The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is gearing up to loosen its recommendations for masking indoors.
The agency’s move to back off recommending that people wear masks in most indoor public places would come weeks after a flurry of blue states, such as New Jersey, Connecticut, and Oregon, lifted their state mask mandates in some capacity.
“We are assessing the most important factors based on where we are in the pandemic and will soon put guidance in place that is relevant and encourages prevention measures when they are most needed to protect public health and our hospitals,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday.
The change to masking guidance could come as early as next week, NBC News reported.
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Cases in the United States have gone down 67% in the past two weeks, according to tracking maintained by the New York Times. The seven-day average number of cases has fallen from the omicron peak of nearly 807,000 cases, down to about 140,000. Hospitalizations have also fallen 38% over the past 14 days. About 88,200 people on average are being treated in hospitals at once this week, compared to an average of about 159,500 in mid-January.
Still, a loosening of the guidance would represent a change in policy rather than a reflection of the decline in the omicron surge. By current CDC metrics, nearly the entire U.S. is unprepared to ditch masks. Agency guidance says that people should wear masks indoors where transmission is “substantial,” meaning 50 to 100 cases per 100,000, or “high,” meaning 100 cases for every 100,000 people. The country is far above those rates, at 309.8 cases per 100,000, according to the CDC.
Walensky has suggested in recent COVID-19 response team briefings that the administration will place more weight on measuring severe cases requiring hospitalizations in any given community rather than rates of new cases. Last week, Walensky said the federal response team is “looking at the hospitals as a barometer of how [communities are] doing locally.”
“We want to give people a break from things like mask-wearing when these metrics are better and then have the ability to reach for them again should things worsen,” Walensky said on Wednesday.
Several states technically still in the highest “red” transmission category by CDC standards have ditched their mask mandates in the past couple of weeks. Many of the governors who have recently lifted the requirements for indoor settings were quick to reinstate mask mandates when the threat of an omicron wave loomed late last year. Most GOP states, though, had already lifted the controversial mask requirements long before the omicron variant arrived. Republican governors, such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’s Greg Abbott, have spurned such measures since early in the pandemic, arguing they were not justified and were harmful even before the omicron variant hit.
The Biden administration has fallen behind the handful of Democratic governors who are keenly aware of the tolls that drastic pandemic-era restrictions have taken on their constituents over the past two years. Still, Walensky said last week that masking rules should be set “at the local level.”
A CDC-sanctioned declaration that people can ditch their masks indoors would be a welcome bit of good news ahead of President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address on March 1. Biden’s approval rating has continued to slide, hitting just under 42% this week. The pandemic’s toll has helped drive down Biden’s approval rating. He had his own “mission accomplished” moment last summer when he said the U.S. would declare its independence from the virus, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the coronavirus is not going anywhere.
Biden’s own chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said last week that the coronavirus pandemic will not go away entirely. Rather, he said it will transition into a less disruptive and dangerous phase.
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“There is no way we are going to eradicate this virus,” Fauci told the Financial Times. “But I hope we are looking at a time when we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infection that the COVID restrictions will soon be a thing of the past.”
