Executive Glassman,

The undersigned citizens of Harford County demand a mask mandate now.  We have watched our hospitals get to a state beyond their capacity during this wave, and we are too slow to react.  Today (12/30), the state reached 2122 hospitalizations (a record number), and had 55 new deaths (a number not seen since last winter).  On top of that, the hospitalizations have increased by 577 over the past 7-days, which is a rate that we have never during the pandemic.  While we know this is mainly driven by those who are not vaccinated, this level of transmission is out of control and puts everyone at risk.  We don’t want to get to a point where the only solution would be mass shutdowns and/or to close the schools; therefore, the only reasonable mitigation strategy to slow down this current wave is to immediately institute a mask mandate. 

The past few months have seen many more people around Harford County mask on their own, however, those who are unvaccinated are more likely to be maskless, causing an increased risk to others.  A masking strategy is not about personal protection, but instead about public protection, and only works when everyone participates.  A “mask if you want strategy” basically leaves it in the hands of the individual about whether they would like to protect others, which means that selfish (or uninformed) people do not participate.

There seems to be less concern during this wave, because we are hearing that the Omicron variant has less severe outcomes.  While this is great, its high transmissibility is making that less relevant.  Reports from South Africa are showing that Omicron tends to be 70-80% less lethal, which is fantastic.  However, in Maryland we had over 14,000 new cases on 12/29, and trending way up.  We know that this is a severe underestimate due to lack of testing (% positivity ~20% indicates this) or testing at home and not reporting.  In fact, some projections say that we could have over 60,000 new cases per day by the end of January (https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/maryland?view=infections-testing&tab=trend&test=infections  Even at 80% less severe, we would have the same outcome from ~12,000 new cases per day of Delta, something that is very hard to fathom. 

This is all compounded with the fact that many of the current cases in the state are still of the Delta variant.  The CDC observed in our region that ~40% of the cases were still Delta last week (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions if we use that to estimate today’s cases, that means of more than 14,000 cases, we had over 5,000 cases of Delta, which in and of itself would have been a record just 10 days ago.  The worst part about this is that we are far from the peak for daily deaths.  We have seen in the previous waves that deaths lag behind hospitalizations by 15-25 days, meaning we won’t peak on our deaths until a few weeks after our hospitalizations peak, and hospitalizations don’t seem to be peaking yet either. 

This County (and state) needed action weeks ago, putting us in a dire dire now.  We don’t want to watch our hospitals turn purely into COVID wards over the next month as that is where we are heading. It is already difficult to get routine or emergency care, which is unacceptable.  We tried to set off the alarm signals weeks ago and the local government would not listen, but we can’t dwell on that as we cannot lose anymore time in this fight against COVID.  The more time we waste, the more lives of our friends, families, and co-workers will be lost.  While masks won’t solve everything, it will surely save lives in the short-term.  We can force the cases and hospitalizations to turn the corner and start decreasing sooner with a mask mandate.  While it may not be popular with all, it is meant to save lives. 

Sincerely,

Jared B. DeCoste, Ph.D.