California Gov. Gavin Newsom visits a mobile COVID-19 vaccination center on March 10, 2021 in South Gate, California.
Mario Tama / Getty ImagesAfter the CDC announced Thursday that individuals fully vaccinated against COVID-19 no longer need to wear masks or practice physical distancing in most settings, UCSF's Dr. Monica Gandhi — a leading COVID-19 expert — called on officials in California and San Francisco to ease mask mandates to align with the new CDC guidance.
"There is immense collateral damage that comes from not easing restrictions after most people are vaccinated," Gandhi said Friday. "It sends a message that there’s still a danger when there isn't one, and then schools remain closed and businesses suffer. Some collateral damage from restrictions needed to occur when we didn’t have vaccines, but now that we have them, there's no justification."
Gandhi cited the fact that California has one of the highest vaccination rates and lowest case rates in the country as evidence the state can loosen restrictions.
On Thursday, state officials said they were "studying" the new CDC guidance, with Gov. Gavin Newsom said new guidelines could come as soon as Friday. Other Democrat-led states that took similarly cautious approaches to pandemic such as Illinois and Oregon have since lifted their mask mandates for vaccinated individuals to align with the CDC.
"If California doesn’t adopt this new guidance even though it has a very high vaccination rate and the highest rate of children out of in-person learning, I think public sentiment will start swinging towards people believing the state took an approach that didn’t follow science," she said. "California has been criticized for taking a more restrictive approach than the CDC recommended, and it did not lead to better health outcomes. The new CDC guidance is based on science, and I think it’s likely — or at least I hope — California will immediately follow."
Despite enforcing some of the nation's toughest pandemic restrictions, California ended up near the middle of the pack in COVID-19 death rates among the 50 states (29th-highest death rate out of 50).
Gandhi says the science conclusively supports the new guidance, and that fears over not being able to tell the vaccinated from the unvaccinated are largely mooted by the fact that the unvaccinated pose very little risk to the vaccinated. There is now overwhelming evidence that vaccines block transmission, even against the variants.
Gandhi, who authored seven papers on the benefits of universal masking, added that the unvaccinated are still protected by masks.
"In November, the CDC updated its guidance to note that masks protect the wearer," she said. "So you can be a masked, unvaccinated person in a store and still be protected against someone who is unvaccinated and unmasked. I have a 13-year-old who isn't vaccinated yet and until he is, I would feel comfortable with him going to a store masked while others are unmasked.
"Not only because masks protect the wearer, but also because as vaccination rates continue to climb, case rates will fall. In San Francisco, we had just 23 new daily cases in a city of over 800,000. So I don’t think my son will bump into one of the 23 infected people out of 800,000 residents."
In San Francisco, more than 70% percent of residents have already gotten at least one shot. Gandhi warned that not loosening the mask mandate for vaccinated individuals will have unintended consequences.
"If you signal in California that it's too soon to lift these restrictions, or that it's too scary still when the state has one of the highest vaccination rates and lowest case rates, it signals to the populations that there's something we don’t know," she said. "It signals there's something scary out there. Is it the variants? No it can't be the variants, studies have shown that no known variants escape the vaccines. You have to believe in these vaccines. It may seem too good to be true, but you just have believe it. These vaccines are that good."