Graphs compare Alameda County’s COVID-19 case rates to rates in neighboring counties.
titled"Why Masks Work, but Mandates Haven't.” The piece states that high-quality, well-fitting masks can help minimize an individual’s risk of catching or spreading COVID-19, but community-level mandates have failed to affect case rates because the virus is so contagious that it spreads easily in the moments when people take their masks off to eat, drink or be comfortable.
After viewing the case rate graphs, UCSF’s Dr. Bob Wachter — one of the region’s more cautious COVID-19 experts and a supporter of mask mandates — echoed many of that article’s sentiments, stating that mandates don’t appear to increase the “probability of people wearing good masks correctly.” Many people find it difficult to wear an N95 for long periods of time, instead opting for lower-quality cloth or surgical masks.
“If the mandate came with enforcement of wearing a good mask correctly, it might demonstrate a significant advantage in preventing cases,” he wrote to SFGATE in an email. “But there is no real enforcement , which means that the rates of effective masking probably isn’t very different in [the Bay Area counties being compared].”
If, in order to have an impactful mask mandate, enforcement teams must ensure that people are correctly wearing N95s indoors, it seems like a policy doomed to fail whenever implemented. It also raises questions of whether the costs of such enforcement would exceed the benefits. Residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, with high rates of vaccination and infection-acquired immunity from the past two surges, are well-protected from severe disease and death. Over the past two months, hospitalizations across the Bay Area have come nowhere close to the winter omicron numbers, which
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