Shares in pharmaceutical company WuXi Biologics were suspended on Tuesday after plummeting by as much as 32 per cent, their biggest ever single-day decline.
Washington on Monday added WuXi and 32 other Chinese groups to a list curbing its ability to access US technology.
US companies face greater restrictions in exporting goods to groups on the list, and are required to conduct more stringent due diligence checks in their dealings with them.
The commerce department adds groups to the list if it cannot verify the end use of goods exported to them. WuXi’s shares fell to as little as HK$59.20 (US$7.59) following the announcement.
The addition of 33 Chinese companies to the so-called “unverified list” comes as the US steps up its scrutiny of Chinese groups amid worsening trade relations between the two countries.
In December, the US added eight Chinese companies to its investment blacklist and 11 biopharmaceutical organisations to its “entity list”, which bans US companies from exporting banned technology originating in America to them.
“WuXi Biologics has been importing certain hardware controllers for bioreactors and certain hollow-fibre filters that are subject to US export controls but have received [US] approval for the last 10 years,” WuXi said on Monday, adding that it did not expect its inclusion on the list to affect its business operations.
The Justice Department said it is “evaluating” the potential use of safe injection sites for people to take heroin and other narcotics with protections against fatal overdoses.
“Although we cannot comment on pending litigation, the Department is evaluating supervised consumption sites, including discussions with state and local regulators about appropriate guardrails for such sites, as part of an overall approach to harm reduction and public safety,” the department told The Associated Press on Monday.
The Hill has reached out to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for comment.
Biden's DOJ, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, has previously refused to take a public stance on such safe havens. Such a policy would mark a major shift from the stance of the Trump administration's DOJ.
Prosecutors previously argued against a plan for a safe consumption site in Philadelphia, and the department won that case after an appeals court decided such a facility would violate a decades-old drug law.
The court said in that case that “[t]hough the opioid crisis may call for innovative solutions, local innovations may not break federal law,” according to the DOJ.
Last year, then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced that the city had approved the opening of a supervised drug consumption facility, known as an "overdose prevention center."
“New York City has led the nation’s battle against COVID-19, and the fight to keep our community safe doesn’t stop there. After exhaustive study, we know the right path forward to protect the most vulnerable people in our city. And we will not hesitate to take it,” de Blasio said.
“Overdose Prevention Centers are a safe and effective way to address the opioid crisis. I’m proud to show cities in this country that after decades of failure, a smarter approach is possible,” he added.
The sites in New York have intervened in more than 125 overdoses from a group of over 640 users, the AP added.
Similar overdose prevention centers exist in Europe, Australia and Canada.
Leaders in several states with Democratic governors announced Monday that they are easing COVID-19 restrictions, including lifting mask mandates, due to the rapid easing of the omicron surge.
California
California will end its indoor masking requirement for vaccinated people next week but masks still are the rule for schoolchildren, state health officials announced.
After Feb. 15, unvaccinated people still will be required to be masked indoors, and everyone — vaccinated or not — will have to wear masks in higher-risk areas including public transit and nursing homes and other congregate living facilities, officials said. Local governments can continue their own indoor masking requirements and last week, Los Angeles County’s health officials said they intend to keep theirs in place beyond the state deadline.
State officials also announced that Indoor “mega events” with more than 1,000 people will have to require vaccinations or negative tests for those attending and those who are unvaccinated will be required to wear masks. For outdoor events with more than 10,000 people, there is no vaccination requirement but masks or negative tests are recommended.
Those thresholds increase from the current 500 attendees for indoor and 5,000 attendees for outdoor events. The increased threshold comes after Sunday’s Super Bowl that will draw as many as 100,000 football fans to SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles.
California also is lifting a requirement that people produce a negative coronavirus test before visiting hospitals and nursing homes, effective immediately.
Health officials said Monday that more changes to the state’s policies will be released in the coming week.
Oregon
Oregon’s statewide mask requirement for indoor public places will be lifted no later than the end of March, health officials announced Monday.
In addition, mask requirements for schools will be lifted March 31.
Education and health officials will meet in coming weeks to revise guidance to “ensure schools can continue operating safely and keep students in class” after the mask rule is lifted, said Dr. Dean Sidelinger, the state medical officer and epidemiologist.
