California’s Los Angeles County, the most populated county in the country, announced on Thursday that it will be reinstating the widely unpopular mask mandate starting this Saturday, according to CNN.
The announcement was made at a press conference by L.A. County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis, who said that “we expect to keep masking requirements in place until we begin to see improvements in our community transmission of COVID-19.” Among other conditions, the entire county requires that all residents wear masks indoors, even if they have already been vaccinated.
Davis’s justification for reimposing the mask mandate was the fact that there were approximately 1,500 new coronavirus cases reported on Thursday; the total population of Los Angeles County is well over 10 million. Davis also said that the daily positivity rate for coronavirus in the county has risen to about 3.7 percent, although he made no mention of how many of these positive cases were serious or potentially lethal, and how many were mild or asymptomatic.
The county has attributed 24,566 deaths to the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic over a year ago, out of a total of 1,262,578 confirmed cases.