Case counts continue to edge down in Santa Clara County and last week finally approached the threshold set by local public health officials for loosening local indoor mask requirements for offices and businesses.
The state of California and most of its counties lifted blanket requirements for indoor mask-wearing last week, but Santa Clara County and Los Angeles County remained holdouts. Local officials have said they expect to allow some indoor settings to choose to drop masking “in a matter of weeks” when the weekly rolling average drops below 550 new cases. As of the Town Crier’s press deadline, that average hadn’t quite been reached, but daily case counts were dipping below 400 on some days for the first time since mid-December. During the viral peak in January, case counts on some days exceeded 6,000.
Property owners anywhere in the state can maintain their own requirement for indoor masking. Schools, health-care facilities and transit all maintain mask requirements set at the state and federal level.
Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s top public health official, said last week that the agency may disclose a timeline for loosening statewide school mask rules on Monday, though local jurisdictions will retain the ability to extend school mask rules in their own districts. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends masking for everyone in areas with substantial virus transmission (which describes all of the United States, including all of California).
The CDC released a report Feb. 15 detailing how hospitalization due to severe COVID-19 infection increased most steeply among the youngest children, ages 0-4, this winter, noting that only children ages 5 and over were eligible for vaccination. Unvaccinated older youth were also hospitalized at a higher rate than their vaccinated peers.
Approval for that final age group awaiting vaccines was delayed again last week, when drugmaker Pfizer and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration withdrew plans to consider emergency-use authorization of a two-shot vaccine series that had proven safe but conferred less immunity than desired for 3 and 4 year olds. All children ages 6 months to 4 now await further trial data on a three-shot series, anticipated sometime in March.