“This will give (school officials) time to look at their community condition — vaccination rates and spread in their community — and decide if they want to implement a local mandate or requirement for schools,” Sidelinger said.
The end of March deadline for lifting statewide mask rules was selected using predictions by local health scientists that COVID-19 related hospitalizations will decrease to 400 or fewer by that time — a level that Oregon experienced before the omicron variant surge.
New Jersey
New Jersey will roll back its mask requirement in schools March 7.
Gov. Phil Murphy called the move “a huge step back to normalcy for our kids.”
He cited the “dramatic decline in our COVID numbers” in announcing the rollback. The omicron variant fueled a spike in infections over the holidays, but cases in the state are down 50% and hospitalizations dropped off by one-third since last week, he said.
“We are not — and I’ve said this many times — going to manage COVID to zero,” the governor said. “We have to learn how to live with COVID as we move from a pandemic to an endemic phase of this virus.”
Connecticut
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont said Monday that he is recommending the state end its mask mandate for schools and child care centers Feb. 28 and allow local officials and school administrators to decide for themselves if masks should be required.
Amid a decline in the state’s COVID-19 infection numbers, the Democrat said residents of the state now have the tools necessary to keep themselves safe amid a growing sense that Americans will need to find a way to coexist with the virus.
“What we got to figure out is, how we as a society, we as a state, learn to live with COVID, which hopefully has a diminishing impact upon our state and community for a long time to come.” Lamont said during a briefing with reporters. “And I think we’ve got the tools to do it. We’ve got the tools to keep ourselves safe. We’ve got the tools to keep our schools safe. That’s part of living with it.”
Delaware
Delaware Gov. John Carney said his state’s school mask mandate will run through March.
While the universal mask mandate will expire at 8 a.m. Friday, Carney on Monday temporarily extended the mask requirement in public and private K-12 schools and child care facilities to March 31.
Administration officials said the temporary extension will give parents time to get their children vaccinated before the expiration of the mask requirement. It will also allow local school administrators and school boards to consider their own mask requirements.
“We’re in a much better place than we were several weeks ago in the middle of the Omicron surge of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations,” Carney said in a statement, while urging people to get vaccinated.
Two studies suggest that ‘breakthrough’ SARS-CoV-2 infections result in improved immune protection against multiple variants of the virus, and data from one of the studies indicates thatsuch infections also protect against Omicron1,2.
Researchers have previously shown that people who have caught SARS-CoV-2 and are later vaccinated tend to make high levels of antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, one of the immune system’s main targets when it is fending off the virus. These individuals’ blood serum — which contains antibodies — blocks a diverse array of SARS-CoV-2 variants, and does so more effectively than serum from vaccinated people who were never infected and serum from people whose immunity comes from infection only.
But it has been unclear whether this powerful ‘hybrid immunity’ is also generated in people who were vaccinated before being infected.
Microbiologist Fikadu Tafesse at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland and his colleagues analysed serum from three groups of health-care workers: some who’d had breakthrough infections, others who’d been infected before they were vaccinated, and vaccinated people with no history of infection. In laboratory assays, the sera from both groups with previous infections had higher levels of antibodies against the spike protein than did serum from people protected only by vaccines. The sera from infected people were also highly effective at protecting cells from infection by variants including Alpha, Beta and Delta, although the team has not yet looked at activity against Omicron. The researchers report their work in a 25 January study in Science Immunology1.
Those results chime with a 19 January Cell study2 led by structural biologists Alexandra Walls and David Veesler, both at the University of Washington in Seattle. This team looked at people who’d been infected and then received two doses of vaccine; people who had two doses of vaccine and then experienced breakthrough infections; and people who’d had a third, booster vaccine dose but no infection. Serum levels of antibodies that blocked variants including Omicron were higher, and persisted for longer, in all three groups than in people who’d had two doses of vaccine and hadn’t been infected.
The maths of COVID-19 protection
The researchers suggest that the number of times people are exposed to SARS-CoV-2, whether through vaccination, infection or both, is a key factor in the quality of their antibody response. Confirming that idea, the group found that eight individuals whose immune systems had ‘seen’ the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein four times — once during a 2020 infection and again during three separate vaccinations — had especially strong antibody responses against several variants, and even against the virus behind the 2002–04 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome. “Those individuals are clearly doing the best,” says Veesler.
Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London, says it will be important to compare breakthrough infections caused by different variants. Current vaccines are based on the spike protein from the version of the virus first identified in Wuhan, China, in 2020, and vaccine-induced immune responses after a breakthrough infection will probably differ from variant to variant. Most of the breakthrough infections studied by Walls and Veesler’s team were caused by Delta, but they also plan to analyse samples from people who have experienced a breakthrough infection caused by Omicron.
With Omicron driving a global surge in cases, understanding the immunity that follows breakthrough infections is important, because it will affect many people, says Tafesse. “There is so much virus in circulation in the community. There is a high chance we’ll all get a breakthrough infection.”
School districts and education officials nationwide have been figuring out how to best spend the latest round of federal Covid relief funds, an unprecedented influx of aid for K-12 education meant to help schools rebound and stay open during the pandemic.
With the Biden administration announcing it had recently distributed all $122 billion of the funds under the relief plan, some themes have begun to emerge about how the money will be spent across the nation.
An NBC News analysis of the spending plans of four of the five largest school districts, and interviews with education experts, found that priorities for the federal aid included increasing instructional time through tutoring; summer school and after-school and enrichment programs. Literacy support, and hiring and increasing pay for staff, including teachers and mental health counselors, has also been given precedence, along with improving ventilation systems.
“We’re beginning to get an understanding of what local spending priorities are. There’s some reason for optimism in what we’re seeing,” said Thomas Toch, director of FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “But it’s going to take a couple of years to know what our return on this investment is going to be.”
FutureEd analyzed a database of the spending plans for about 2,500 school districts compiled by data services firm Burbio to assess how they would spend the federal Covid relief.
FutureEd's analysis found that summer learning was a top priority in the Northeast and South, while School districts in the West gave upgrades to ventilation, heating and air-conditioning systems priority. Hiring and increasing pay for teachers was of great importance in the Midwest.
The think tank found that more than half of the districts and charter schools in the data sample planned to use the funds to hire or reward teachers, guidance counselors and academic specialists. About half planned to spend the aid on summer programs.
More than half also planned to use the federal aid to improve school climate systems, with heating, ventilation and air conditioning a top-three priority in every region, according to FutureEd.
School districts have until late 2024 to spend the money.
“In areas where these funds are being deployed quickly, we are already seeing the positive impact that this infusion of federal support is having directly in schools and communities,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement last month. “We know what it takes to keep our schools open safely for in-person learning, and these funds will help us achieve that goal.”
Florida's Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the fourth largest school district in the country, plans to spend as much as $30 million for hourly K-12 tutors and interventionists through the next school year, and another $20 million for after-school enrichment programs, according to plans on the district’s website detailing its draft budget initiatives.
The school district also plans to spend $100.5 million for mobile devices for students, and $120.5 million for extended summer school in 2021 and 2022, using the latest and previous round of federal funds.
The first day of classes at a public school in Miami Lakes, Fla., on Aug. 23.Eva Marie Uzcategui / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Ron Steiger, the district’s chief financial officer, said the key questions the school district asked itself to determine how to best spend the funds were: “How do we make sure that the impact of the pandemic doesn’t sit with us academically as a school district in perpetuity? How do you make that investment in a way that’s non-recurring so when the dollars run out, the expenses decline as well?
“That’s the needle we have been threading for the last few months and we’ll continue to do it for the next few years,” he said.
The district identified four buckets of priorities: accelerating learning, promoting mental and physical health, preparing for and avoiding potential future closures, and maintaining operations and retaining existing staff.
Plans also include spending $200 million for indoor air quality and building envelope improvements to reduce energy use; $20 million for enhanced cleaning supplies; $8.2 million for contracted mental health professionals; and $14.2 million for hourly counselors.
In Los Angeles, the spending plan reflects concerns over how to address learning loss and lost instructional time as the pandemic grinds on and upends learning in unpredictable ways.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the nation, provided data showing it plans to spend $1.7 billion on strategies to address lost instructional time, including technological devices and internet access for students. Another $407 million has been set aside for resources that enhance continual and safe in-person learning, such as custodial staffing, Covid testing and personal protective equipment.
Chicago Public Schools, the third largest school district, said in a statement that the use of Covid relief funds was “aligned with key priorities like emerging stronger post-pandemic with a focus on a safe return to in-person instruction; maintaining continuity of service, including sustaining staffing and adding additional resources in schools; and a focus on resource equity addressing the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color and communities experiencing poverty.”
