Limited Mask Mandates Will Return to California Bay Area
California has got to California.
The mask mandate is making a comeback in some parts of California. Several counties in the infamously blue Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Napa) are planning to start masking requirements on November 1st.
In Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Napa counties, masks must be worn in skilled nursing facilities, hospitals, and many other healthcare settings.
The new mandate was put into effect to limit the spread of the flu and other viruses during the late fall to early spring flu season, with some counties opting to end the requirement in March and others in April of 2025. The orders only apply to healthcare workers except for Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, which are also requiring visitors to wear masks; in Santa Clara, patients must also wear masks.
These mask mandates come as the 10-campus University of California system banned masks to conceal identity, and Los Angeles Mayor Kare Bass reportedly considered a similar mask ban until she recently contracted COVID-19.
Presently, it does not appear that there will be a more comprehensive mask mandate.
As a Southern Californian, I am relieved that the insanity is being confined to the Bay Area. However, I do not see the logic behind the move.
To begin with, covid has become an endemic disease. The following snippet comes from an article published by the Harvard School of Public Health.
Masks in public are rare and many people have stopped bothering to test or isolate when they feel ill. As official guidelines and social expectations have shifted, the landscape for navigating one’s own risk can feel trickier.
These shifts reflect what many experts are now saying about COVID: that it has moved from a pandemic to an endemic phase. While epidemiologists’ definitions of endemic can vary, [Bill Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health] said in the article, it generally means a constant presence rather than a disruptive outbreak. By that definition, “we’re definitely there” with COVID, he said.
There were no mask mandates for colds or flu (also endemic respiratory diseases) before COVID-19. Why institute them now, especially as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House Coronavirus Advisor, indicated no evidence showing mask mandates worked to stop the spread among the public?
Anthony Fauci has sparked a backlash from politicians and commentators after saying that wearing face masks protects individuals from spreading coronavirus, but that there was inconclusive evidence to suggest it prevented a pandemic spiraling at a whole population level.
The former chief medical adviser to the president, who was regularly the face of the government’s response to the pandemic, told CNN on Saturday that “an individual protecting themselves or protecting them from spreading it, there is no doubt that masks work,” amid a spike in infections of the virus and speculation that fresh COVID restrictions could be on the horizon.
“Fauci admits that masks don’t work for the public at large but still absurdly claims masks work on an individual basis,” Rand Paul, a Republican senator for Kentucky who was suspended from YouTube in 2021 for questioning mask wearing, wrote on Sunday in one of many critical responses to the interview. “More subterfuge.”
And if any of the control measures for covid had actually worked in the first place, it would not now be an endemic respiratory illness.
Finally, I am using the Wayback Machine to take us to early 2023, when I discussed a study for Cochrane, a British nonprofit widely considered the gold standard for reviewing healthcare data. The conclusions of the Cochrane Study, as it is now known, were based on 78 randomized controlled trials, six of which were conducted during the Covid pandemic, with a total of 610,872 participants in multiple countries.
Jefferson summed up the conclusions in an op-ed in The New York Times written by Bret Stephens, which is that mask mandates did nothing.
The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.
“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”
But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks?
“Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.
But California has got to California.
California is bringing back mask mandates but I clearly remember Gavin Newsom lecturing people about women’s right to do what they want with their bodies. pic.twitter.com/k6L7w7O7jI
— Being Libertarian (@beinlibertarian) October 11, 2024
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Comments
Who is surprised? They are true Leftist believers
AKA, zealots and fanatics.
I still occasionally see mask wearing outside, alone sometimes in cars by themselves here, a long way from Leftifornia.
It’s the same people who are terrified at the thought that you might own a gun.
I see it every day in my lefty town. I still see people wearing them while driving in cars alone.
I also remember that in June, 2020, Gov. Noisome promised that the CA Health Department would soon provide solid scientific evidence that masks are the most effective means of preventing the spread of respiratory viruses; since then nothing, including any acknowldgement that he was wrong.
Wait! What about when I’m shoplifting? Is it mandatory then or just advisable?
Not mandatory if one is engaging in self-reparations or anything linked in any way to a leftist protest.
You need no mask if you take items worth less than $950.
This is the branch of Medical Science™ that uses the “What Can It Hurt?” reasoning for all its fakshual recommendations.
A mask cannot stop covid, but might stop colds and flu.
Different bugs, different modes of transmission.
Let those who feel vulnerable wear one if they choose but leave the rest of the world out of it .. unless the mask wearing ‘fraidy cat Karens are willing to accept direct and immediate consequences for provoking a confrontation by nagging others who want to be left alone.
Do they have to wear them at the Monkeypox Pride Parade, too?
Nope, they’d need to make diapers mandatory there (and they might be even more effective).
Just in time for voting day. But California is voting Democrat anyhow, so why have ID denying masks? Especially as IDs can’t be required there.
Not a government mandate but the hospital and clinics that I go to would greatly appreciate my wearing a mask in their buildings because some of the people in there are seriously infected. I also put one on while on a plane if I sit near someone who will not stop coughing and sneezing. I also wash my hands before leaving a restroom.
I beg your pardon. Common sense and common courtesy are not allowed in public policy discourse. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.
““What Can It Hurt?”
*****
The “Hurt” most often cited is “Risk Compensation” AKA the Peltzman effect. As a example for Covid/Masks, people who are at higher risk and think masks provide protection, will expose themselves in environments that they otherwise wouldn’t enter without a mask. ie in store shopping vs delivery,
Plus if transfers power to the very sort of folks who will misuse it; Karen. Any mask mandate is ultimately enforced by armed agents of the State aka LEO. Reducing interactions with LEO seems like a better idea.
Only the most advanced masks have the ability to filter out viruses, and certainly not 99.9% of the masks (and bandannas! 🤣) that were used during the “pandemic”.
The requirement to wear masks was *never* about stopping the spread of the mOsT DaNGeRoUS viRuS eVEr but rather the government’s insistence that you *submit* to their authority over you. Chances are that the person you see masking up today is a far left progressive that is virtue signaling.
It was plain as day to anyone with an IQ over 100 that the “pandemic” was a psy-op to deny Trump a 2nd term. To that end, we have yet to reconcile what our governing class did to us in 2020 but, as the old saying goes, revenge is a dish best served cold.
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