And let the Church say Amen!

A new statewide mask mandate in California took effect Wednesday. At a moment when health authorities are warning of the fast spread of the highly infectious omicron variant, states with mask mandates — just nine according to the Kaiser Family Foundation — are outliers.

This is true in places with huge surges, like Michigan, where there’s no mandate and hospitals overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. There’s none in Ohio, where the legislature has taken away the governor’s authority on mandates. There’s none in New Hampshire, which currently has the most cases of COVID-19 per capita of any U.S. state, with 93 cases per 100,000 residents.

Even some counties and cities — like Nashville, Tenn., and Washington D.C., for example — that were pro-mask mandates earlier in the pandemic seem reluctant to bring them back.

Public health experts who track the pandemic are worried. Past experience with COVID-19 shows that when mitigation measures are put into place early, surges are smaller and end more quickly, which means more lives are saved.

“I’m a little mystified as to why we aren’t talking more about masking,” says Dr. Emily Landon, an infectious disease physician at the University of Chicago. “We want to avoid having hospitals be overwhelmed. We want to avoid having an impact on our economy. And the best way to do that is to keep cases as low as possible, and that means having a mask mandate in place.”