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Under the direction of the mask unveiled by Bay Area health officials this week, it is now clear that for most of the area no one will remove their face coverings until all the children have been removed. school-age children have their turn to get vaccinated.
Removing masks in the eight counties that still need them will likely depend on one new rule: that counties vaccinate 80% of their total population. If they can’t meet that metric, counties can lift warrants eight weeks after children ages 5 to 11 are eligible for vaccines.
Of the three criteria for lifting the mandates announced by health authorities on Thursday, the vaccination target will be the most difficult to achieve, and for most counties, it will be impossible to achieve it without vaccinating young children.
It can also mean that most of the Bay Area wears masks until the end of the year.
The new guidelines essentially make immunization of young children the backbone of mask mandates and underscore the priority health officials have placed on keeping schools open and students in classrooms.
“We have worked hard to get to a place where the schools are open and they stay open,” said Dr Nicholas Moss, the Alameda County health worker. “After a year and a half of the pandemic, most children are back to school, and as case rates go down we have less and less disruption. We want to make sure that we are supporting this as best we can. “
Eight of the Bay Area’s nine counties – all except Solano County – currently have indoor mask warrants in place, and those rules will be lifted when they reach three measures: showing the virus is not circulating widely , that hospitals are not too crowded with COVID patients, and that vaccination rates are high.
Most counties already meet the first two criteria, or expect to do so within the next week or two. But only Marin County has reached the 80% vaccination mark. In the other seven counties, health officials say they will almost certainly need to immunize young children to meet the 80% target.
Setting the bar so high reflects how contagious the delta variant is compared to previous strains of the coronavirus; To crush the community spread of the delta will require many more people to be immunized than expected. And many Bay Area health officials say they won’t feel comfortable lifting the mask warrants until they are satisfied that enough people are vaccinated to mitigate. future outbreaks.
“They are showing an appropriate degree of caution in the face of a highly transmissible delta variant,” said Dr George Rutherford, an infectious disease expert at UCSF. “We know the masks work. We also know that vaccines work. But you still have to be careful. Now is not the time to claim victory and move on.
With the exception of Marin County, vaccination rates in the Bay Area range from around 66% to 75% in places that have indoor mask warrants. In San Francisco, the number of people needed to reach 80% vaccinated – 44,000 – is roughly equivalent to the total number of children aged 5 to 11, said Dr Susan Philip, the city’s health officer.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is expected to be licensed for children aged 5 to 11 next month. Counties can only lift mask warrants eight weeks after that date or until they have reached 80% of the population fully immunized – whichever comes first. Most counties are unlikely to meet any of these goals until the end of December. But several health officials said it didn’t seem too difficult to ask everyone to wear masks until then.
“We still have a lot of unvaccinated children and we want to protect them,” Moss said. “There is going to be a time when vaccines will be widely available and we will not be able to keep everyone masked indefinitely. I don’t know what this magical date is, but we quickly arrive at this place. I don’t quite feel there yet.
Children under 5 also remain vulnerable, but they are not included in the mask mandate guidelines for several reasons: it is unclear when a vaccine might be cleared for them, and the prevention of infections in this group. age is not essential to keep schools open.
In general, children 18 and under don’t get very sick from COVID, although Bay Area health officials have noted that in other parts of the country a large number of children were infected and some became very ill and had to be hospitalized.
Locally, the biggest problem is that if children are infected, they can miss a week or more of school. And they can pass the virus on to others, which means classmates may have to stay home as well.
So far, the worst-case scenarios – including epidemics that cause entire classes to be sent home or even temporary school closures – have not happened since children returned to in-person learning in the city. the Bay Area in August. And after almost a full academic year of virtual education, health and education officials say they are determined to have kids in the classroom as much as possible now.
“It is really crucial that we do everything we can to keep children in school”, said Philip, the San Francisco health official. “It was a huge success this year for San Francisco that the kids were in person to learn, and we want to protect that.”
Masks are currently required in all California schools as part of a statewide mandate, and this is expected to remain in place for the foreseeable future.
But Philip and other health workers have said that forcing adults to wear masks in other indoor spaces – even places like bars and nightclubs where children aren’t allowed – will reduce the overall spread of disease in the community and will prevent adults from transmitting the virus to children.
“The decrease in cases in the community, along with the masking, decreases the spillover of these cases into children,” Philip said. “In some settings, even though adults may be the ones who hang out with them, if they are infected and when they are infected, they are often linked to children in their life, and if these children are infected, they have to isolate themselves. outside of school. We want to stop this as much as possible.
Many parents applauded the announcement on Thursday that the masks in most counties would stay in place until young children could get vaccinated. But others questioned whether it was necessary to require everyone to wear masks for another two to three months.
Oakland relative Megan Bacigalupi, who heads state-wide conservative advocacy group OpenSchoolsCA, noted that Orange County in Southern California has not implemented a mask warrant for interior this summer, and schools there did not report more cases among students than in counties with warrants.
“We hang masks on children. But our most vulnerable are not children, our most vulnerable are adults and immunocompromised people, ”said Bacigalupi, whose children are 6 and 9 years old and are not yet entitled to vaccination. “The fact that we try to hide our less vulnerable doesn’t make sense to me and a lot of other parents. “
Erin Allday is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @erinallday
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