California Tries To Reboot Indoor Masking, Fails

In the New York Times this past Monday:

Less than a month after instituting a mask mandate for most indoor settings, health officials for Alameda County, the San Francisco Bay Area’s second-most populous county, lifted the order, citing improving conditions in a news release.

Mask requirements were reinstated earlier this month for restaurants, bars and offices and other places, in response to increased hospitalizations and new coronavirus cases across the county, which had exceeded last summer’s Delta variant wave.

The order was lifted Saturday after Alameda County, home to Oakland and 1.6 million people in the eastern Bay Area, moved from high risk to moderate risk for community transmission on Thursday, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance.

Los Angeles County, which must have been humiliated to be beaten to the punch by Alameda up north, had nevertheless threatened to do the same:

LOS ANGELES (CNS) -- Mandatory indoor mask-wearing could return to Los Angeles County in a matter of weeks, possibly by the end of June, absent a downturn in the rate of new COVID-19 cases and virus-related hospitalizations, the county's public health director said Thursday.

Los Angeles County is currently listed in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "medium" virus-activity category, based on its cumulative seven-day rate of new cases. But the county will move into the "high" category if its average daily rate of new COVID-related hospital admissions rises above 10 per 100,000 residents, or if the percentage of staffed hospital beds occupied by COVID-positive patients tops 10%.

. . . She applauded the step taken by Alameda County in Northern California, where an indoor mask mandate will take effect again on Friday. And she pointed to a pair of recent studies that suggested mask-wearing has a notable impact on reducing spread of the virus.

However, we managed to make it through June without the mandate being reimposed down here. A San Francisco news site, SFGATE, points out:

In early June, during an uptick in COVID-19 cases, Alameda County was the only Bay Area county to bring back an indoor mask mandate.

At the time, county Health Officer Dr. Nicholas Moss said, “Putting our masks back on gives us the best opportunity to limit the impact of a prolonged wave on our communities.”

But regional case data provides no discernible evidence that the rule, which was lifted June 25, succeeded at that goal.

. . . San Francisco and Santa Clara had higher case rates than Alameda County throughout the current surge, including pre-mask mandate. Once the mandate was introduced, the three counties all followed the same trend line, casting doubt on whether the mask mandate did anything to curb transmission at the community level.

It contacted Dr Moss for commeent, who replied,

“We believe the recent mask order contributed to the improvements we are now observing with COVID-19 in Alameda County,” Moss said in a statement. “Conditions are more stable now than at the time the Order was put in place.”

I think this points out that by and large, the world is done with COVID, and attempts to reboot the panic aren't going to work, even in the bluest of blue cities. The red light-green light approach is annoying and disruptive, and it erodes health officials' credibility. But it's indicative of where we are that President Biden is clearly on board with finding a new pandemic:

But we don’t just need more money for vaccines for children, eventually; we need more money to plan for the second pandemic.

There’s going to be another pandemic. We have to think ahead. And that’s not something the last outfit did very well. That’s something we’ve been doing fairly well. That’s why we need the money.

He can't wait.