Los Angeles is set to lift its outdoor mask mandate as Covid hospitalisations in Southern California continue to fall, health officials have announced.
The new guidance will come into effect across Los Angeles County just after midnight on Wednesday and will allow people to go without masks at K-12 schools and child-care facilities.
Spectators will also be able to ditch masks when they go to “mega” events at city venues such as Dodger Stadium, SoFi Stadium, the Hollywood Bowl, and Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
Mask rules at all of these settings will be lifted at 12.01am on Wednesday, LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer announced on Tuesday.
“With significant improvement in community transmission rates, we’re looking forward to realigning our safety measures while continuing as always to ensure protections for our workers and our most vulnerable residents,” she told the LA County Board of Supervisors.
And she added: “We remain very encouraged by the steady declines that are seen across so many of our metrics.”
Health officials had said they would drop the outdoor mask mandate when Covid hospitalisations fell below 2,500 for seven days in a row, which happened last Wednesday.
Data showed that as of Monday, there were 1,995 Covid patients hospitalised in LA County, down 26 per cent over the last week.
And over the last few weeks, LA County has seen an 81 per cent drop in new daily Covid cases.
Although the outdoor mandate will change, people in LA County will continue to have to wear masks in indoor spaces, regardless of vaccination status.
On Wednesday the state of California will lift its requirement for anyone over the age of two to wear a mask in most indoor space, but LA County will keep it in place until they record seven days of “moderate” Covid transmission.
Officials say that this could keep the indoor mandate in place until the middle of March.
California has seen more than 8.85m Covid cases during the pandemic, and 83,120 deaths.
