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Major Sacramento school district won’t return to a mask mandate next week. Here’s why

Sacramento Bee - 1/6/2023

Sacramento City Unified School District will not impose an indoor mask requirement when students return next week from winter break, officials confirmed Friday morning, following a recent decline in local coronavirus case numbers.

Under its COVID-19 safety policy, Sacramento City Unified’s mask mandate is automatically triggered by Sacramento County being classified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into the “high” community level for COVID-19 danger.

The CDC’s community-level assignments are released weekly, on Thursday afternoons, based on counties’ recent COVID-19 metrics.

If and when Sacramento County is placed in the “high” community level, Sacramento City Unified would return to a district-wide mask requirement the following Monday.

The county was downgraded from the high level to the CDC’s “medium” community level on Dec. 29 and remained in the medium level in this week’s update.

District officials in a message to parents Friday morning confirmed that this means “indoor masking will not be required, but strongly encouraged, when students and staff return from winter break” next Monday.

Sacramento City Unified administrators urged parents to have their students tested using at-home rapid tests that were distributed before the start of winter break.

The county had entered the high community level on Dec. 22, but the mask requirement was not triggered for students because the district adjourned for its winter break the following week. The district said staff and faculty working at campuses during break would be required to wear masks.

Prior to the one-week stint last month, Sacramento County had not been in the CDC’s high community level since late July.

What are the CDC community levels?

Community-level assignments are based on counties’ case and hospitalization figures for COVID-19.

Federal health data from the CDC show Sacramento County’s case rate has declined since mid-December, from a weekly rate of just over 200 cases per 100,000 residents to 114 per 100,000 in Thursday’s update. A seven-day case rate of 200 per 100,000 residents is the CDC’s main threshold between the medium and high community levels.

Hospital admissions with COVID-19 have continued to climb in the county, up 24% in the past week according to the CDC data, but the percentage of intensive care unit beds being used by virus patients declined by 1%. Trends in hospitalization numbers tend to lag trends in transmission rates by about two weeks.

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