Santa Clara is the only county in the greater San Francisco Bay Area that isn't falling in line with the state of California and lifting its COVID-19 indoor mask after Feb. 15.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Santa Clara is the only county in the greater San Francisco Bay Area that isn't aligning with the state of California and liftingat a Wednesday morning press conference that while the omicron surge is subsiding, she believes the community transmission rate remained too high to stop requiring masking.
"Currently we are emerging from the omicron surge and it's been about a month since the peak and our cases and our case rates are 40 percent of what they were," Cody said, KTVU"But we still have very high levels of community transmission, still higher than at any other point in the pandemic pre omicron. And so the risk of being exposed to someone with COVID in our community is still high.
Santa Clara County is using vaccination, hospitalization and case rate metrics to determine when to lift the mask mandate, a press release from the health department said. Public health officials anticipate it will be able to drop indoor masking requirements"in a matter of weeks," the statement said.
This news comes as eleven counties in the region — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Monterey, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma, and the City of Berkeley — said Wednesday they would fall in line with the state and drop the indoor mask mandate after Feb. 15.
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