Authored by Jack Phllips via The Epoch Times,

Mask mandates will be returning to several counties in California’s San Francisco Bay Area starting next month.

The orders, which were handed down by individual counties, apply mainly to health care workers, although at least two Bay Area counties have extended the requirement to visitors and patients.

A similar mandate was handed down broadly across the Bay Area for the 2023–2024 fall-through-spring period.

Health officials in counties who have issued upcoming mask mandates say that the face coverings are designed to reduce the spread of COVID-19, influenza, and other respiratory viruses, harking back to the COVID-19 pandemic when mandates were widespread across much of the United States.

Where the Mandates Are Going Into Effect

Alameda County, which encompasses the city of Oakland, issued an order last month that mandates staff at health care facilities to wear masks between Nov. 1, 2024, and March 31, 2025.

“The fall and winter of 2023-2024 saw substantial waves of RSV, flu and COVID19, and a similar pattern is expected this year,” the health order said, adding that such viruses “typically circulate and peak in Alameda County during the late fall and winter months.”

It warned that any violation of the order’s provision in Alameda County “constitutes an imminent threat and menace to public health, constitutes a public nuisance, and is punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both.”

The mandate only applies to staff and not patients or visitors.

Authorities in Contra Costa County issued a similar health order on Sept. 26 requiring health care staff to wear masks for the same time period with similar penalties. It also applies only to staff and not patients.

“The masking of personnel in these facilities is necessary to provide a layer of protection to patients during the respiratory season when risk of exposure is highest,” the county said.

Napa County issued an Oct. 1 health order that mandates health care workers in health care facilities wear masks. It doesn’t apply to visitors and patients.

“This Order requires each of these facilities implement and enforce a program requiring healthcare workers, regardless of vaccination status, to mask while in patient care areas. This order supersedes prior standing masking orders directed at healthcare workers,” the county wrote.

Going a step further, Santa Clara County—which includes San Jose—will require all people inside health care facilities, including visitors and patients, to wear masks from Nov. 1 to March 31, 2025. Exceptions are made for children under age 2 and people with medical issues in which a mask could interfere with the individual’s breathing or cannot remove a mask without assistance.

“Preventive measures like wearing a mask in crowded indoor places and staying home when you are sick continue to add layers of protection against respiratory viruses,” the county said in a news release issued last month. “Just like last year, the April 2023 health order will continue to require masks in all patient care areas of health care facilities starting November 1 and continuing through the winter respiratory virus period.”

Not Every Bay Area County Has Them

Sonoma, Solano, Marin, and San Francisco counties have not indicated whether mask mandates will go into effect at health care facilities, according to an Epoch Times review of recent orders from the counties.

Outside California

Aside from the Bay Area, it appears no other counties anywhere else in the United States will issue similar mandates at health care facilities.

However, if data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show cases of COVID-19 rising again, other areas may reintroduce mask mandates. Last winter, New York City reimposed a mask mandate at its hospitals as officials cited a rise in cases of the virus.

Over the summer, mask mandates were implemented for a period of time by at least two U.S. health care providers. The Tuba City Regional Health Care Corporation in Arizona said in early August that it would reinstate mask mandates at its facilities in the state for at least two weeks, while the Baystate Health in Massachusetts also implemented one in late August.

What the CDC’s Data Shows

As of Oct. 10, the CDC’s wastewater tracking tool shows that COVID-19 levels across the United States are currently at “low” levels, down from the “very high” amounts reported in mid-August. In August, COVID-19-related deaths in the United States were near all-time lows, according to the CDC’s historical data on the virus.

COVID-19 is now the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, according to a CDC report released over the summer. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus was the nation’s third leading cause of death. It dropped to fourth in 2022.

Authored by Thaddeus McCotter via American Greatness,

Presently, we are embroiled in a presidential campaign. It is the apex of political messaging, as both parties and their well-heeled allies bombard the electorate with varying promises, claims, smears, and deceits.

One of the Democrats’ and their “Never Trump” cohorts’ favorite narratives is that the GOP candidate, former president Trump, is divisive and that he must be defeated to allow the Democrat nominee, Vice President Harris, to unite the nation. To believe this, one must concur with the Democrats and Never Trumpers on two counts: first, Mr. Trump, his MAGA supporters, and the GOP are divisive; and, second, Ms. Harris and the Democrats are not divisive but rather a unifying political force.

For purposes of this piece, let us stipulate Mr. Trump and his MAGA and GOP supporters are “divisive,” if only for the simple reason they dissent from the Democrats radical, extreme, and dangerous agenda; and, moreover, unapologetically champion the populist and conservative principles and policies they believe will promote and protect the liberty, prosperity, and security of our free republic.

Nonetheless, even with this stipulation, it is impossible for an objective mind to conclude Ms. Harris and her Democrat supporters are a unifying force within our deeply divided nation. The Democrats are, by design, a divisive party that premises its campaigns and policies upon identity politics—race, gender, class, etc.; and, at root, offers the electorate varying and increasing levels of paranoia and dependence upon the Leviathan—i.e., the administrative state, which is controlled by their cohorts who are ensconced within the unaccountable and remunerative sinecures housed in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy.

