Montgomery County officials are recommending residents resume wearing masks indoors, as COVID surges again in the region.

Likely driven by the spread of variant BA.5 – an omicron off-shoot and now the dominant COVID strain in the U.S. — community spread in Montgomery County is back in the “high” zone — a category determined by the rate of new COVID cases per 100,000 residents, the number of hospitalizations per 100,000 residents, and how many hospital beds are occupied by COVID patients.

As of Wednesday, the weekly case rate per 100,0000 resident was 232, and the number of COVID hospitalizations per 100,000 residents was 13. Patients with COVID occupy 10% of staffed beds. The three metrics together indicate high transmission — triggering a recommendation from the county that residents resume masking indoors.

“We might be tired of COVID, but COVID isn’t tired of us,” the county’s Health and Human Services department tweeted on Tuesday.

Mary Anderson, a spokesperson for Montgomery County, confirmed to DCist/WAMU that the county is following the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance, which recommends masking indoors, regardless of vaccination status, when community transmission is “high.”

According to the CDC’s dashboard, the county is still in the medium zone, but those numbers are updated weekly on Thursdays and so could change. (Montgomery County’s dashboard was last updated on Tuesday.) It’s difficult to see exactly up-to-date COVID statistics, now that many localities and public health departments have moved away from frequent reporting and instead focus on analyzing trends over time, often involving a few days’ lag. According to D.C.’s COVID website, COVID is at a “medium” level in the city, although the numbers have not been updated since July 20. (The CDC’s dashboard also shows D.C. in the medium zone.) Due to the popularity and availability of at-home COVID testing, it’s likely that current case loads are an underestimated.

BA.5 variant is the most transmissible variant of the virus so far, and has been shown to evade immunity gained even from recent omicron infections. While cases have jumped nationally, officials have not done much — if anything — in response. In New York City, where some boroughs were reporting more than 20% positivity rates earlier this month, city health officials reupped a mask recommendation. But elsewhere in the U.S., leaders have seem to have given up on messaging completely.

Regionally, nearly all mask mandates — and even masking recommendations — have fallen away. Most jurisdictions in the D.C. region dropped mask mandates back in February and March, during the lull in cases following the late-December, early-January omicron surge. And while it’s been the CDC’s stance since last summer that masking is recommended in parts of the country with “high” or “substantial” spread, in 2022, that guidance has largely gone unnoticed. Most recently, Prince George’s County Public Schools announced that it would no longer require students to wear masks at the start of the upcoming school year — the last school system in the region to adopt a mask-optional policy.