Sacramento, 12 other California counties move to CDC’s ‘high’ COVID level. Is it mask time?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday placed more than a dozen California counties into the “high” community level for COVID-19 danger, including the entire four-county region of Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer and Yolo counties, as well as several Bay Area counties.
That means federal health officials are calling for people in those counties to mask up in public indoor settings.
The move into the high classification for Sacramento County also automatically triggers a return to an indoor mask requirement at Sacramento City Unified School District.
It was not immediately clear when exactly the school district’s mask order will go into effect, though the district in statements last week told parents to prepare for a “possible return” after this week’s update from federal health officials. A district spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment seeking clarification Thursday.
Thirteen California counties were placed in the high level: the four in the Sacramento area, as well as Del Norte, Marin, Mendocino, Monterey, Napa, San Benito, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma.
Alameda County health officials on Thursday announced a new indoor mask mandate would take effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday. Alameda was not among the counties moved into the CDC’s high level Thursday, staying in medium, but it was near the data thresholds for the high level based on recent hospitalizations.
It is not yet clear whether any other health offices in the Bay Area or Sacramento area are planning to join Alameda County in returning to a countywide mask order.
“We continue to monitor cases and the impact on hospitals,” Sacramento County health spokeswoman Samantha Mott said in an emailed response Thursday. “Public Health continues to strongly recommend vaccination and wearing masks in public places.
“Businesses may make independent risk assessments and implement additional requirements such as masking.”
Yolo County spokesman John Fout in an emailed response late last week said Yolo would not consider returning to a mask mandate unless there is a “threat to our healthcare system.”
El Dorado and Placer counties have not previously imposed local mask orders during the pandemic, instead deferring to state health orders.
Data behind CDC’s community level assignments
The CDC considers per-capita case rates as well as hospitalization metrics in its community level assignments, calculated weekly on Thursdays.
Any county with at least 200 weekly cases per 100,000 residents is moved at a minimum into the “medium” level of the three-tiered framework.
Counties with a case rate above 200 are then moved into the high level if their corresponding health service area – groups of counties that share hospital resources – records a weekly total of 10 or more COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 residents, or if the health service area has 10% or more of its staffed hospital beds occupied by virus patients.
The CDC as of Thursday recorded Sacramento at 284 cases per 100,000 for the past week, Yolo at 276, Placer at 241 and El Dorado at 226.
The four counties comprise one health service area, as defined by the CDC, and the area combined for 12.1 virus hospitalizations per 100,000, up from 9.7 per 100,000 a week earlier. COVID-19 patients occupied 6.4% of staffed beds in the region, up from 5.1% last week.
Sacramento County had 159 patients in hospital beds with confirmed COVID-19 on Wednesday, state health data show, exactly triple the 53 reported a month earlier on May 1. Placer County increased from 29 to 72 patients; El Dorado from one to 11; and Yolo from one to six.
San Francisco and San Mateo counties were on the cusp of the high community-level threshold, both measured at 9.6 hospitalizations per 100,000, up from 8.2 last week. Alameda and Contra Costa counties were also close at 9.3 per 100,000, from 7.3 last week.
Up until Thursday, none of California’s 58 counties had been in the high level since recovering from winter’s omicron surge earlier this year.
The upgraded risk levels reflect a surge of COVID-19 sweeping through most of the U.S., largely fueled by more contagious offshoots of the omicron variant. One of those subvariants, BA.2.12.1, recently became dominant both nationwide and within the CDC region that includes California.
This story was originally published June 2, 2022 at 3:10 PM.
