The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors (BOS) won’t implement any indoor vaccine mandates, for now.
At its Tuesday, Aug. 31 meeting, supervisors received a report from L.A. County Public Health showing that the County is making gains in fighting COVID-19.
Of the County’s 10.3 million residents, 56% are fully vaccinated. Hospitalizations have stabilized and are showing a slight decline, said L.A. County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer. The County’s seven-day cumulative case rate had a “welcome decline” of 12% compared to the previous week, with 166 new cases per 100,000 residents.
The data was enough to inspire optimism in the supervisors, who expressed confidence that an indoor vaccine mandate was not yet essential.
Supervisor Janice Hahn, who represents Long Beach, was “pleasantly surprised” by the information in the presentation.
“For me, I wasn’t convinced that I was ready to pull the trigger on proof of vaccination,” she said, noting that she didn’t want to get back to a point where businesses would be forced to shut down again.
A few weeks ago, the Board requested a report on implementing vaccine mandates. San Francisco, New York City, New Orleans and Palm Springs have all implemented similar mandates, which require business patrons to prove that they’re vaccinated in order to enter certain businesses.
The implementation of such a mandate would require resources. Businesses would need a reliable means to verify vaccinations, and potentially additional staff to do so. At the government level, cities would need resources to enforce the health orders.
Even so, Ferrer said that Public Health believed “it’s worth a limited mandate” for locations with a high risk of transmission.
“[A vaccine mandate] does immediately reduce risk when it gets implemented at these higher risk settings, and it does help us slow down transmission,” Ferrer said. “From our perspective, one of the things we’re desperately needing to do is to stop the cycle of surges. We can’t just keep doing this cycle.”
Those high-risk environments would include bars, indoor restaurants, entertainment centers, card rooms, theatres and other areas where people are crowded together and may remove their mask for eating and drinking.
By CDC standards, L.A. County is still considered an area with “high transmission,” defined as a 7-day average of 100 new cases per 100,000 residents. The highly transmissible Delta variant has long overtaken the previous strain of COVID-19 and now makes up nearly all sequenced cases.
With schools reopening and the Labor Day weekend on the horizon, Ferrer stressed cautious optimism.
Even if the board does implement a vaccine mandate in the future, it will only apply to the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County.
For incorporated areas, their guidance is more symbolic. Long Beach has its own health department, meaning it is not behested to follow County guidance, but the City has a history of mirroring health decisions made at the county level. At it’s Aug. 24 meeting, the Long Beach City Council said it would look to the supervisors for guidance.
Supervisors and health officials stressed the importance of vaccination, the most effective means of preventing infection from COVID-19.
“There’s no question in my mind that [getting vaccinated] is a responsible thing to do, if not for yourself, for your family. If not for your family, for the community,” Supervisor Kathyrn Barger said. “I hope that those numbers will scare people into doing the right thing, which is unfortunate, but I think that is the reality.”
Related:
