As Los Angeles County, California, resumes mandatory indoor masking due to a surge in confirmed cases of COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019), U.S. Public Health Service Director Vivek H. Murthy said today that other cities may have to follow suit and are “very concerned” about the outbreak this fall.
AFP reports that Vivek H. Murthy appeared on several news programs and spoke hours after Los Angeles County reinstated mandatory indoor masks.
Although no other cities have followed suit yet, Murthy said other cities are expected to follow Los Angeles County’s lead because of the surge in confirmed cases caused by Delta, a mutant strain of the virus first found in India.
He told ABC’s “This Week” political program, “I think it makes sense for counties to take more measures to stop the epidemic in areas where there are fewer vaccinations or a surge in confirmed cases, like the mask requirement that was announced in Los Angeles. I think it’s reasonable to expect that other parts of the United States will follow suit.”
After months of slowing down the outbreak, confirmed cases in the U.S. have jumped 135 percent in the past two weeks, with the number of confirmed cases climbing in nearly every state.
Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said 97 percent of patients hospitalized with the disease in June were not vaccinated.
Only 48 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, and 68 percent of those over 18 years of age are fully vaccinated.
With more and more working people returning to work and many unvaccinated schoolchildren going back to school, the Delta variant is causing a spike in confirmed cases and delays in vaccination, and Moses is “very concerned” about the outbreak this fall.
He said, “I’m concerned that millions of people in our country have not been vaccinated, and we have to protect children under the age of 12 who have not been vaccinated.”
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