Health officials still recommend masks in indoor public settings, but school operators will be able to require masks or make them optional.
Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of UC San Francisco’s Department of Medicine, said because children age 2 to 4 are ineligible for vaccines, it would be safer for them to wear a mask until shots are available for them.But if he had a 1-year-old in a childcare center, and the facility chose to go mask optional? “I probably would just accept that there is a tiny risk of doing that, that the benefits of having the kid in daycare outweigh that risk,” Wachter said.
“It’s all about transmission,” Maldonado said. “If you still live in an area where your transmission rate is high — even if your county rate is low, but your neighborhood or your school district is high,” there’s a higher risk in unmasking in those settings. A trend of seeing more kids coming to school infected — or if cases aren’t dropping — might be a signal to retain a mask-wearing policy.
“Child care is difficult because children under 2 don’t wear masks and never have. So the protection for those children has been to try to surround them with both people who are fully vaccinated and boosted, and, of course … adults wearing their masks and older children wearing their masks,” L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in an interview Friday.
Younger children aren’t just vulnerable because they’re not yet eligible for vaccinations; some have “underlying conditions that put them at much higher risk, or they live with people who are very vulnerable,” Ferrer said. “It’s still reasonable to talk with your childcare provider about your unique circumstance, particularly for children under 2, that can’t mask up.