The district provided a presentation showing how it planned to use $578 million in fiscal years 2023 and 2024 for special education staffing, universal pre-K expansion, and district equity grants. Another $438 million, for fiscal years 2022 and 2023, would go toward “districtwide initiatives to address unfinished learning,” and toward high-dosage tutoring, mentorship, mental health support, and professional learning opportunities.
“CPS’ spending plan is based upon feedback from school leaders, teachers, students, parents and community stakeholders shared during the Budget Equity Forums held in February 2021,” the statement said.
Jenna Lyle, the associate press secretary for the New York City Department of Education, the largest school district in the country, said in a statement, “Every dollar we’ve received in stimulus funds is going towards supporting our students and continuing the incredible work happening in our schools as part of our city’s recovery.”
John Marro, the dean of students at P.S. 347, the American Sign Language and English Lower School in New York, takes students' temperatures as they arrive on Jan. 3, the first day after the holiday break.Jennifer Peltz / AP
Just how the school districts spend the money is expected to be closely watched.
Toch said these plans “may evolve over the next two or three years, and so we want to be watching to see what they actually spend their money on.”
“Ultimately, what matters most is how well they spend their money,” he said. “It’s great to be committed to a substantial tutoring infrastructure, but if they do it badly then the return on that investment will be much lower than it might otherwise be.”
According to the pandemic relief act, at least 20 percent of the funds must be used “to address learning loss through the implementation of evidence-based interventions, such as summer learning or summer enrichment, extended day, comprehensive after-school programs, or extended school-year programs, and ensure that such interventions respond to students’ academic, social and emotional needs and address the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on the student subgroups described.”
But there is also a lot of discretion in the way the more than 13,000 school districts around the country can spend the money, said Bree Dusseault, a principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. The research organization compiles a database of pandemic planning from 100 large and urban districts.
“It’s an unprecedented amount of funds and it’s really flexible,” Dusseault said. “What that means is that there’s going to be a lot of variation in difference in how districts think about and strategically deploy those funds. It also means that transparency and clarity on how they’re spending the funds and why they’re spending them that way is so important.”
A report by The Associated Press found that at least a handful of districts were devoting a lot of the money to athletic projects, which proponents say support students’ physical and mental health. Critics, however, say such plans run counter to the intention of the federal aid and could be used on learning loss instead.
Dusseault said whether the spending plans for the funds are transparent and clear to communities depends on the district.
“In some cases, we have districts that are very clear about how they’ve surveyed or spoken with stakeholders, and some districts actually explain how that feedback is shaping the decisions they’re making,” she said. “Other districts, there’s just nothing available publicly to know how you could give input to that process.”
She said the plans for the funding were coming out “just as more and more data is surfacing about just how much students have been impacted by the last two years.” She added there was increasingly more data showing that students are not just behind from the first year of the pandemic, but the disruptions from the delta and omicron variants “have led to two years in a row of highly disruptive learning for students and for the staff who care for them.”
“That is putting more pressure and attention on districts to make sure they focus these funds on caring for their students and getting their students back to a place of recovery,” she said.
“In a way, just returning to the old status quo may be a worst-case option for districts because we know that prior to the pandemic there were already a lot of inequitable gaps. The pandemic really just exacerbated those gaps,” Dusseault said. “There’s a hope that these funds are also going to go to districts piloting new strategies that will get them to a new normal rather than the old normal from before the pandemic.”
“Omicron,” mused a student in Assistant Professor of political science Mauro Caraccioli’s fall 2021 Plagues, Pandemics, and Politics class. “Doesn’t that sound like a Transformer?”
A few months later, the COVID-19 variant with the Hollywood-villain name would be wreaking global havoc. But on that late November day, Omicron was merely the spark for a wide-ranging class discussion that hopped from vaccine inequity to supply chain issues to pandemic mental health. Like the rest of us, the 11 students in the small McBryde Hall classroom were experts on the course’s principal subject matter: the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since 2020, Virginia Tech professors have been designing and teaching classes that turn COVID-19 into an object of study. Students want to understand the current moment. So do faculty members.
For the fall 2021 Pathways course he co-taught, called The Science of COVID-19, Ignacio Moore, professor from the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Science, invited faculty from around campus to guest-lecture on various topics related to the virus. “Almost everything has been super interesting to me,” he said.
