CA Residents Should Put On Masks For The Holidays, CDC Advises

CALIFORNIA — As families and friends in California gather for the holidays, they may want to put on a mask to control the spread of COVID-19, RSV and seasonal flu, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week.

With the spread of COVID-19, RSV and seasonal flu surging in California, along with lagging vaccination rates, masking up is one of the best ways Americans can protect themselves, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said Monday in a call with reporters.

Coronavirus cases plummeted in early fall, and California relaxed its mask guidance and ceased requiring face coverings in most public settings with the exception of high-risk settings such as hospitals, doctor’s offices and nursing homes. However, COVID-19 cases began skyrocketing across the state in late November and early December, and some regions such as Los Angeles are on track to see a possible return to mandatory indoor masking before the year's end.

In fact, Los Angeles County daily case rates are on track to match levels not seen since the winter surge of 2021. On Wednesday, Los Angeles County reported more than 5,000 new cases, matching the daily average for the entire state in mid-November.

In the Bay Area, health officials are warning of rising caseloads as well. In Santa Clara County, where only a quarter of eligible residents are up-to-date on COVID boosters, the county's wastewater monitoring program detected a sharp increase in COVID-19 levels over the last 30 days.

"The Palo Alto sewershed’s levels are higher than they were in January 2022, at the height of the Omicron surge last winter," the County of Santa Clara Emergency Operations Center / Public Health Department warned Tuesday. "The current rise in COVID-19, along with high levels of flu and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) within the County, should serve as a stark reminder for everyone eligible to get vaccinated against both flu and COVID as soon as possible, especially in advance of the holidays."

COVID-19 case rates began surging across the state after the Thanksgiving holiday, but the holiday gatherings only partly explain the spike, said Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer.

“People came back from Thanksgiving and pretty quickly were testing positive,” Ferrer told the Los Angeles Times. “We had more people who tested positive right after Thanksgiving than we’ve ever had before...A shorter incubation period could be contributing to a more rapid increase in cases earlier on in December than we saw the past two years.”

BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 are now the dominant versions of the coronavirus in California, and they are believed to have a shorter incubation period.

Even as COVID-19 cases surge in California, RSV and influenza are spreading at "very high" rates - particularly in Southern California, the CDC warned. The combination is straining hospitals, forcing Orange County to issue an emergency declaration to help the Children's Hospital of Orange County cope with an ongoing flood of young patients afflicted with upper respiratory viruses.

Mask guidance is based on COVID-19 community levels, and the CDC is considering expanding the dashboard to include seasonal flu and other highly contagious respiratory illnesses to give Americans a clearer picture of when they need to mask up.

“One need not wait on CDC action in order to put a mask on,” agency director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday in a call with reporters. “We would encourage all of those preventive measures — handwashing, staying home when you’re sick, masking, increased ventilation — during respiratory virus season, but especially in areas of high COVID-19 community levels.”

Nationally, COVID-19 rates and hospitalizations ticked up slightly over the last couple of weeks, although the number of people who are dying is down sharply, to 1,780 for the week ended Nov. 30 from the pandemic high of 23,372 deaths for the week ending Jan. 13, 2021.

Nationally, only about 12.7 percent of the eligible 5 and older population are vaccinated and fully boosted against COVID-19. In California, that rate s slightly higher with 18.3 percent of the eligible population vaccinated and fully boosted.

About 56 percent of Americans had gotten their flu shots as of Nov. 19, according to the CDC. In California, 59.2 percent of residents are inoculated.

Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, peaked early, subsided and is picking up again, straining capacity in pediatric units across the country. In California and neighboring states, the number of positive RSV tests statewide hovered at almost 17 percent for the week ending Dec. 3.

Most children get an RSV infection by the time they’re 2, but people can be infected at any age and more than once in a lifetime, according to the CDC.

The symptoms are typically similar to the common cold. But for the extremely young whose lungs aren’t fully developed, the very old and people whose immune systems are compromised, RSV can lead to breathing difficulties.

Masking is still recommended for people using public transportation, or who have weakened immune systems or for other reasons are at heightened risk for severe respiratory illnesses.

Months of hunkering down and avoiding contact with others during the COVID-19 pandemic weakened Americans’ immune systems, according to health experts.

“Public health officials have been bracing for this possibility since early in the pandemic,” Dr. Michael Mina, chief science officer at eMed and one of the nation’s leading epidemiologists, said in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch.

“The recent surges are fully expected ramifications of a new virus that caused massive swings in human behavior,” Mina said. “We know that immunity is working exactly as it was supposed to, and in this case, it means that we drained population-level immunity by not having exposures.