15 years in San Francisco because of all of the negative reaction she has received since she leaked a surveillance video of a maskless House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) going to get her hair done.
Pelosi visited eSalon on August 31 for a wash and a blowout without wearing a mask, despite local coronavirus restrictions — a move the owner called “a slap in the face.”
Salons in San Francisco had also been closed since March and had just been allowed to reopen to the public on September 1 for outdoor hair styling only.
Pelosi responded that Kious had “set her up” for political reasons and owed her an apology. On September 3, Kious responded to Pelosi’s accusations, calling them “totally false and outrageous.”
Despite the negativity, a GoFundMe page set up by former Nevada State GOP chairman Amy Tarkanian raised $336,503 for Kious to relocate her business and family.