Dr. Kavita Patel, a medical contributor for MSNBC, told "Morning Joe" on Friday she thinks it's a great idea for Los Angeles County to reimpose a mask mandate for everyone, even if they are already vaccinated against COVID-19 because of new variants that are in the country.
"And let me just say, even more than Los Angeles County. By the way, I really do praise the public health officials there, they’re sticking their necks out on the line, they’re not popular people these days," Patel told host Willie Geist.
Patel said the U.S. can look to other countries like the U.K., Israel, and parts of the European Union on what they have done to limit the spread of the COVID-19 variants due to them being "canaries in the coal mine, they have put back in indoor masks."
"Vaccines do protect us. They protect us from hospitalization and death, as we’ve said. Unvaccinated people with a variant, Willie, that is novel, that we don’t understand, that is highly transmissible, highly infectious, minute to give it to each other, what is the harm when you’re with strangers to wear a mask indoors, especially in close-contact settings? Why are we taking a risk we don’t need to take when we have a preventative measure for now until we get more people vaccinated. And that’s really the bottom line," she added.
The state of California, so far, is not following L.A. County's lead on another mask mandate, though KABC reported on Friday the city of Long Beach, which has its own health department, will also reinstate its own indoor mask mandate for residents, regardless of vaccination status.
For the record, this is the spike in Los Angeles coronavirus cases that led to them reinstating the indoor mask mandate pic.twitter.com/Z0BvMvUh9u
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) July 15, 2021
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