Back to Masks?

While Los Angeles last week announced that masks will be mandatory when indoors regardless of vaccination status, other areas are beginning to follow suit. St. Louis County's new mandate goes into effect July 26th. All 50 states are experiencing a surge in Covid cases. We used to hear vax it OR mask it, but now it's vax it AND mask it.

The CDC has not publicly announced that they made a huge mistake in relaxing mask requirements back in May, but they really need to own up to the fact that they should not have stated that vaccinated people no longer needed to wear a mask while in crowds. Expecting the unvaccinated population to do the right thing and mask up was just ridiculous. And the increasing numbers of cases and hospitalizations is proving the point. 

I made the comment to my neighbor, who is a physician, that I can get the shot and not have too much impact on anyone else's life but my own. But a person who refuses to get the vaccine can have a huge impact on my life. We all may have to go back into full masking requirements, if not total lockdown, because of the people who will not get vaccinated. There are about 1,000 counties in the U.S. with vaccination rates of less than 30%. Less than half of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated.

Without the numbers needed to create herd immunity, we will continue to see variants of the virus as evidenced by the one called delta. And now the first case of a mutation called lambda has been discovered in Texas. At some point, the existing vaccines may not protect us from these new variants. We really need the vast majority of the population to get vaccinated before we all end up in full lockdown again. Or worse.