San Jose State administrators say the university will continue to follow Santa Clara County mask mandate guidelines after the county announced its removal conditions on Oct. 7.
Three conditions must be met simultaneously for the mask mandate to be lifted, a Santa Clara County Public Information Officer (PIO) said in an email.
The county PIO said the conditions include: a county or city must first be in the yellow coronavirus Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) transmission tier for three weeks, COVID-19 hospitalizations must be deemed stable and low by a health officer and more than 80% of a county must be fully vaccinated.
If less than 80% of a county is fully vaccinated, a mask mandate can be lifted if eight weeks or more have passed since a COVID-19 vaccine was approved for state and federal emergency use for 5 to 11 year olds, the PIO said.
As of Monday, about 73% of Santa Clara County residents of all ages are vaccinated, according to the county’s Vaccination Among Residents Dashboard.
Kenneth Mashinchi, SJSU senior director of strategic communications and media relations, said the university will continue to follow the county’s public health guidelines.
“SJSU continues to require masks be worn indoors, with few exceptions as outlined in an Aug. 2 message to campus,” Mashinchi said.
President Mary Papazian stated in the Aug. 2 campuswide email that the exceptions to wearing masks indoors on campus are granted when a person is alone in a private office with the door closed or if one is drinking or eating.
SJSU studio practice sophomore Sky Ly said she agrees with the new conditions placed by public health officers but is wary about breakthrough cases.
“I’m fine with all of [the requirements], besides the condition where 80% of the population are getting the vaccine,” Ly said. “I’m going to assume that there might be breakthrough [COVID-19] cases after they receive the vaccine. Sometimes people may not show symptoms [of COVID-19 infection] after being vaccinated.”
Those who’re vaccinated are eight times less likely to be infected by COVID-19 and 25 times less likely to die from or be hospitalized with COVID-19 than unvaccinated people, according to a Sept. 7 CDC news release.
Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County’s public health officer, said she doesn’t know when the county will lift its indoor mask mandate.
“We want to ensure many layers of prevention,” Cody said during an Oct 7 news conference. “We want to make sure the vaccination layer is robust before peeling off the masking layer.”
Cody said Santa Clara County is currently in the orange transmission tier but numbers are slowly trending down.
There are four tiers of COVID-19 transmission including blue, yellow, orange and red, meaning transmission is low, moderate, substantial and high respectively, according to the CDC’s COVID-19 Interactive County View webpage.
A county is considered in the orange tier if 50-99 people per 100,000 tested positive, according to the same CDC webpage.
As of Sunday, 1,025 people are infected with COVID-19 in Santa Clara County and the positivity case rate per 100,000 people is at about 53, according to the CDC’s COVID-19 data tracker webpage.
“I can tell you that in Santa Clara our hospital capacity is on the robust side,” Cody said. “So that metric is going to be easy and simple for us to meet.”
Cody said the last condition of repealing the mask mandate, which is achieving majority vaccination, will probably be harder to fulfill.
“The metric that is probably the most important and most challenging is the vaccination metric because we need 80% of our whole population to be fully vaccinated and eight weeks have passed since 5-11 year olds have been approved for the COVID shot by the FDA,” Cody said.
SJSU business junior Kyle Tran said the indoor mask mandate hasn’t changed his life and the mask mandate’s removal won’t change it either.
“When the mask mandate gets uplifted, what am I going to do? Go to the grocery store without a mask on? Woah! I guess I show up to school without the mask, that’s it,” Tran said. “It’s not like my day changes. I go to the same classes and I do my routine.”
Tran said ultimately the decision should be left to health officials, including doctors, as they’re the people who help COVID-19 patients.
“I think, at least personally, [health officials] should be the ones that know the most about just general safety,” Tran said. “So I don’t mind giving the trust to them that it requires them to give the ‘OK’ [to lift mask mandates].”
