What is the latest US advice on masks as Los Angeles prepares to bring back mandate?

All states have abandoned their mask mandates as BA.5 variant rages

America, by and large, is done with mask mandates. The federal mask mandate for mass transit was struck down in court in April. As of this month, not a single US state has a general-purpose mask mandate, down from the nation’s peak of 39 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia all required residents to mask up.

“We’re not going to be able to have infinite series of mandates forcing people to do this, that and the other,” King County, Washington public health officer Dr Jeffrey Duchin said on Thursday of his region, which includes Seattle.

The CDC still recommends that people wear well-fitted masks on mass transit, near people at extra risk of severe Covid, and in communities with high spread of Covid.

The public health agency defines such communities as those with greater than 20 new Covid cases per 100,000 people per day.

In such areas, the CDC recommends people wear a mask in public indoor spaces, regardless of their vaccination or health status.

In May, the BA.5 variant of coronavirus became dominant in the US, and infections are rising in at least 40 states.

The new subvariant is considered to the most infectious yet, given its ability to evade previous immunities to Covid, though it doesn’t appear to cause more severe individual cases.

This new wave has drive hospitalisations up 20 per cent in the last two weeks, with more than 40,000 Americans in hospital with Covid a day on average.

Thankfully, the surge in cases, which now average more than 126,000 a day, hasn’t translated to a similar jump in deaths. And overall, hospitalisations are still a fraction of the 159,000 on average who were hospitalised on a given day in early 2022 during the worst of the Omicron wave.

Still, things are far from ideal.

In places like California, 43 of its 58 counties are experiencing high community spread of Covid, prompting jurisdictions like Los Angeles County to reinstate mask mandates.

The area is the state’s most populous, with 10 million people, and will reintroduce an indoor mask mandate on 29 July unless numbers go down.

“Covid is still one of the leading causes of death in LA County,” LA County public health director Barbara Ferrer said in a press briefing last week. “Every day when I report out who dies, there are people who die who have no underlying health conditions. So no one should go into a space of saying, ‘I’m not at any risk.’ Because that’s just absolutely not true.”

“We’ve always been very concerned about the disproportionate impact of Covid, particularly on people who are living in communities with higher rates of poverty, and on Black and brown residents. Every time we have a significant increase in our cases, our hospitalization and death numbers reflect this disproportionality,” she added in an interview yesterday with The New York Times.

“I don’t think we should be settling for high mortality that disproportionately affects people who have less economic means and people of color. And masking remains a strategy that layers in protections when transmission is high.”

Other California institutions have adopted a similar approach. University of California, Irvine, reintroduced a mask mandate this week once Orange County was listed as a zone of high community spread.

UCLA did the same in June, and recommends students and employees get tested every week.

The San Diego Unified School District has also brought back its mask mandate amid high community spread.

The state as a whole lifted its indoor mask mandate in March, but still recommends masks for all individuals in indoor public settings.