Masks remain in Mecklenburg for now as threshold to end mandate remains elusive
The COVID-19 positivity rate has slowly increased in the past two weeks since Mecklenburg County commissioners voted to lower the threshold to remove the county’s mask mandate, making the target rate elusive.
As of Sunday, the 7-day average positivity rate was about 6%. To remove the mask mandate, the county wants to see a rate below 5% for seven consecutive days.
That might not be easy. The rate has held below 5% for more than seven days only a handful of times since the beginning of the pandemic. While the county has been on the right track for the past several weeks, predicting COVID-19 trends has been notoriously difficult — even for experts.
Gibbie Harris, the county’s public health director, said experts were not sure why the positivity rate has increased recently, from 5.2% on Nov. 8 to 6% on Sunday. She added that the number of cases and hospitalizations have leveled off recently, whereas they had been declining.
It remains unclear whether these are reflective of an actual trend, Harris said, or whether cases and hospitalizations will soon go back to declining. The number of cases nationally has increased by about 14% over the past 14 days, according to a case tracker from The New York Times.
Encouraging vaccination proves difficult
George Dunlap, the chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, called the metric that could end the mask mandate “stubborn” in its inability to decrease enough.
He added that if people “really want the mask mandate to end, then they need to participate in terms of making that happen.”
Harris said it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince unvaccinated adults to get the vaccine. It has also been a challenge to convince certain adults to vaccinate their children.
“We can’t make them take it,” Harris said. “We can make it available and we can educate, and that’s what we’re trying to do right now.”
Children have represented about 28% of total cases over the past two weeks in Mecklenburg County. About half of those children are between 5 and 11 years old.
About 58% of county residents are fully vaccinated and 62% have received at least one dose. The mask mandate applies to most indoor, public settings, including at grocery and retail stores.
As Thanksgiving approaches, Harris urged people to get vaccinated and to consider getting tested for COVID-19 before traveling. It’s possible that the recent increase in the positivity percentage was bolstered by Halloween celebrations, but it remains unclear, Harris said.
“Unfortunately, what we’re seeing across the country is numbers going up,” she said. “I’m hoping that’s not what we see here in Mecklenburg County, but that is sort of the trend that we’re seeing right now.”
This story was originally published November 16, 2021 at 9:07 PM.
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