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https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-07-28/why-some-health-experts-see-less-value-in-a-new-l-a-mask-mandate-at-this-stage-of-the-pandemic

Thanks to a combination of widespread immunity, effective COVID-19 treatments and a more benign virus, theres less reason to suppress viral spread by any means necessary, said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor who conducts public health research at UC San Francisco.

Were in a very different place in the pandemic, Gandhi said. At this point, I do not think that widespread masking is necessary.

Hospitalized patients with coronavirus infections are less of a burden in the BA.5 era, even if their numbers remain high. At Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the largest of four county-run public hospitals, around 90% of infected patients were admitted for something other than COVID-19 and virtually none of them to go the ICU, according to Dr. Brad Spellberg, the hospitals chief medical officer.

It is just not the same pandemic as it was, Spellberg said this month at a virtual town hall for hospital staffers. A lot of people have bad colds, is what were seeing.

Gandhi said that even steep increases in new infections have ceased to be a reliable predictor of hospital admissions for severe cases of COVID-19.

Weve started seeing a decoupling of cases and hospitalizations, she said.

On top of that, the use of the antiviral Paxlovid in the first five days following a positive test can reduce the chance of hospitalization or death by as much as 88%. For people with weakened immune systems an estimated 3% of Americans prophylactic use of a monoclonal antibody called Evusheld reduced the risk of COVID-19 by 83% over six months; when taken after the onset of an infection, it drove down the risk of severe disease by 88%.

Plus, the Omicron variant now dominating the U.S. is less dangerous than the coronavirus strains that preceded it. The CDC has observed that the Omicron variant generally causes less severe disease than infection with prior variants. A recent study in the medical journal Lancet even suggests that the risk of developing long COVID after an infection with Omicron is less than half what it was with Delta.

The threat has decreased, said Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, chief health officer of Seattle and King County. And for that reason, taking steps that are seen as inconvenient or costly or philosophically objectionable is less palatable and less desirable.

In some cases, health officials still turning to mask mandates out of instinct, Gandhi said.

When new infections rise, that feels scary to a public health officer, and it feels like something they can do, she said.

But if mask mandates no longer hold the promise of driving down hospitalizations and reducing deaths, they will be hard to defend especially to an increasingly restive public.