Los Angeles County Will Mandate Masks Indoors to Combat Delta

• July 15, 2021, 5:41 p.m. ET

Los Angeles County announced Thursday that it volition necessitate masks to beryllium worn wrong careless of vaccination status, arsenic the highly contagious Delta variant spreads passim California.

Public wellness officials successful the region had already been urging residents to deterioration masks indoors. The mandate volition statesman Saturday night, conscionable earlier midnight.

The Delta variant is highly contagious, scientists say, and whitethorn origin much terrible illness, though vaccinated radical are mostly protected. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s apical infectious illness doctor, has described it arsenic “the top menace successful the U.S. to our effort to destruct Covid-19.” The C.D.C. says that the variant is present liable for implicit fractional of each caller cases successful the United States. In Los Angeles County, scientists recovered that it accounted for astir fractional of each of the variants genetically sequenced.

Some experts person said they didn’t deliberation the Delta variant was a peculiar menace successful Los Angeles, wherever immense swaths of the colonisation person already been infected with the virus, and vaccination rates are comparatively high.