CommentsCAL MATTERS - A little more than a month after California fully reopened, the state’s coronavirus positivity rate has skyrocketed from 0.7% to 5.2% — a figure not seen since early February.
The highly contagious Delta variant now accounts for nearly 83% of California’s sequenced coronavirus cases — up from 53% in late June and just 6% in late May. The color-coded reopening system is gone, but if it were still in place, at least 12 counties would be in the most restrictive purple tier. And California’s mask mandate is over, but local health officials are either requiring or recommending around 50% of the state’s population wear face coverings indoors.
With the Sept. 14 recall election hanging over his head, Newsom has avoided commenting directly on whether he would reinstate mask requirements or lockdown measures, instead emphasizing the importance of getting vaccinated. The coronavirus case rate among vaccinated Californians was 2 per 100,000 during the week of July 7-14, compared to 13 per 100,000 among unvaccinated Californians, the state Department of Public Health said Friday. The department also noted that Newsom’s vaccine lottery program slowed the rate at which California’s inoculation rates were declining.
Still, COVID is spreading fast even in counties with high inoculation rates — a trend experts attribute to high-density urban settings that bring people into contact with both unvaccinated residents and fully vaccinated people who may be asymptomatically passing the disease.
- Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a UCSF epidemiology professor: “The challenge in public health communication is we ultimately do want more people to be vaccinated. And the concern is communicating that we also need to wear a mask right now … (which may) dilute the message that we need to be vaccinated. The challenge is that both things are true.”
Perhaps the ultimate challenge facing California’s leaders: charting a long-term response to a virus that “will be with us chronically,” in the words of Solano County Public Health Officer Dr. Bela Matyas.
The first hurdle on the horizon: fall school reopenings. California parent groups last week sued Newsom over a requirement issued last week that all students wear masks to school, and a federal appeals court ruled Friday that California violated parents’ rights by keeping private schools closed amid the pandemic.
(Emily Hoeven is an award-winning writer, reporter and editor for CalMatters where this story was first posted.)
