WhyPublicHealthMandatesMatter
PopulationVille
From Erig Ting writing for SF Gate on Thursday:
An indoor mask mandate.
Last month, (San Francisco) Bay Area counties announced that were opting not to mandate masks indoors amid the current uptick of COVID-19 cases, citing low hospitalization numbers, as well as the fact that the highly vaccinated region is well-protected against severe illness and death.
On Thursday, Alameda County broke ranks by once again implementing an indoor mask mandate "to limit the impact of increasing COVID-19 cases on hospitalizations." The mandate, which takes effect June 3, applies to most indoor settings, save K-12 schools and the city of Berkeley, which sets its own health protocols...
An indoor mask mandate.
It's easy, and, if everyone partakes, it works.
The following is from the synopsis and abstract of a study by Laurence Aitchison et al. from the University of Bristol published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last Tuesday:
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And for those wondering (including, I suppose, the trolls who have been filling the comment inbox to bursting with unread dross that I refuse to wurlitzer), unless a population is past the point of no return (i.e. an R of 5 or greater) a 19% reduction in R is significant.
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We resolve conflicting results regarding mask wearing against COVID-19. Most previous work focused on mask mandates; we study the effect of mask wearing directly. We find that population mask wearing notably reduced SARS-CoV-2 transmission (mean mask-wearing levels corresponding to a 19% decrease in R[eproduction number]). We use the largest wearing survey (n = 20 million) and obtain our estimates from regions across six continents. We account for nonpharmaceutical interventions and time spent in public, and quantify our uncertainty...
{snip}
...In light of these results, policy makers can effectively reduce transmission by intervening to increase mask wearing.
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And for those wondering (including, I suppose, the trolls who have been filling the comment inbox to bursting with unread dross that I refuse to wurlitzer), unless a population is past the point of no return (i.e. an R of 5 or greater) a 19% reduction in R is significant.
Image at the top of the post: Case count per 100K population in Alameda County via the NY Times.
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