Our on-again, off-again relationship with masks.

Tajha Chappellet-Lanier here, thinking that I should probably get some new masks. I didn’t expect that my reusable cloth masks would be something I’d eventually wear through and need to replace but here we are—with a frayed seam here and a snapped nose wire (critically helpful if you wear glasses as I do) there.

On Feb. 15, one week from today, California’s statewide indoor mask mandate will end for vaccinated people. Unvaccinated people will still be required to wear face coverings inside, and everyone will still need to mask up in certain high-risk situations like public transit and hospitals. The mandate went into effect on Dec. 15, 2021, and was later extended another month from its original end date of Jan. 15. The timing for ending the mandate makes sense: The statewide case rate has fallen from a peak of 295 cases per 100,000 on Jan. 9 to 93 cases per 100,000 today. It’s expected to keep falling.

In Monterey County, the omicron variant-fueled surge led to an all-time case rate high and topped out with 942 cases reported on a single day on Jan. 20. Total new cases reported per day have been declining since. 

It’s a pattern we’ve seen again and again during our nearly two years of experience with Covid. The good news is that while the omicron surge led to a huge number of cases, there were fewer hospitalizations and deaths than during the surge in the winter of 2021. That’s largely due to the wide availability and use of vaccines—in Monterey County, an unvaccinated person is about 5 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than a vaccinated person, county Health Officer Edward Moreno said during his report to the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Feb. 8.

When the statewide mask mandate ends, counties will have the option to continue with an indoor masking requirement locally. Some, like Los Angeles County, have indicated they’ll do just this. Moreno does not seem to expect to go in this direction. “If we continue to see a decline in case rates most likely I…will not be putting anything in place that would be more restrictive than the state health officer’s order starting Feb. 16,” he said today.

If things continue the way they are expected to, we could be entering a period that emphasizes the “normal” of our new normal. Fewer masks and, more importantly, fewer people getting sick. But how long this lull will last is anyone’s guess, and depends both on things we can control on an individual level—like getting vaccinated, social distancing, washing our hands and staying home when sick—and on things we cannot. Masks are among the tools we have to prevent serious illness and death, and it seems likely we’ll be using them again at some point.

Stay healthy out there.

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