Cabarrus County issues mask advisory, saying it ‘cannot sustain the rapid rise in cases’

Cabarrus County residents and visitors, regardless of their COVID-19 vaccination status, are now urged to resume wearing masks indoors and in crowded outdoors settings as a result of the highly contagious delta variant.

The Cabarrus Health Alliance issued the public health advisory on Thursday morning.

Yet this falls short of a mask mandate, meaning the advisory is not binding and there’s no enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance — unlike Mecklenburg’s mask requirement that goes into effect Aug. 31.

The advisory from Cabarrus County comes nearly one month after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had announced the same indoor mask-wearing guidance due to the spread of the delta variant and rising concerns over breakthrough coronavirus infections among fully vaccinated individuals.

Cabarrus County has seen a 200% increase in new coronavirus cases over the past two weeks, health officials said. That translates into an average of 800 new cases per week.

And over the past two months, the positivity rate in Cabarrus County soared from 2.4% to 14.2%.

“Our community and our health care system cannot sustain the rapid rise in cases,” Dr. Bonnie Coyle, public health director at Cabarrus Health Alliance, said in a statement. “To truly see case counts and hospitalizations decrease, we need the support of our community and partners to individually or institutionally implement these masking recommendations.”

Cabarrus County COVID trends

Coyle said vaccines are the best protection against COVID-19.

Some 47% of residents are at least partially vaccinated in Cabarrus County, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Statewide, the partial vaccination rate is 53%.

Available bed space at Atrium Health Cabarrus is “extremely limited,” county health officials said. Just under one-third of all hospitalizations at Atrium Health were for COVID-19, as of this week.

In the next two weeks, Cabarrus Health and Atrium Health anticipate an “even more drastic spike.” That would be due to the delta variant, with virus spread exacerbated by children returning to the classroom and Labor Day gatherings, officials said.

As long as Cabarrus remains a high-transmission county, considered the worst tier of virus spread by the CDC, the public health advisory will stay in effect, said Cabarrus Health’s Chief Community Health Officer Marcella Beam.

Once transmission declines — including a drop in the case rate and positivity rate, plus a lessened hospital impact — health officials may reevaluate the mask advisory, Beam told the Observer. There are no fines or penalties for people who refuse to wear masks indoors.

“This is voluntary,” Beam said in a statement Thursday morning. “We are alerting the public that this a very critical time, we are asking them to make this commitment for themselves, as our health systems are strained and cases continue to surge.

“Other public health mitigation strategies may need to be explored, but we are hopeful that our community will do what is needed for themselves, their neighbors and our health care systems,” Beam added.

Fast-growing Cabarrus County includes Concord, which recently became North Carolina’s 10th largest city. Concord Mills mall and Charlotte Motor Speedway are two of the county’s biggest attractions.

Masks in Mecklenburg

Just last week, Mecklenburg County commissioners voted on a public health rule that would reinstate the indoor countywide mask mandate.

The rule takes effect next week, although interim indoor mask-wearing requirements have already been imposed for residents in Charlotte, Davidson, Matthews and unincorporated parts of Mecklenburg County.

Similar to neighboring Cabarrus County, coronavirus trends in Mecklenburg have rapidly deteriorated under the strain of the delta variant.

On average, Mecklenburg is logging 570 new cases each day, compared to 170 at this point a month ago, according to an Observer analysis of state public health data.

Mecklenburg health officials last week said the positivity rate had reached 13.2%. Earlier this summer, the rate briefly dropped below 2%.

As of Wednesday morning, 56% of Mecklenburg residents were at least partially vaccinated against the coronavirus.