Los Angeles County Officials Tell Residents To Wear Masks Again

Los Angeles County's COVID obsession, since March 2020, has equaled or exceeded any other jurisdiction in the United States.

LA was one of the first counties in the country to mandate masks; starting April 10, 2020, residents were required to wear masks in indoor public areas. That was extended to cover outdoor areas just a month later, despite overwhelming evidence showing outdoor transmission was minimal to nonexistent. With just one small interruption, those mandates continued well into 2022.

County and public health officials seemingly operate under the assumption that when a mandated policy is so ineffective that it doesn't prevent the very thing it's designed to prevent, it should continue indefinitely. So they did. Mask mandates continued in some locations into 2024, contradicting the prolific amount of accumulated data proving they don't work.

And they're not giving up now.

LOS ANGELES - Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of L.A. County Department of Health, visits a free COVID-19 Rapid Test site at the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport Friday, December 3, 2021. This was the first day free tests were made available to arrivals and Dr. Ferrer personally tried to direct many travelers to take a free test. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Los Angeles County Tells Residents To Wear Masks In Summer 2024

LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer has been an exceptional failure, both in her handling of the pandemic period and the ensuing aftermath. Her mandates became unquestionable law; local politicians and county supervisors, whose incompetence, fear and lack of awareness are obvious in most normal situations, effectively disappeared during a time of crisis.

Ferrer became a defacto dictator, closing restaurants at will, closing schools, enforcing business curfews, mandating masks and vaccine passports, and demanding vaccine mandates that restricted the ability of residents to earn a living. As is common for those who share her political ideology, she completely escaped any accountability or consequences for her extreme authoritarian overreach.

As predicted, the lack of consequences ensures that residents will continue to be punished, indefinitely.

In every single summer period since the start of the pandemic, COVID cases and other metrics have increased in the Western and Southern United States in the summer. Yet somehow, in our fifth summer during the COVID period, the media continues to act surprised. 

READ: The Media Is Now Blaming Outdated COVID Vaccines For Latest ‘Surge’

Sure enough, ABC 7 in Los Angeles reached out to Ferrer to find out if Los Angeles was also seeing the same, predictable increase.

"With the exception of deaths, which have stayed steady at about one person passing away every day," Ferrer said, "All of the other indicators for us, the number of cases, the number of people hospitalized, our wastewater have doubled in the last month."

Here's the chart of current COVID hospitalizations in Los Angeles County. 

LA County Public Health Hospitalizations Dashboard

Not only is this increase entirely predictable given previous seasonal spread, easily visible in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, it's by far the smallest summer increase that we've seen yet.

Even more damning for Ferrer's fear-mongering is the fact that her own county public health dashboard shows that a majority of "COVID hospitalizations" are people there with incidental cases, meaning they're being treated for something else and happened to test positive.

None of this stopped Ferrer from repeating the same nonsensical platitudes about new variants and updated vaccines.

The increase, she says, is not because it's summer and summer produces seasonal increases in the south and west, but the new "FLiRT variant," that means residents are "more likely to get sick and to spread it to others." Somehow, despite all of the increasing awareness of side effects and widespread natural immunity, Ferrer refuses to change her COVID vaccination message.

According to her, "everyone 6 months or older will be asked to get a new vaccine" in the fall. The semi-annual ritual, telling 6-month-old babies to get a vaccination dose with limited efficacy, and a poor side effect profile that's targeted to variants that have already disappeared by the time it's released.

If you're older, Ferrer wants you vaccinated now, and again in a few months, regardless of how many doses you've already had.

"But that doesn't really apply for people who are 65 and older or people who are higher risk," Ferrer said. "Those people should get the current vaccine now and then in the fall, they can go ahead and get another dose of the new vaccine."

The two dose vaccination series used to mean you were considered "fully vaccinated." Now it's two doses, a 2021 booster, two 2022 boosters, another 2023 booster, the first 2024 booster, and a fall 2024 booster. Eight or nine shots for a few months of rapidly waning protection and zero efficacy against infection or transmission. Just ask Joe Biden.

READ: Joe Biden Gets COVID...Again

But Ferrer wasn't done there.

The pièce de résistance, is that Ferrer once again told Angelenos to wear masks when around crowds, traveling, or in busy public areas.

"We have been here before. We have very good tools to protect ourselves," Ferrer said. "Our common-sense precautions make a huge difference and let's remember that some people in particular still can get very sick and let's go out of our way to make sure we're protecting them."

LA Ignoring Its Own Masking Data

"Common-sense precautions." 

There is quite literally nothing less common sense than masks. There is no high quality evidence showing that masks have made a huge difference, and Los Angeles County's own data showed the opposite. A press release from December 2021 titled: "High Compliance with Masking Requirements Keeps L.A. County Residents Safe and Healthy," touted mask wearing as a successful tool for reducing spread.

"Public Health data suggests that public mask wearing is one of the most effective strategies at reducing the spread of the virus when compliance is high," it says. "Public and business sector masking compliance is high, indicating the broad understanding that this small behavior change adds a layer of protection that enables us to engage in our customary activities without endangering ourselves or others. Public Health regularly conducts site visits to assess mask compliance across a variety of L.A. County businesses, during which we determine compliance among customers, employees and their staff, and overall safety requirements. Out of more than 1500 site visits conducted between December 4th-10th, the vast majority of businesses and industries, including restaurants, bars, food markets and hair salons, had masking compliance rates above 95%."

On December 10, 2021 when their compliance checks ended, the seven-day average of new COVID cases in LA was 1,465. By January 8, 2022 it was 47,212, an increase of 3122 percent. With mask compliance rates above 95 percent. This is the "common-sense precaution" Ferrer wants residents to follow.

There cannot be a more obvious, inarguable failure than masks in Los Angeles. And Ferrer is telling people to wear them in 2024. It's unacceptable. And it's also a permanent feature of allowing terrified, unqualified, maliciously incompetent bureaucrats to run major cities.