For one class, Lauren Childs, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, passed out a deck of cards to show the math behind herd immunity. Black cards indicated immunity. Red cards meant susceptibility. “I think [students] all of a sudden got it,” Moore said. “It became sort of real as opposed to more abstract.”
To teach a course about a situation that’s still rapidly unfolding requires a high level of engagement from faculty members. It’s more challenging, yes, but also a perfect model of ongoing learning. “It shows that to be an engaged, educated citizen, we have to really see our current environment as an opportunity to continue to learn, and to apply what we learn at a university,” said Kim Filer, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.
In COVID-focused courses, faculty members from disciplines as diverse as political science, public administration and policy, geography, and English are teaching students to apply different scholarly lenses to the pandemic—and to their own experiences. These four classes are among the ones equipping students to understand the current era in entirely new ways.
Geography 4984, The Emergence of COVID-19
In a twist on her usual medical geography class, Korine Kolivras launched Geography 4984, “The Emergence of COVID-19,” in the 2021 spring semester. “We talked about how the disease spread around the world and the connections between people that led to that global spread,” said Kolivras of the synchronous online course. “Geographic scale was kind of the big overarching theme.”
With the pandemic ongoing, Kolivras constantly monitored and introduced the latest research, hoping it might battle rampant misinformation. In a Zoom discussion, she shared a new South Korean study that mapped how a ventilation system within a restaurant facilitated COVID transmission between tables 20 feet apart.
Immediately students popped into the chat: “Wait, so six feet isn’t enough?” Some students shared personal stories about their work in restaurants—and maybe some thought twice about going to an indoor party that weekend.
“I think they were a lot more engaged, because they were living it at the same time,” said Kolivras, who works in the College of Natural Resources and Environment. “I think they were probably learning things that they applied outside of class.”
The course went so well that Kolivras got approval to teach it in future semesters as a Pathways course, Geography 2074. Its fitting name? “COVID-19: Global Pandemic, Local Impacts.”
Political Science 3154, Plagues, Pandemics, and Politics
Caraccioli, from the Department of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, has had students explore such issues as lockdowns and bailouts in the context of historical, political, even fictional responses to disease. In Plagues, Pandemics, and Politics, one assigned course reading was Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower.
He also let students use class sessions to process their own pandemic experiences. “I wanted it to be a space for students to express both questions and concerns as well as frustrations and hopes,” said Caraccioli.
In her first paper for the course, Reganne Milano, a senior majoring in international public policy, described the pandemic as “the world’s worst group project,” since one person who doesn’t do the work (i.e., wear a mask or get vaccinated) ruins everybody’s grade. The situation enraged her. During the semester, class discussions and readings helped open her up to other viewpoints. Just being listened to by her professor turned out to be healing. “He actually valued our opinions and was willing to let us speak and bring our own perspectives,” said Milano.
Caraccioli hopes to publish some of his students’ personal response essays as part of a “college COVID archive.” Political scientists, he said, will be studying the pandemic for years to come.
Public Administration and Policy 5354, Homeland Security, Response, and Recovery
Where does the word disaster come from? From the English dis-, or “ill,” and the Latin astrum, or “stars.” “I think this is just a wonderful word,” said Dennis McBride, a research professor with the Hume Center for National Security and Technology and a professor of practice in the Center for Public Administration and Policy, to the graduate students in his Homeland Security, Response, and Recovery course. “It literally means ‘ill stars’—like the stars are not aligned for us.”
When catastrophic star-misalignments cause disasters like hurricanes, terrorism, electromagnetic pulses, and, yes, pandemics, national and state governments kick into action. How that works is what McBride addressed for his class’s graduate students at the Innovation Campus in Alexandria. COVID-19 offered a real-time case study in the limits, and responsibilities, of government action. “That’s going to be a very important future part of disaster management,” McBride said.
English 4674, Studies in Contemporary Culture
For his course about Asians in popular culture, Silas Cassinelli, an assistant professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, chose the subtitle “From Virus to Going Viral” as a nod to the changing narratives around Asians because of the pandemic.
“For this fall, it wouldn’t have been possible to think about what it means to be Asian American in the United States without also thinking about the pandemic and how Asian Americans and people of Asian descent have been represented in discussions about the pandemic from the beginning,” Cassinelli said.
Cassinelli is a scholar of Asian American literature, and he taught a similar class in spring 2019, when the film Crazy Rich Asians became a box office hit with the first all-Asian movie cast in 25 years. But “representation is incredibly dynamic,” Cassinelli said. From that high, the pandemic provoked “significant issues and topics of public debate that have effects on the Asian and Asian American experience in the U.S.,” from the tightening of national borders to mask wearing as a regular practice.
To digest the changes COVID-19 instigated, Cassinelli asked class members to discuss anti-Asian attacks in the context of the virus’s origination in China. “It gave us the opportunity to think about, if we acknowledge that we live in a global world, what are the circumstances in which we are excited and inspired by flows of people and ideas and products? And when we do put up restrictions and limitations? Who’s deemed safe, and who’s deemed potentially suspect?”
By teaching them to think critically about portrayals of race in media and to become more aware of the history of the Asian American experience in the United States, Cassinelli hopes students feel more culturally competent to engage with an onslaught of information. They’ll know the story within the story of the pandemic.
Less than a week after aphoto surfacedofLos AngelesMayorEric Garcettiand Magic Johnson maskless atSoFiStadium, County SupervisorKatheryn Bargerhas ratcheted up the pressure on health officials to modify L.A.’s strict mask mandate for outdoor mega-events before theSuper Bowlkicks off there on February 13.
After the mayor was spotted maskless at the NFC Championship Game, Barger issued a statement calling for an end to “blanket Covid masking policies.” Shortly thereafter, Barger sent a little-noticed official request to the County Public Health Department, asking it to “revisit the masking requirements” and align with the state’s less-stringent guidance for outdoor mega-events.
Without mentioning the mayor by name Barger observed, “This past weekend, we witnessed more than 70,000 fans in attendance for the National Football League NFC Championship game at SoFi Stadium, with a vast majority not wearing masks.” A quick glance at the “Rams Fam Cam” from the game confirms that statement. Barger called the lack of compliance “extremely discouraging.”
Barger said that L.A. Public Health officials have indicated “we have not observed any Covid-19 spikes resulting from prior games this season from games at that stadium.” She also maintained that she fully expects next week’s Super Bowl, also at SoFi, “will see even lower masking compliance.”
Failure to make the change would, she maintained, “again call into question why we have stricter County mandates in place that are neither followed nor enforced, causing more feelings of frustration for residents who have been subject to masking requirements more strictly enforced in other settings like schools, restaurants, and retail.”
The the logic of easing a regulation simply because it is not followed or enforced is not air tight; There is also the option of increasing enforcement. But local officials have been loath to do that, saying they prefer “educating” business owners, especially after restrictions on restaurants early in the pandemic roused strenuous objections from that sector. As of this moment, however, L.A. Public Health officials are standing their ground on masking at outdoor mega-events.
“This is not the right time to stop wearing our masks indoors and in crowded outdoor settings,” said Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer yesterday. She did, however, outline a framework for reducing Covid mitigation measures as the current Omicron surge fades, but she warned that, even after the surge, the threat level would still be considered “high” and numbers would need to come down considerably before restrictions are lifted.
Board of Supervisors Chairperson Holly Mitchell also rebuffed Barger this week, saying Covid transmission remains too high in the county to relax the masking rule.
Barger posted a statement to her web site about the letter she sent to Public Health officials. You can read it below.
Los Angeles County residents deserve clarity and consistency. Currently, L.A. County’s Health Officer Order regarding the outdoor mask mandate is the only one stricter than the State of California’s. I want to emphasize that wearing masks in high-risk indoor settings is still an important tool to combat COVID-19. However, State health experts have established that outdoor events and outdoor school environments are safe for residents to do without a mask. Aligning with the state is the most effective way to maintain the community’s confidence in our safety protocols.
With this in mind, I sent a letter to the Department of Public Health this week formally asking to align with State guidance. With the Super Bowl just over a week away where thousands of fans will arrive from outside L.A. County, I anticipate we won’t see very much compliance with our current mask mandate. We shouldn’t continue to have mandates in place that aren’t followed or enforced. This only continues to sow further distrust and frustration for L.A. County residents. As we near the two-year mark of this pandemic, it is imperative that we protect the public health and public trust of our communities.
