No More Masks: Covid’s biggest danger now is not the latest variant but the risk that public health officials will overreact.

Over the past two months, new Covid cases have risen by roughly 15 percent. Covid hospitalizations have risen even more. But BA.5 does not cause more severe disease than earlier variants. In fact, the percentage of Covid cases leading to bad outcomes appears to be declining.

The hospitalization increase is likely artifactual. The severity of illness among hospitalized Covid patients has been declining since autumn 2021—both intensive-care unit admission and mortality rates have been steadily falling. The likely explanation is that many Covid-positive admissions actually entered the hospital for other reasons before testing positive on routine tests for Covid. In fact, current cases and hospitalizations are still moderate when viewed over the history of the pandemic and are far lower than previous spikes. More importantly, Covid death rates have been relatively flat for the past three months.

But these facts have not kept Los Angeles County from planning to reinstate its indoor mask mandate on July 29. Multiple California universities and school districts have already reinstated mask mandates. Gwinnett County, Georgia, employees and schools have imposed new masking requirements. And it’s always possible that enterprising officials could inflict more restrictive lockdown-type measures if cases continue rising.

Yet no evidence exists that generalized mask mandates are beneficial. A pre-pandemic systemic review by the highly regarded Cochrane Library found that medical/surgical mask-wearing made little or no difference to the outcome of influenza or influenza-like illnesses compared with not wearing a mask.

A recent review of randomized controlled trials—the gold standard for scientific studies—came to a similar conclusion. Thirteen of 14 RCTs failed to find a statistically significant benefit from mask-wearing for non-Covid respiratory infections. Two RCTs of masking effectiveness concerning Covid-19 also showed little benefit: One found that surgical masks did not provide statistically significant protection to mask wearers; a second found no benefit from cloth masks and only a tiny, marginally statistically significant, reduction in viral transmission for surgical masks.