LOS ANGELES, July 14 (US): Nick Bargan used to wear a mask because his job in the Los Angeles film industry required it for so long, so he wouldn’t be surprised if the country’s most populous county reinstated rules requiring face coverings due to another spike in Corona virus cases across the country.
“I feel good about it because I’ve worn it consistently for the past few years. Bargan said, convincingly while on assignments Wednesday.
Barbara Ferrer, the county health director, said Los Angeles County, which has a population of 10 million, faces a return to its extensive indoor mask use mandate later this month if current trends in hospitalizations continue.
Nationally, the latest wave of COVID-19 is driven by the highly transmissible BA.5 variant, which now accounts for 65% of cases with its cousin BA.4 contributing another 16%. The variants showed an impressive ability to circumvent the protection afforded by vaccination.
With new omicron variables once again driving hospitalizations and deaths higher in recent weeks, states and cities are rethinking their responses, and the White House is ramping up efforts to alert the public.
Some experts said the warnings are too little, too late.
“It’s been a long time since the warning was sounded,” said Dr. Eric Topol, president of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who called BA.5 “the worst variable to date.”
Experts said global trends for mutations have been clear for weeks — they are quickly outpacing legacy variants and pushing cases upward wherever they appear. However, Americans threw down their masks and jumped back into travel and social gatherings. And they have largely ignored the booster shots, which protect against the worst outcomes of COVID-19. Courts blocked federal mask and vaccine mandates, and tied the hands of US officials.
“We have learned a lot from how the virus works in other places, and we have to apply the knowledge here,” said Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The White House coordinator for COVID-19, Dr Ashish Jha, appeared on morning television on Wednesday urging taking booster shots and renewed vigilance. However, Mokdad said federal health officials need to increase the pressure on masks indoors, early detection and prompt antiviral treatment.
“They’re not doing everything they can,” Miqdad said.
The challenge for the administration, from the White House’s perspective, is not their messages, but the people’s desire to hear them — due to pandemic fatigue and the politicization of the response to the virus.
For months, the White House has encouraged Americans to take advantage of rapid, free or cheap at-home tests to detect the virus, as well as the free and effective antiviral treatment Baxilovid that protects against serious illness and death. On Tuesday, the White House response team called on all adults 50 and older to get an urgent boost if they didn’t do so this year — and commended people for waiting for the next generation of shots expected in the fall when they can fold them. Sleeves and get some protection now.
Ferrer told Los Angeles County Supervisors that ordering masks again “helps us reduce risk.” She is expected to discuss details of the county’s potential new mandate during a public health briefing on Thursday afternoon.
“I realize that when we go back to using the universal inner mask to reduce widespread spread, for many this will feel like a step backwards,” Ferrer said on Tuesday.
For most of the pandemic, Los Angeles County has required masks in some indoor settings, including health care facilities, subway trains, buses, airports, prisons and homeless shelters. The new mandate will extend the requirement to all indoor public spaces, including shared offices, manufacturing facilities, warehouses, retail stores, restaurants, bars, theaters and schools.
It is unclear what enforcement might look like. Under previous states, officials preferred educating people to issuing citations and fines.
Sharon Fayette tore her mask off the moment she got off her Lyft ride in Los Angeles on Wednesday and sighed when she learned that another world condition might be coming. “Man, when will it end?” I wondered about the epidemic.
Fayette said she is tired of changing regulations and that most residents will follow another questionable mandate. “I just think people are over that, above all the rules,” she said.
Bargan said he learned a hard lesson about the effectiveness of masks when he went without a face covering at a filmmaking factory last month in Los Angeles. “I thought it would be okay because we were all outdoors,” Bargan, 35, said. A few days later he started feeling ill, and his test result was definitely positive.
He avoided contracting the virus for more than two years because he was religious about disguise. “The one time I took it off, I caught it!” He laughed.
The country’s brief lull has been reflected in the deaths from the coronavirus. In the past month, daily deaths have fallen, although they have not matched the lowest level last year, and deaths are now trending up again.
The seven-day average of daily deaths in the US rose 26% over the past two weeks to 489 on July 12.
The coronavirus doesn’t kill nearly as much as it did last fall and winter, and experts don’t expect death to reach these levels again soon. The hundreds of daily deaths from summer respiratory illness are usually jaw-shattering, said Andrew Noemer, professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine. He noted that in Orange County, California, 46 people died of COVID-19 in June.
“That would be all hands on deck,” Neumer said. “People will be like, ‘There’s a crazy new flu that’s killing people in June. “
Instead, simple, proven precautions are not taken. Vaccinations, including eligible booster shots, reduce the risk of hospitalization and death — even against the latest variants. But less than half of all eligible adults in the United States got one booster shot, and only about 1 in 4 Americans age 50 or older who qualified for a second booster got one.
“This has been a failed booster campaign,” Topol said, noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still uses the term “complete vaccines” for people who have received two shots of Moderna or Pfizer. “They didn’t see that two bullets were enough,” he said.
If he is responsible for the nation’s response to COVID, Neumer said, he will be at the level of the American people trying to get their attention in this third year of the pandemic. He was telling Americans to take it seriously, pick up the mask inside and “until we get better vaccines, there’s going to be a new normal for a disease that kills more than 100,000 Americans annually and affects life expectancy.”
Neumer admitted that this message probably won’t fly for political reasons.
It also may not fly with people tired of taking precautions more than two years into the pandemic. Valerie Walker of New Hope, Pennsylvania, is aware of the latest surge but is hardly concerned.
“I was definitely worried at the time,” she said of the pandemic’s early days, with pictures of body bags on the evening news. “Now there is fatigue, things are getting better and there has been a vaccine. So I would say on a scale between one and 10, I’m probably at four.”
Even with two friends who have the virus now, and her husband recently recovering, Walker says she has even bigger problems.
“Sometimes when I think about it, I still wear a mask when I go to the store, but honestly, that’s not an everyday idea for me,” she said.