Los Angeles Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer gave Angelenos a ray of hope on the looming prospect of a universal countywide mask mandate next week.
While caveating her statement with “I think it’s highly likely we could stay in High” — meaning the CDC’s High community category — “should we start seeing steep declines in our [case] numbers next week, because we know hospitalizations are this lagging indicator, we are likely to want to take a pause on moving too quickly on indoor universal masking. Because if our cases start a steep decline, it’s likely that our hospitalizations will take a steep decline [two weeks later].”
Hospitalizations are the chief measure by which the CDC determines community levels.
Ferrer then offered this observation: “You all look at the same numbers I do. You can see we’re at the cusp between medium and high. It isn’t going to take much to move us back into that medium community level if we can get our case numbers to go lower.”