Sacramento school district returns to indoor mask mandate due to local COVID-19 surge
Sacramento City Unified will return to mandatory indoor masking at all school sites Monday in response to rising levels of coronavirus transmission, less than two months after the K-12 school district ended its requirement.
The district of some 40,000 students said it is reimposing the mandate after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday placed Sacramento County and a dozen other California counties in the high “community level” for COVID-19 danger.
The move means students, teachers and staff will need to mask up next week and the following week, after which the district breaks for summer. The district, in a message to parents and staff Thursday evening, also encouraged masking on Friday.
“Providing a soft start to our reinstated indoor masking requirement ... will allow time for our school sites and families to fully prepare for this change,” the district said in its announcement. SCUSD officials also said masks would be provided as needed.
California ended the statewide mask requirement at K-12 campuses in mid-March, but Sacramento City Unified elected to keep its district-level mandate in place until its return from spring break on April 18.
The school board voted in March to remove the mask requirement once Sacramento County had been in the CDC’s low community level for four straight weeks, also announcing that a return to indoor masking would be automatically triggered by the county reaching the high community level.
The CDC categorizes counties into low, medium and high community levels for COVID-19. Sacramento County was classified in the low community level as recently as two weeks ago but has leaped into the high level as infection rates have surged in the region.
After the county moved into the medium level, and as local virus hospitalizations began approaching the threshold for the high level, Sacramento City Unified in a pair of statements sent last week said the return to a mask requirement appeared to be “likely” after this Thursday’s update from the CDC, advising parents to prepare.
The district urged mask use ahead of the mandate, especially for students who have been notified of potential exposure to COVID-19, and said it sent at-home rapid tests to students ahead of Memorial Day weekend.
The latest surge of the pandemic has seen outbreaks emerge at schools. Sacramento City Unified recorded close to 1,100 virus cases among students in May, more than a fivefold increase compared from the previous month; and more than 240 in staff members, nearly seven times more than in April.
The entire four-county region of Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer and Yolo joined the high community level this week, as did several other California counties some in the Bay Area.
Counties are placed into the high level if they exceed 200 weekly cases per 100,000 residents, with the local hospital service area also reaching at least 10 weekly hospital admissions for COVID-19 per 100,000 or reaching 10% or more of its staffed hospital beds occupied by virus patients.
The four counties, which comprise one health service area, ranged from about 225 to 285 cases per 100,000, according to Thursday’s update from the CDC. The four-county hospital admission rate rose to 12.1 per 100,000 on Thursday, up from 9.7 reported last week.
COVID-19 numbers are worsening in California and many parts of the U.S. as contagious subvariants of the omicron variant spread rapidly. The current dominant strain, BA.2.12.1, is believed by experts to be about 25% more contagious than BA.2, which was already more contagious than the original omicron strain known as BA.1.
BA.2.12.1 now makes up just over half of cases in the CDC region that includes California.
California’s test positivity rate has more than quintupled since April 1, from 1.4% to 7.9%, according to a Tuesday update from the California Department of Public Health.
The capital region is now among the hardest hit in California’s surge. Positivity in Sacramento County has jumped from 1.7% to 12% since the start of April, while El Dorado and Placer counties increased from about 2% to 14%.
No other major K-12 districts in the region appear to be planning a return to mandatory indoor masking, though many of them either end their academic year this week or next week, or have already adjourned for summer.
Sacramento-area health offices have not announced plans to return to countywide health orders. Alameda County on Thursday announced a return to an indoor mask order, effective 12:01 a.m. Friday.
This story was originally published June 2, 2022 at 7:48 PM.
