Mask Mandate Returns To Alameda County For Indoors

ALAMEDA, CA — Alameda County is reinstating its indoor mask mandate.

The county's public health department on Thursday ordered that everyone — regardless of vaccination status or past coronavirus infection history — cover their faces while indoors in workplaces and other public settings, with few exceptions. Businesses were also recommended to make face coverings available for customers.

The order takes effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday and applies to businesses, government offices, youth-serving facilities (except K-12 schools throughthe 2021-22 school year), and workplace settings. It also applies to people on trains, buses, ferries, taxis and ride-shares, as well as in transportation hubs such as bus terminals, train stations, marinas, seaports and subway stations.

Exceptions are included under certain circumstances:

• Children younger than 2 should not wear a mask because they could suffocate
• Students and staff in K-12 settings are exempt through the end of the 2021-22 school year, including during sports and other extracurricular activities.
• While working alone in a closed office or room
• While eating or drinking
• While swimming or showering in a fitness facility
• While obtaining a medical or cosmetic service involving the head or face for which temporary removal of the mask is necessary to perform the service.
• Performers at indoor live events (such as theater, opera, symphony, religious choirs, and professional sports) can remove masks while actively performing or practicing.
• Participants in indoor religious gatherings can remove masks when necessary to participate in religious rituals.
• Athletes in indoor recreational sports, gyms, yoga studios, and similar facilities can remove masks when necessary while actively engaged in periods of heavy exertion, as well as when participating in water-based sports, and while actively engaged in other sports where masks create imminent risk to health.
• People with a medical condition, mental health condition or disability that prevents them from wearing a mask.
• People with a hearing impairment, or who are communicating with a person who is hearing impaired.
• People for whom wearing a mask would create a risk to the person related to their work.

The order said the omicron variant of the coronavirus and its subvariants have circulated in Alameda County.

"These variants are highly transmissible in indoor settings, and recent mutations have increased infectiousness, including the ability to infect vaccinated persons and those with a history of prior infection," the order said. "Laboratory-reported COVID-19 diagnoses have risen steadily since early April, and the County is experiencing a worsening wave of community transmission."

The current wave is larger than the previous wave from the delta variant last year, the county said, with comparable levels of daily cases.

"Critically, the County’s reported cases are reaching those levels despite the fact that COVID-19 case reports are a substantial underestimate of total case burden, because they do not include home testing results and unidentified infections," the order said.

Daily COVID-19 hospitalizations and newly identified hospitalized persons with COVID-19 infections — which are indicators of severe disease that lag behind case report data — are also increasing, the county said. It noted that hospitalizations remain "well below pandemic peaks," but called the latest increases "concerning in light of the ongoing rise in infections."

Read the full health order here.