Pirate's Cove

Well, this should definitely incentivize more people to get the vaccine, right?

L.A. County will require masks indoors amid alarming rise in coronavirus cases

Just a month ago, Los Angeles County and the rest of California celebrated a long-awaited reopening, marking the tremendous progress made in the battle against COVID-19 by lifting virtually all restrictions on businesses and other public spaces. Now, the coronavirus is resurgent, and the nation’s most-populous county is scrambling to beat back the pandemic’s latest charge.

Starting Saturday night, residents will again be required to wear masks in indoor public spaces, regardless of their vaccination status.

The latest order not only puts the county further at odds with both the California Department of Public Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — both of which continue to maintain that vaccinated people need not cover their faces indoors — but puts officials in the precarious position of asking the inoculated to forfeit one of the benefits recently enjoyed.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck moment,” said Dr. Muntu Davis, the county’s health officer.

Vaccinated people are, in essence, being asked to make a sacrifice to help slow coronavirus spread among the unvaccinated.

Officials have stressed that those who have been inoculated have an excellent chance of being protected, even from the easily spread Delta variant, believed to be twice as transmissible as the conventional coronavirus strains. Between Dec. 7 and June 7, the unvaccinated accounted for 99.6% of L.A. County’s coronavirus cases, 98.7% of COVID-19 hospitalizations and 99.8% of deaths.

We keep being told that it is the unvaccinated who are at risk, that the majority of cases are the unvaccinated. So, why tell the vaccinated that they must mask up? Further, how well did masks help? They didn’t stop COVID19 infections or deaths. In many areas the infections and deaths were higher than before the mask mandates.

But officials suspect that unvaccinated people have stopped wearing masks in indoor public settings and businesses, even though they’re still required to do so.

The new mask order, Davis said, “really is about making this a universal practice. It’s the easiest thing to do in terms of ensuring that we’re all protected, regardless of the risks that we have.”

One question I’m not seeing answered is if this only applies to areas under LA County control, which would exclude the individual cities, or applies to the cities themselves, which the county usually has little to no control over.

But there’s undoubtedly a segment of the population that’s steadfastly opposed to getting inoculated — either for personal or political reasons, or because they’ve come to believe some of the vaccine disinformation that’s spread widely on social media.

Experts say it is possible to persuade people to get the shot. About 1 in 5 adults say they’re now vaccinated after being previously reluctant, according to a national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and many of them said that conversations with family, friends and doctors helped.

Will it persuade the unvaccinated to get the shot when the Government slaps the vaccinated with restrictions? By the way, why wait till Sunday if this is so darned important?