A Lafayette Mask Ordinance?

Editor’s Note: This post has been modified to indicate that the City Council voted down the ordinance 3-2.

The Lafayette City Council recently voted down a mask ordinance for the city of Lafayette, Louisiana. I will try to enumerate what I see as the main issues at play and then give my view on this particular ordinance.

Main issues:

• What is the proposed city ordinance?
• State of Louisiana mandate and level of enforcement and mask wearing
• Current situation for covid-19 pandemic in Lafayette
• Effect of masks on covid-19 and society

What is the proposed city ordinance? Based on currently available information, it appears that the ordinance would be modeled on a mask ordinance in Baton Rouge. From the previous linked article: “The [Baton Rouge] mandate requires that all commercial and nonprofit entities in the parish providing goods or services directly to the public require patrons to wear masks or face coverings.” Further information on the ordinance can be found here.

State of Louisana mandate. Here is a pdf of the original proclamation of Governor Edwards issuing the mask mandate. The relevant section is Section 4, which I quote (A) here: “Every individual in Louisiana shall wear a face covering over the nose and mouth when inside a commercial establishment or any other building or space open to the public whether indoor or outdoor. This shall include public or commercial modes of transportation.” The proclamation then gives some exemptions, the most signficant of which are for people who will be able to maintain strict social distancing of six feet, those under age 8, and anyone with a medical condition preventing wearing a face covering. Enforcement is deferred to the business establishments to deny entry to those who won’t wear the mask and then if patrons will not leave, the establishment may call the police to enforce trespassing laws. The order first went into effect July 13, 2020 and has been extended repeatedly (now having been in effect for more than 6 months).

Enforcement of state mandate. In Lafayette, enforcement has generally varied from establishment to establishment. Some establishments will enforce it strongly with someone greeting you at the door with extra masks if you don’t have one, whereas some will not enforce it at all. People generally wear the mask in places that insist on it, while at establishments that do not, mask wearing is variable. Further, local news articles suggest that local government is not enforcing the mandate.

Rate of mask wearing in Lafayette. It is difficult to get precise information on this. One useful metric for mask wearing is here which suggests that approximately 91% of Lafayette parish residents wear masks most or all of the time in public (as of January 21), with the caveat that it is based on a survey of facebook users which is not a strictly random sample of the population. This compares to approximately 90% in Louisiana as a whole on the same date, while the median state has approximately 94%. By this measure the rate of mask wearing is similar in Lafayette to the rest of the state, which is a little lower than the national average.

Current state of Covid-19 pandemic in Lafayette. The basic state of the pandemic in Lafayette is similar to the national one: hospitalizations have been declining significantly over the last few weeks and vaccines have been rolled out to a significant percentage of those at highest risk from the virus that causes covid-19. For some specifics:

• in Acadiana, covid-19 hospitalizations declined 54% from a peak of 224 on January 6 to 103 in most recent data from February 9
• in Louisiana, hospitalizations declined 48% from a peak of 2,069 on January 7 to 1,076 in most recent data on February 9, and
• in the U.S.A, hospitalizations declined 40% from a peak of 132,474 to 79,179 in most recent data from February 9.

Further, a relatively simple way try to quantify the cumulative effect of the pandemic is to look at per capita death rates. In this case, we find that per capita deaths from covid-19 from the entirety of the pandemic are:

• in Lafayette, 1,000 per million (247 deaths with a population of approximately 247,000)
• in Louisiana, 1,982 per million
• in the USA, 1,452 per million

Therefore, the severity in Lafayette Parish in terms of deaths is around half the severity of the state of Louisiana and around a third lower than in the United States as a whole.

Additionally, the approximate percentage of the population having received a covid-19 vaccine dose is:

• 7.6% in Acadiana
• 9.6% in Louisiana
• 9.9% in U.S.A.

For context, about 11% of Americans are over 70, 35 percent over 50, with age the largest determining factor for fatality risk (those under 50 have a fatality ratio of approximately 1 in 5000, those aged 50 to 70 with an approximate fatality ratio of 1 in 200). With proper protocols, a high percentage of the highest risk people should have the opportunity for a vaccine in the near future. We have been vaccinating people nationally at a rate of 1 million people a day, at that rate nationally we should have 11% receiving at least one dose of the vaccine in a few days.

Effect of masks. The evidence seems to suggest that widespread cloth mask adoption leads to a decrease in the rate of spread of the covid-19 virus, primarily due to reducing the probability of the wearer spreading the virus to others. On the other hand, research suggests that mask-wearing has negative psychological effects. Research also suggests (fairly intuitively) that anonymity increases antisocial behavior. See here, here and here. It is also the case that widespread mask-wearing has coincided with the worst riots in the United States of my lifetime. Any mask policy must attempt to balance the benefits of the masks with the downsides of mask-wearing combined with the issue of enforcement.

My view. I find the research regarding widespread mask wearing causing a mild decrease in the rate of spread of the virus to be compelling enough to reasonably support policies supporting mask wearing in certain contexts. These policies are most compelling when the covid-19 virus is widespread and we still have a significant number of high-risk individuals without immunity. However, given that covid-19 hospitalizations are falling quickly at a regional, state and national level and that we are rolling out a vaccine, I oppose increasing restrictions related to covid-19 at this time in Lafayette. The strongest arguments for compelling universal mask-wearing are the shared social cost of an overwhelmed hospital system as well as the high fatality rate for at-risk populations. As the risk of hospital overwhelm declines, that argument becomes weaker and weaker. When the high fatality risk population has had an opportunity to be vaccinated, the fatality risk argument also is much weaker. Additionally, I am acutely aware that any government edicts must at the end of the day be enforced by the police possibly using weapons if they face resistance. As such, there should be a high bar for passage of a new law of this sort. Therefore, I oppose the city ordinance. Further, at some point in the near future (when hospitalizations are lower and/or vaccination rates have increased significantly), I would prefer to explicitly allow more establishments to decide if they will require masks or not.