Photos show what San Francisco looked like the day before residents were ordered to ‘shelter in place’ for 3 weeks to contain the coronavirus

It was sunny in San Francisco on the day that city leaders in the Bay Area announced that 6.7 million residents would be placed under a “shelter-in-place” order.

The order directs residents to stay inside their homes for three weeks to help stifle the spread of the coronavirus, which has infected at least 40 people in San Francisco.

Source: San Francisco Examiner

People will still be allowed to go out for a walk, run, hike, or bathroom trip for their pets, as long as they keep 6 feet between themselves and others.

There was a line just to get into this Trader Joe’s in the city’s Lower Nob Hill neighborhood when I visited on Monday.

It was the same scene at Trader Joe’s on Fourth Street near the financial district.

What people won’t be allowed to do is visit the hair or nail salon.

Gyms and fitness studios are also closed.

All entertainment venues are shut down until April 7.

The award-winning musical “Hamilton” shows at the city’s Orpheum Theatre. A sign posted in the entryway beyond a gate indicated it was canceled through April 30.

The city’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium had already been closed when the city banned nonessential events held in city-owned facilities on March 7.

Source: Business Insider

Public transit will remain open for essential travel.

Hardware stores are one of the only businesses allowed to stay open throughout the three-week order.

Restaurants can stay open only if they provide takeout food — customers are not allowed to dine in.

A sign was posted on the door of a Starbucks in the financial district saying that the store was open for “grab-and-go” only.

Cannabis dispensaries are also closed for the order. A line had formed outside this one at about 4 p.m. on Monday, with patrons wanting to get in before it was too late.

Source: Business Insider, The San Francisco Chronicle

Other shuttered businesses included North Beach’s City Lights bookstore. A notice hung on the window that included an excerpt from a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem.

The city’s bars may be among the hardest-hit businesses.

All bars and nightclubs are ordered to close for three weeks.

Kells in the city’s North Beach District is also a popular St. Patrick’s Day destination.

A sign was taped to the window indicating that the bar and restaurant was closed. It read: “Trying to do our part!”

Eventually, I reached the city’s hub of tech offices near the East Cut neighborhood. It was nearly desolate.

But this part of town had been cleared out for a while now, for the most part.

Tech companies, like LinkedIn, had been increasingly migrating their workforces to remote work in the weeks leading up to the shelter in place.

It’s an adjustment that many are having to make across the country, with in-person brainstorms turning into virtual meetings.

When Salesforce instituted a mandatory work-from-home policy for its employees, a whopping 10,000 workers stopped coming into the district every day.

Source: The San Francisco Chronicle

Salesforce is the city’s largest private employer.

Source: The San Francisco Chronicle

Google recommended that its hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide, including in San Francisco, work from home earlier in March before the shelter-in-place order.

Source: Business Insider

Farther down Market Street is Twitter’s headquarters. The social-networking giant made working from home mandatory for its employees on March 12.

Source: Business Insider

Much of the city will come to a standstill until April 7.

The city’s estimated 883,000 residents will adapt over the coming weeks to a new daily rhythm.

Source: US Census