The new COVID-19 variant, called BA.5, has been rapidly spreading across the country and is now estimated to make up more than 60% of new cases, according to the CDC. It is highly transmissible, compared to previous variants, and seemingly more resistant to prior vaccinations and immunities.

These factors are making people think differently about wearing masks, which experts say are still an effective way to curb the spread of the virus. Los Angeles County, for example, will likely reinstate an indoor mask mandate at the end of the month due to rising COVID-19 cases.

But also at the community level, when you take on masks at the community level, you will see transmission go down. And that is why communities like L.A. are deciding to take on masking, because they’re looking at their particular context, seeing a surge and ultimately applying correct interventions to help reduce risk and ultimately not allowing for further transmission. That would ultimately create a surge in our hospitals and a capacity concern.

And so masking makes sense, but in a highly targeted way. That’s why we have to be very specific in the timing of masking. You’re pre-surge in the community. You’re seeing cases go up. That’s when you want to bring in masks to help reduce transmission, help reduce the risk to our health systems.

But these are not broad scale mask mandates across the country for undefined amounts of time. These are very targeted and this is why it’s done at the local public health level. They can look at the data and make these decisions and have people engage in a very important intervention to reduce the risk to the community.BROWNSTEIN: Well, first, it’s really important to note that the tools that we have still work. If you’re fully up to date with your vaccines, especially if you’re on that booster and that second booster, if eligible, it dramatically reduces your risk of severe illness and death. So that’s point No. 1. Testing still works. Masking still works. So all the tools still work.

The issue is that this new variant is highly transmissible. It’s immune evasive in the sense that if you are exposed to this variant, your previous immunity from vaccination and potentially other variants, likely non-human variants, doesn’t necessarily protect you in the same way as previous infections. And so we’re going to see increased amounts of breakthrough infections.

Many of those will not turn, of course, into severe illness, but they’re turning into infections that ultimately lead to more transmission. And then we’ll see the impact in our most vulnerable communities, those that are elderly, immunocompromised, and we’ll see history repeating itself. And that’s the real concern we have with this new immune evasive variant.

START HERE: And how does testing factor in — should Americans be testing regularly at home?

BROWNSTEIN: Yeah, testing is such an important first line of defense. It’s been the cornerstone of our response. We’ve seen testing dramatically reduce. People are not going to get PCRs and even home testing is declining.

And that’s a problem because if people don’t have awareness of their infection, they are not necessarily isolating and potentially creating risk into the community. And that leads, of course, to these surges that we’re seeing. And so I advocate, you know, the testing. It’s simple. You know, there’s so much availability. There’s free home tests that the Biden administration is offering. Please use those because that really will have such an impact on the course of this BA.5 surge.