Mask mandates are returning to California, despite the fact that covid has become an endemic disease and there is little reliable evidence they are anything other than a virtue-signalling nuisance.

For example, Bay Area hospital officials say the institutions are reinstating mask requirements out of a concern for the “tripledemic”: respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza, as well as covid.

If you walk into a doctor’s office or hospital in much of the Bay Area, you’ll notice every staff member must have a mask on starting November 1.

Bay Area public health officials are hoping to prevent the same ‘tripledemic’ that put a strain on hospitals across the area last year.

“This situation right now with RSV and other viruses, respiratory viruses is basically our March 2020 — this is our pandemic,” Dr. Jackie Grupp-Phelan, division chief of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals said in an interview with ABC7 in November 2022.