Consider the Democrats’ demanding the citizenry’s obeisance to their DIE (“diversity, inclusivity, and equity”) secular religion, which one is compelled to believe above all else.

The left defines “diversity” with external traits, not internal thoughts. In sum, this inherently divides the entire population by physical traits and social castes into “manageable” political blocs—the “Balkanization” of the American electorate. Their root fallacy is that how you look determines how you think. The left purports it is using one’s “lived experience” to make this differentiation, but this experience is presumed to have occurred (even if it has not) based on your external appearance and/or economic status. Such a prejudicial pronouncement upon one’s fellow citizens is patronizing, demeaning, and—in its most heinous manifestations—racist. (Why do you think progressives have expended so much energy trying to redefine and dilute the definition of “racism” to weaponize it against, not racists, but non-leftists?)

Once an individual has been pigeonholed into one of the Democrats’ diversity classifications and it is marked with its “social credit” connotations, these leftist social engineers will cajole and coerce them into their “inclusive” collective, wherein what matters is not individual rights but one’s allegiance to the left’s ideological dictates. True, some individual rights and licenses are granted by the state, but they are in addition to our unalienable, God-given rights we already possess and that cannot be infringed by the state. The left disagrees, believing the state is the ultimate grantor of rights and that “Our Democracy” must not be impaired by the antiquated concept of unalienable, God-given constitutional rights. Consequently, the left believes a citizen’s rights are not God-given but rather government-given. As such, they constitute not unalienable rights; they are arbitrary and conditional licenses. This subordinates the citizens’ sovereignty to the supremacy of the state.

As the Supreme State doles its licenses, it will decide what is “equitable.” This is merely another of the left’s euphemisms for socialism—as is Ms. Harris’s “Opportunity Society.” But once citizens have been civically and economically diminished by the Democrats’ delineating and dividing them on basis of physical traits and economic status and by being subsumed into a leftist collective, Americans will have little recourse to dissent, let alone rid themselves of such a repressive, autocratic socialist regime.

Why would people subject themselves to this DIE agenda This is where the left’s paranoia pimping enters stage left. The Democrats aver that they and their administrative state are needed to protect citizens from sundry conspiracies out to block Americans’ pursuit of happiness—or worse. Hence, the Greek chorus of Democrats wailing about “Systemic Racism,” “The Patriarchy,” “Threats to Democracy,” and so forth. This is literally a party that smears its opponents as existential threats to “Our Democracy” and demands these opponents be crushed so that they may never again threaten it. Such inherently divisive narratives are designed to lure people into the illusory “security” of the one extant entity capable of controlling Americans’ lives—“Their Government.”

So, how does a progressive manage to believe they are the champions of “Our Democracy,” even as they burn it to the ground to persecute their opponents? By reason of a simple intellectual sleight-of-hand. When Democrats bleat “Our Democracy,” it is a “prog whistle” that, translated, means “Our Party.” Conflating the fortunes of their party with those of the country, the Democrats have the capacity for enormous self-regard that allows them to engage in immense amounts of cognitive dissonance and self-justification as they attempt to foist their reckless, harmful agenda on Americans.

Yes, Republicans also believe their fortunes will save “Our Republic.” But there is a critical distinction. Democrats define “unity” as a uniformity of agreement. Republicans define “unity” as a uniformity of acceptance.

This explains why the Democrats are hellbent to force their DIE ideology on people and why Republicans oppose it. It is an overlooked irony that the left, which obsesses over the diversity of external traits, demands the conformity of internal thoughts. The Twentieth Century is replete with bitter instances of such an ideology’s failed attempts to dictate a rigid uniformity of ideological agreement in the vainglorious hopes of recreating and perfecting humanity.

The answer to such state coercion is still federalism and pluralism. A limited, divided government charged with protecting the unalienable God-given rights of sovereign citizens remains the surest path upon which to pursue one’s happiness. The acceptance required is of the ground rules of the nation—of the constitution, of the peaceable means of effectuating constructive change, of someone else’s thoughts and their right to hold and advocate them, and of your reciprocal right to disagree and oppose their ideas. E pluribus unum—“Out of many, one”—has well served and enriched our nation and must remain the abiding goal.

Again, the left deems federalism and pluralism as bars to the implementation of their autocratic, socialist state, which will determine and map your pursuit of happiness whether you like it or not. It is evinced in why the left crafted the word “diversity” to supplant “pluralism.” Ponder that the root of the word, “div-,” as is found in words such as “divisive,” “divest,” “divorce,” and so forth, that do not exactly scream “unity.”

Nor does their pushing of their “Our Democracy” narrative to supplant the reality we live in a constitutional republic with limits upon its enumerated and citizen-delegated powers; and the duty to serve as a guardian of our unalienable God-given rights and the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic—be they a dictator or a mob.

As they do, the left reveals how their clamor and connivance for “Our Democracy” merely mark “Their Duplicity.”