Los Angeles County, home of America’s second largest city, announced Thursday it is reinstating an indoor mask mandate amid a spike in COVID-19 cases. The order goes into effect just before midnight Saturday.
The county’s public health officer, Dr. Muntu Davis, didn’t fully detail the exemptions to the mandate. However, he did say people could still take off their masks while eating and drinking at restaurants.
Davis said officials will focus on education rather than enforcement, and handing out citations to people who don’t comply is “not something we really want to have to do.”
“This is an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Davis said during a virtual news conference.
Los Angeles County has been recording more than 1,000 new cases each day for a week. On Thursday, there were 1,537 new cases, over 400 hospitalizations. The Delta variant is responsible for many of the new cases. Unvaccinated people are the ones who are primarily affected.
Thursday’s announcement came within hours of the University of California announcing students, faculty and staff must be vaccinated in order to return to campuses this fall.
In a letter to the system’s 10 chancellors, UC President Michael V. Drake said unvaccinated students who were not exempt from getting the vaccine would be banned from in-person classes, events and campus facilities. That includes housing.
President Drake said the decision came after consulting UC infectious disease experts, and reviewing evidence from studies on the dangers of COVID-19 and emerging variants like the delta strain.
“Vaccination is by far the most effective way to prevent severe disease and death after exposure to the virus and to reduce spread of the disease to those who are not able, or not yet eligible, to receive the vaccine,” Drake wrote.
In California as a whole, More than 3,600 cases were reported Thursday. That’s the most in a day since late February. There are also more than 1,700 COVID-19 patients in California hospitals, the highest total since April. However, the 3,600 cases is still way less than the 40,000 new case per day average we saw during the winter peak.
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