California County Re-Implements Mask Mandate After Rise In Cases And Hospitalizations

A Bay Area county has just put a mask mandate back in place for most public settings.

As COVID-19 cases have started rising again, some parts of the country are already going back to earlier COVID-19 safety guidelines, including wearing masks indoors. That’s the case for Alameda County in California, which just announced that COVID-19-related hospitalizations and COVID-19 cases have blown passed the county’s peak numbers from last summer, according to Fox News.

Officials say the county is “now approaching levels seen during the winter 2020-21 wave, at comparable lab-reported testing levels.” The mask mandate starts today; masks won’t be required in K-12 schools through the end of the 2021-2022 school year, Fox News reports.

“Hospitalizations are also rising after remaining stable during the early weeks of this wave. Daily new admissions of patients with COVID-19 rapidly increased in recent days and now exceed last summer’s peak. We expect to reach [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC)] ‘High’ COVID-19 Community Level soon, given current trends,” the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency said in a release, Fox News reports. “In addition, when COVID-19 cases started to rise again in April, we did not observe in our data the disproportionate impacts on communities of color. That is no longer true and Hispanic/Latino residents now have the highest case rate in Alameda County among the largest race/ethnicity groups.”