The same weekend Washington, D.C., will embrace the new coronavirus normal and scale back its mask mandate, a next-door wealthy and liberal Maryland county of 1 million people is moving in the opposite direction. Montgomery County is reinstating its mask requirement, even while its top health officials acknowledge the policy won’t make much of a difference.
“Do I think it’s going to make a huge difference to keep masks on at this point?” Montgomery County health official Earl Stoddard asked on a press call Wednesday after endorsing the mask mandate. “I don’t think so.”
Montgomery County has effectively pinned its mask mandate to case counts. Over the summer, former county health officer Travis Gayles instructed the county council to require masks whenever the county experienced “substantial transmission,” as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means either 5% test positivity or eight daily cases per 100,000 residents (about 75 cases per day in MoCo, a county of 1.05 million.)
Montgomery County’s positivity is 1.7%. It has not gone above 3.5% since February, but thanks in part to massive testing, including random testing of students, MoCo is catching dozens of cases a day. Because the county is, by some measures, the most vaccinated county in the United States, hospitalizations and deaths are low. The latest data show 70 people in the hospital countywide (out of a population of a million) and one death per day. Hospitalization will be lower on the day the mask mandate returns than it was on the day they lifted the mandate in May or when they lifted it again in October.
According to the county’s rules, super high vaccination doesn’t matter. The fact almost all cases are mild doesn’t matter. The fact hospitals are nowhere close to being overrun doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t matter to the county government that most of the population wears a mask even when not required.
County Executive Marc Elrich said as much in his weekly COVID-19 briefing this week, proclaiming, “Everyone should be wearing a mask when indoors, regardless of what the regulation may be. I know that beyond a small minority of our residents, most people get it.”
Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., this same weekend is scrapping its mandates precisely because they realize high case counts alone can’t determine COVID responses. Governments should take a broader view.
More to the point, masks don’t really do much to stop the spread. Elrich has made that clear by eschewing masks.
Elrich wears a mask outside but not inside????
— JimFink (@JimFink03566868) September 19, 2021
More directly, the county’s top health official, Earl Stoddard, said in this week’s briefing: “Do I think it’s going to make a huge difference to keep masks on at this point? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But there’s enough reason to do it, and there’s little harm to doing it to justify keeping the policy.”
So why require masks? Elrich said forcing people to cover their faces is a “trivial” burden that is “small, insignificant.”
Of course, that’s a matter on which not everyone agrees. Elrich dismisses those of us who think masking imposes significant costs as a “small minority,” as if that makes it fine to force us to follow his practices, which are not likely to do much.
