Thursday, August 20, 2020

Are we Californians wearing our masks?

The Los Angeles Times decided to take a count:

What they concluded:

"To reduce the spread of the coronavirus, all Californians are required to wear a mask in crowded outdoor spaces. Failure to do so is a misdemeanor under an order issued in June by Gov. Gavin Newsom. ... Most people don’t follow the rules.
"Only 42% of the people we tracked were wearing masks correctly, 10% were wearing masks incorrectly and 47% were not wearing masks at all."

The newspaper shared its tally sheet and invited readers to conduct the same experiment. I spent an hour logging passersby out the front window of my residential San Francisco Mission District block. Here's what I found:

We're doing better than Venice, Long Beach, and Huntington Beach, but probably barely well enough to reduce spread of the coronavirus. I did not replicate the part of the LA Times count that recorded perceived ethnicity and gender, but I noticed no obvious disparities of compliance in my tiny sample. 

The Mission neighborhood is one of the epicenters here; 51 percent of people who've caught COVID in this city are Latinx. The community makes up 15 percent of our total population.

3 comments:

Joared said...

Interesting! Don't have much traffic walking on my street, but seem to be a number of individuals without masks. Am in small community northeast L.A. County.

Bonnie said...

If there is little traffic and no one coming near you, say they are across the street, they shouldn't need the mask outside from what I understand here.

Be more interesting to stand in the grocery store and count. Daughter won't tell people when they are wearing it wrong, I probably would. :-) She won't let me in grocery.

janinsanfran said...

Bonnie -- actually agree with you re across the street and low traffic. But we are under a 30 foot mask order when outside with people not from our households. And for a city, we're doing okay, though our workers in groceries and other stores remain at a high risk.