With mask mandate, L.A. County now leads national battle against the Delta variant

Sam Weissler, left, enjoys an ice coffee while Ryan Maldonado paints an inside a window at Three Kings Tattoo on Friday in Highland Park. Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, medical epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said he’s not worried about the pandemic approaching the same level of devastation seen half a year ago, but is “concerned about the trajectory and the speed of the doubling of new cases.” He said: “Hopefully, this will be the wakeup call for those who are still vaccine hesitant to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated.” Kim-Farley said he did not expect officials to restrict business capacity or reimpose physical distancing measures except as a strategy of last resort. Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases expert at UC San Francisco, said it’s smart to wear masks in crowded indoor settings, especially “with a bunch of people you don’t know.” Dr. Monica Gandhi, also an infectious diseases specialist at UC San Francisco, said it can be a reasonable policy to require masks when more than five people are hospitalized for COVID-19 for every 100,000 residents. And a cadre of Bay Area health officials — representing Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Sonoma counties, as well as the city of Berkeley — did likewise Friday, saying in a joint statement that the move would be “an extra precautionary measure for those who are fully vaccinated” and “ensure easy verification that all unvaccinated people are masked in those settings.” Nearly half of California’s residents, or about 19 million people, now live in counties where health officers are recommending or requiring everyone wear masks in indoor settings. “People that aren’t wearing a mask and haven’t gotten vaccinated — how can you tell?” Castellanos said Friday while walking in Montrose.