Los Angeles County Pauses Universal Indoor Masking Mandate
“While hospitalizations and cases are still elevated, we’re relieved to see declines across these two metrics,” said Los Angeles County Director of Public Health today. “There has been a fairly steady decline in cases since July 23, potentially signaling an end to this current surge.”
The county entered the CDC’s “high” level of transmission two weeks ago, which was the beginning of the watch period for a masking mandate, which ended today. One key metric in the CDC evaluation was the number of hospitalizations per 100,000 residents. For the past two weeks, it has been over 10, which is the CDC threshold between high and medium. Today, Ferrer announced that the county had determined it had fallen to 9.7 admissions per 100,000. But, that data is not CDC official.
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Ferrer explained that while the CDC still indicates admissions per 100,000 in L.A. remains at 11.7, more updated local data shows it at 9.7.
Given that the county’s internal numbers are down, Ferrer said, “We will be pausing out universal indoor mask mandate.”
“We’re hopeful that the [hospital] admission rate remains under 10 for the next few days,” she said. “The clock is stopped [on a mask mandate] at the moment. I hesitate to call it a ‘pause’ because the data indicates we’re headed back toward the CDC’s medium level.” That would mean indoor masking would only be strongly encouraged.
It should be noted, however, that the average 7-day test positivity rate is still on the rise, at 16.6% today.
Earlier this week, the cities of Beverly Hills, El Segundo, Long Beach and Pasadena announced that they would not enforce any mandate. Long Beach and Pasadena have their own health departments which issues their own orders, and so they are not subject to the L.A. County mandate.
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