The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended on Tuesday universal masking in schools regardless of the vaccination status of staff, teachers, and students age 12 to 18.
CDC TO RECOMMEND SOME VACCINATED PEOPLE WEAR MASKS INDOORS
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced the updated guidelines on Tuesday afternoon, calling it “a real effort to try and make sure that our kids can safely get back to school in person learning in the fall.” The agency has also recommended that vaccinated people in certain parts of the U.S. with high case rates wear masks indoors in public, after announcing roughly two months ago that those people could ditch the face coverings.
Walensky suggested that the delta strain’s transmissibility, especially among vaccinated people, caught the agency by surprise. The CDC said just a few weeks ago that vaccinated students and staff would not need to mask up at school.
“When we released our school guidance on July 9, we had less delta variants in the country, we have fewer cases in this country. And importantly, we were really hopeful that we would have more people vaccinated especially in the demographic between 12 and 17 years old,” Walensky said.
President Joe Biden said in a town hall event last week that the agency is likely to recommend widespread masking in schools, citing an increase in new COVID-19 case counts due to the delta variant. On top of that, COVID-19 vaccines have not received regulatory approval for young children up to 12 years old. Teachers, staff, and students 12 through 18 are expected to be told they should mask up, with exceptions for mealtimes in school.
“Masking students is inconvenient, I know, but will allow them to learn and be with their classmates with the best available protection,” Biden said on Tuesday. “More vaccinations and mask wearing in the areas most impacted by the Delta variant will enable us to avoid the kind of lockdowns, shutdowns, school closures, and disruptions we faced in 2020.”
Walensky stressed to reporters that the new masking guidance, which many will see as a regressive move after weeks of going maskless with confidence, “that this was not a decision that was taken lightly.”
In the absence of updated CDC masking guidelines for schools in recent weeks, some school districts, such as Atlanta Public Schools, had enacted their own rules. The school district will provide surgical-grade masks to all employees and students, and face shields will be available for students and teachers for classes in which “viewing facial expressions is especially important (disabilities).”
Breakthrough cases, or confirmed COVID-19 cases in people who have been vaccinated, are rare but they have raised the concern that the dominant delta strain might evade some protection provided by the shots. For instance, the CDC reported that as of July 19, 5,914 vaccinated patients were hospitalized or died due to COVID-19 infection.
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Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna, which developed the two most-used COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S., have begun clinical trials to test the shots in younger children. Moderna announced Monday that the company will expand the size of their clinical trials for children ages 5 to 11 in order to rule out the risk of severe inflammation issues that were linked to the shots in people under 30.
To date, about 69% of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of a vaccine, while 60% have been fully vaccinated, according to federal data.
