Vaccine priority remains even with restrictions lifted

Is it over? Are we finally moving into the post-pandemic world, blinking as if we’ve suddenly emerged into the light of day from the long night? Maybe. Stay-at-home orders were officially lifted last week for Californians, even though the state will remain under the state of emergency declared in March of 2020.

On Tuesday, though, capacity restrictions on businesses, as well as physical distancing requirements, were lifted.

As for wearing a mask, that’s a bit more complicated. If you’re fully vaccinated and not working, it appears you no longer will be required to wear a mask.

But workplace rules were still confusing as of this writing. Unvaccinated people will still have to wear a mask indoors — although businesses will have the option about how to enforce, or not enforce, that regulation.

Rules for masking up at workplaces are set out by the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board, which has reversed course several times, with the most recent revision suggesting fully vaccinated workers won’t have to wear masks, even if some co-workers are unvaccinated and still required to mask up.

All this continues to beg the question about just how businesses and larger scale gathering places will be able determine people’s vaccination status and know whether they need to wear masks.

Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested Friday the state is working on an electronic system that businesses and gathering places can use to check vaccination status while emphasizing “there is no mandate, no requirement, no passport.”

OK, although we still can’t decipher the difference between what the state is calling a “vaccine verification system” and a “vaccine passport.” Perhaps it’s all in the wording, since anti-vaccine activists vociferously oppose the latter.

And we don’t expect that to be the only public battle, as the skirmishes and shaming around wearing a mask in public or not wearing a mask will almost certainly continue to flare.

Perhaps all the confusion over what is happening this week will be dispelled.

No doubt the outlook is much brighter – mainly because of the widespread availability of vaccines, with about 55% of Californians now vaccinated.

That also means that 45% of residents are not yet fully vaccinated, though about twothirds of eligible residents have received at least one vaccine dose. So while the infection rates from COVID-19 and hospitalizations have dropped significantly in recent months, people are still contracting the disease and still dying.

Public health experts say that 70% to 85% of the total population must be fully vaccinated to reach large-scale protection against the virus, which has killed more than 62,000 Californians including 209 Yolo County residents.

So as restrictions are mostly dropped on Tuesday, some public health experts warn this will likely cause infections to increase, although it won’t approach the severity of the peak of the pandemic.

But outbreaks also are expected to occur in counties with lower vaccination rates. Also at higher risk are Black and Latino Californians, where the vaccination rate remains lower than for whites and Asian-Americans. Vaccines for children under the age of 12 probably won’t be available for months, with young people returning to school full-time in late summer.

Nor do we know for sure whether booster shots will be required for the fully vaccinated, or how variants will change the disease front. But the encouraging news is the vaccines have been shown to be working extremely well against the variants, with the best performing vaccines vastly reducing the number of COVID-19 cases of any kind and virtually eliminating deaths.

So here is the one clear message around what is happening starting on Tuesday and for the next few months: Nothing is more important than getting vaccinated. And there really is no excuse not to get vaccinated.

When enough of us get vaccinated where community immunity finally is a reality, then, and only then, will we be “back to normal.”

No doubt the outlook is much brighter – mainly because of the widespread availability of vaccines, with about 55% of Californians now vaccinated.