by Jill Cowan for the New York Times: For almost two years, as the coronavirus has surged and receded and surged again in Los Angeles, Barbara Ferrer, the county’s public health director, has been a steady voice of caution.
Even when California officials eased restrictions throughout the pandemic, Ferrer’s office kept many of those rules in place. Indoor dining was shuttered in Los Angeles for much longer than in many parts of the state. Although California’s indoor mask mandate has expired as of today, Los Angeles County’s requirement will remain in effect.
Still, just before the Super Bowl drew tens of thousands of visitors to the region, Ferrer told me she was hopeful that the event wouldn’t lead to the kind of increase in Covid-19 cases that have followed other big celebrations.
“We are fully open in Los Angeles County and I’m glad we’re fully open,” she said. “But we’ve done it by layering in sensible protections.”
I talked with Ferrer about how she’s thinking about the future. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited:
What will you be watching in the aftermath of the Super Bowl, and on what kind of timeline?
We usually will see the uptick somewhere around Day 10. Omicron seems to have a shorter incubation period, so we could see an uptick a little bit earlier. It’s going to be hard to see the impact, unless it’s pretty significant, because cases are declining and I think we’re going to continue to decline. The impact might be more of slowing the rate of the decline.
There are going to be confounding variables. The governor is lifting the indoor masking requirement in many places, but that won’t be the case in L.A. County. There will be some confusion, and there may be places where people are going to be taking off their masks a bit early. And when everybody starts taking off those masks indoors, there’ll be more spread.
We’re not in a place where we don’t have to worry about transmission yet.
So do you think it’s safe for the state to be lifting the indoor mask mandate?
Case rates are all over the place in the state. And that’s why the governor has always been clear that your local health departments will look at the data and make a decision at the local level about what makes sense.
You’ve said that, based on projections, Los Angeles County’s indoor masking requirement could be lifted next month. Can you talk through that?
If the rate of decline in new cases continues at about 3.5 percent every day, we’d get there in 25 to 30 days. And then, we’ve given ourselves a two-week window to make sure it’s a stable number. So that’s why we’re looking at the middle of March or the end of March.
I think asking ourselves to all get through another month with masks on is really going to be worth it, because if we can get the rates down much lower, a lot of things become safer.
How are you approaching what comes after that indoor mask mandate is lifted? There’s been a lot of discussion recently about what “endemicity” might look like. What will restrictions look like in Los Angeles in the longer term?
What I’ve welcomed with the pandemic is the ability to respond to the changing circumstances. That’s probably everyone’s greatest source of frustration, as well.
The near future holds for us a host of better therapeutics that will be more widely available, and that’ll be a game changer. It’s just like having access to antigen testing has been a game changer.
So while everyone would like us to have the crystal ball, I think what we can do is acknowledge that we live in a country with enormous resources that have helped make it possible for us to develop a larger cadre of tools that help us mitigate the endless challenges of an unpredictable virus. I don’t think the unpredictable virus part is changing.
The way to think about it is when we’re in the valley — case rates are low, transmission is low, we don’t have a lot of emerging variants of concern — we can remove some of the protection layers that we add in when we’re in the surges. But I don’t know anybody that can predict there are going to be no more surges.
Do you think we’ll ever reach a point where we’re not toggling between levels of restriction? Like there might be advisories about wearing masks or getting vaccines, but there aren’t mandates?
I am confident we’ll get there. For a couple of reasons, we’re not there yet.
One is we’ve messed up in the past on access. The next powerful tool is going to be these therapeutics, and we really need to make sure that it’s not lip service to say that there’s good access for everyone.
We also have to recognize that whenever there’s a lot more transmission, essential workers get hit the hardest, and many of those essential workers are also low-wage workers.
So I would say the second area we need to focus on as a country and as a state is where the jurisdiction lies on protecting workers.
We shouldn’t be this far along in a pandemic and still be trying to decide what the standards are going to be for workplace safety around infectious diseases. We should have really, really strong standards, including requirements around employers providing the best masks, not the cheapest.