The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) on Friday updated its coronavirus guidelines, which are posted on its website, to essentially ban cloth masks.
"Masking will be required at all times, indoors and outdoors. It is required that all students wear well-fitting, non-cloth masks with a nose wire. All employees are required to wear surgical grade masks or higher," the updated guidance said.
District officials said the masks, which include N95s or other surgical-grade or higher-grade masks, would be available for students and staff upon request, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The new masking rules come amid the latest wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, largely driven by the highly transmissible omicron variant.
LAUSD tweeted on Friday that there was a 6.3 percent seven-day positivity rate for staff and a 9.1 percent seven-day average positivity rate for students in the school district. About 75 percent of the district's students were in classes on Friday, per the tweet.
Shannon Haber, a spokesperson for LAUSD, said in statement regarding the new mask requirements that the school district was "continuing to be diligent and agile in creating the safest learning environment," according to the Times.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal indoor masking in schools from kindergarten to 12th Grade, but mask requirements vary for schools around the country.
Missouri's attorney general on Tuesday said he would sue school districts over their mask requirements, while Virginia's newly sworn-in Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, last weekend lifted a public school mask mandate in the state, allowing parents to make that decision for their children.
Comment: How interesting it is that everything is focused on the positivity rate now. The focus started out on deaths, then moved to hospitalizations, and now it is this all encompassing 'rate'. And also notice that the rare severity of Covid has decreased (and exceedingly, exceedingly rare for children), yet the restrictions continue and in many places accelerate. Such things should give pause to people feebly obeying the Grand Priests of Pharma, but the world population has become so compliant that we are in for the proverbial 'ride' as destruction continues to collapse on all the denial.