Santa Clara County Dropping Indoor Mask Mandate, Joining Rest of Bay Area
SAN JOSE (CBS SF) -- Santa Clara County health officials announced Tuesday that all their COVID benchmarks have been reached, allowing the county to lift its indoor COVID masking mandate on March 2.
"What we can expect with this pandemic is we will have peaks and valleys," County public health director Dr. Sara Cody told reporters. "So right now, we are coming into a lovely valley. We can all really enjoy that."
Cody told reporters that the community spread of the virus has fallen significantly during the current lull to a level now safe enough for the county to finally join other Bay Area communities in lifting the mandate.
"We have met the metrics," she said. "It's a balance. At some point, we do need to transition from a requirement to a recommendation and in our county. We set metrics where we thought that was safe enough. It's not completely safe, we still have community transmission of COVID, but we've reached a level where it feels safe enough to make the transition."
She added that individual businesses can still require patrons to wear masks.
"Our trends are very strongly in a downward direction," she told reporters. "The levels of community transmission have declined significantly over the last week and very significantly over the last two weeks. And the rate of decline continues to be fairly steep...All of our data is consistent, the level of community transmission in Santa Clara County is continuing to decrease.
When it applies to schools, Cody said the county discontinued local rules for schools and childcare settings in mid-2020 and has followed state guidance and rules since that time. County schools will now follow the state's lead in lifting school mask requirements on March 11.
While the mandate will go away, Cody said she would encourage residents to continue to wear masks in crowded, public settings.
"While indoor masking in public spaces will no longer be required, it still makes sense to do," she said. "Wearing a mask is part of working together to protect others, especially the most vulnerable among us."
The three benchmarks Cody put in place were -- a high vaccination rate, a decline in the hospitalization rate and dip below an average of 550 new cases a day for week.
On Tuesday, the 7-day average had fallen to 351 new cases and 244 county residents were hospitalized with COVID, less than half of the 533 residents that were hospitalized at the peak of the county's winter surge in cases due to the omicron variant.
In addition, 84.8 percent of county residents are vaccinated.
