The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed course on some masking guidelines on Tuesday, recommending that even vaccinated people should return to wearing masks indoors in parts of the United States where coronavirus is rising.
Citing new information about the ability of the delta variant to spread among vaccinated individuals, the CDC also recommended inner masks to all teachers, staff, students and school visitors regardless of vaccination status.
The new policy follows recent decisions in Los Angeles and St. Louis to revert to indoor mask regulations amid an increase in COVID-19 cases and hospital stays, which have been particularly dire in the south. The country has an average of more than 57,000 cases per day and 24,000 COVID-19 hospital admissions.
Most new infections in the US continue to be from unvaccinated people. However, vaccinated people can develop “breakthrough infections”, which usually lead to milder illnesses. When previous strains of the virus prevailed, infected vaccinated individuals were found to have low levels of virus and were considered unlikely to spread the virus widely, said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
But with the Delta variant, the virus concentration in infected vaccinated people is “indistinguishable” from the virus concentration in the nose and throat of unvaccinated people, said Walensky.
The data was obtained from 100 samples in the last few days. It is unpublished and the CDC did not publish it. But “it’s worrying enough that we feel we need to act,” said Walensky.
People who were vaccinated “have the potential to pass this virus on to others,” she said.
For much of the pandemic, the CDC advised Americans to wear masks outdoors when they were within 6 feet of each other.
In April, when vaccination rates soared, the agency relaxed its guidelines on wearing masks outdoors, saying that fully vaccinated Americans no longer need to cover their faces unless they are in a large crowd. In May, the instructions for fully vaccinated individuals were further relaxed so that they can no longer wear masks outdoors in crowds and in most indoor spaces.
The guidance still required the wearing of masks in crowded indoor spaces such as buses, airplanes, hospitals, prisons, and homeless shelters, but paved the way for reopening jobs and other venues.
Subsequent guidelines from the CDC stated that fully vaccinated people no longer had to wear masks even in summer camps or in schools.
For months, COVID cases, deaths, and hospital admissions continued to decline, but those trends began to change at the beginning of summer when the Delta variant, a mutated and more transmissible version of the virus, became widespread, especially in areas with lower vaccination rates .
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Delta variant has changed the nation’s COVID-19 outlook since the CDC eased masking recommendations.
“That is your job. Your job is to examine evolving information, data and an evolving historical pandemic and provide guidance to the American public, “Psaki said.
“What hasn’t changed,” she added, “is the fact that people who are vaccinated have high levels of protection from serious illness, hospitalization and death.”
Some public health experts said they believed the CDC’s earlier decision was based on good scientific evidence suggesting that vaccinated people had a relatively low risk of spreading the virus and the risk of contracting the virus infect and become extremely ill, is even lower.
However, these experts were also critical and noted that Americans were not asked to document their vaccination status, creating an honor system. Unvaccinated people who refused to wear masks in the first place saw this as an opportunity to do what they wanted, they said.
“If all the unvaccinated people were responsible and wearing a mask indoors, we wouldn’t see this surge,” said Dr. Ali Khan, a former CDC disease investigator who is now the dean of the University of Nebraska College of Public Health.
Lawrence Gostin, professor of public health at Georgetown University, came to a similar conclusion.
“It was completely predictable that masking would no longer be the norm when they (the CDC) made their announcement, and that’s exactly what happened,” Gostin said.
The CDC could be viewed as a “flip-flop,” he said, as there has been no generally accepted change in science, he said. In addition, it is unlikely to change the behavior of those most urgently needing to wear masks.
“I don’t think you can effectively go back on that,” he said.
Ken Thigpen, a retired respiratory therapist who now works for a medical device manufacturer, is fully vaccinated and no longer wears his mask in public after the CDC changed its guidelines in May. But he started thinking last week after his job took him to hospitals in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, where he witnessed medical centers being flooded with COVID-19 patients.
“This delta variant is intense. It’s so transferable that we have to do something to contain it, ”he said.
“I loved it when I could call the hospitals and they said, ‘We actually closed our COVID ward today or we only have two COVID patients left,'” he recalled. “And now we’re opening the stations again and the numbers” are going crazy. “
Aamer Madhani in Washington and Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas contributed to this report.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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