AZ Governor Removes School Mask Requirements Just As Dangerous Variants Increase

Arizona's Governor, eager to show he can eat marshmallows with the best of 'em, issued an order rescinding the requirement that students in schools wear masks.  Thankfully, he did not try to preclude school districts making their own choices, and many are keeping their mask requirements.

Dr. Josh LaBaer with ASU’s Biodesign Institute told reporters this is no time to be making such changes as more contagious strains are taking over.  He said the UK variant is showing up in 60%-80% of samples sequenced by his lab.

That may be the case in his lab, but according to the CDC the California variant is the predominant one.  Here's a visualization of how they break things out:


The California variant is worrisome because it can evade antibodies produced by infection or vaccination. As I wrote on Monday, it's a likely reason AZ has more than twice the breakthrough case rate of the nation as a whole.

Whatever variant is at work, it is particularly dangerous for younger people because they are less likely to be vaccinated yet.  This is showing up in the CDC's case numbers broken out by age.  Here is a chart based on their data:

This makes it very odd that the Governor would choose this particular time to cut back on safety measures for young people.

Update April 22

With regard to what variant is most active in Arizona, I just noticed that the data the CDC is reporting is from March 27. So it is possible that that dominant strain in Arizona has changed to the UK variant since then, which Dr. LaBaer reported he is seeing in his lab.

Header image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

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