People wear face coverings inside the Grand Central Market on December 15, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. California residents, regardless of COVID-19 vaccination status, are required to wear a mask in all indoor public settings starting today.
Mario Tama / Getty Images
hide captions
switch captions
Mario Tama / Getty Images
People wear face coverings inside the Grand Central Market on December 15, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. California residents, regardless of COVID-19 vaccination status, are required to wear a mask in all indoor public settings starting today.
Mario Tama / Getty Images
A new statewide mask rule in California went into effect Wednesday, bringing the total states with mask mandates to only ten. At a time when health authorities are warning of the rapid spread of the highly infectious omicron variant, the states with a mandate to wear masks are the exceptions.
This is true in places where there is a spike, like Michigan, where there is no mandate, even though hospitals are consistently overflowing with COVID-19 patients. There is nothing in Ohio, where the legislature has stripped the governor of his powers of mandate. Nothing in New Hampshire, which currently has the most COVID-19 cases per capita of any US state, with 93 cases per 100,000 residents.
Even some counties and cities — such as Nashville and Washington DC — that had previously had anti-mask mandates during the pandemic seem reluctant to bring them back.
Public health experts monitoring the pandemic are worried. Previous experience with COVID-19 shows that when mitigation measures put in place soon, the surge is smaller and ends faster, which means more lives are saved.
“I’m a bit confused as to why we don’t talk more about masking,” said Dr. Emily Landon, an infectious disease physician at the University of Chicago. “We want to avoid overcrowding our hospitals. We want to avoid hurting our economy. And the best way to do that is to keep cases as low as possible, and that’s possible. means an authorization mask must be present.”
Here’s what we know about mask requirements and their role in helping slow the spread of COVID-19.
Can masks help block omicrons?
Given what’s known about the variant so far, yes. SARS-CoV-2 is still a respiratory virus, which means it will still be spread primarily from an infected person breathing, coughing, or sneezing the virus and someone else breathing it in. The difference with the omicron is that it seems more transmittable, meaning it’s even easier to catch.
However, a good mask will still make a difference in how much virus a person spits out or takes in, Landon said. On a personal level, that means it might be the right time to discover your best mask – the N95 or KN95 – especially if you’re traveling or out in public. add. Also, if you’ve let your mask slide under your nose, you should start your game and Make sure your mask fits well.
Do masking missions work?
There is evidence that masking duties can help limit transmission. Recently, Rebecca Nugent, a data scientist at Carnegie Mellon who is tracking impact of COVID-19 mitigation policies, looked at how delta variation spreads through summer and fall.
Of the states with similar vaccination rates, she said, those with The statewide mask duty did better now contain the spread.
“While mask regulation doesn’t necessarily end the spread, you can see the difference between those who have kept the statewide mask regulation in place and those who have not,” she explains. use. She and her collaborators are still in the process of analyzing exactly how much of an effect the differential masking task has on the record numbers.
She also pointed out that, while county and local policymakers can and often do have requirements for concealment, keeping things at the local level requires residents to follow the rules that have may vary from county to county.
“It’s not reasonable or realistic to think that we are containing the contagion by doing things [policies] in different places, she said.
Meanwhile, current CDC guidance is that everyone should wear a mask — vaccinated or not — in indoor public places. in places with high transmission rates, which is practically everywhere. But while the federal government has established and advocated vaccine mission, it doesn’t show equal interest in masking requests. President Biden’s omicron action plan barely mentioning the mask.
Even with mandates in place, will people comply or is there pandemic fatigue and resistance to masks in place?
Policymakers seem to get the impression that people are already abiding by the rules of the pandemic – they won’t comply anyway, and that will only infuriate them.
Landon, who actually worked to convince the governor of Illinois to keep that state’s mask regulation in place, says she’s frustrated with the idea that masks are such a big burden.
“I said to the governor in my conversation with him, ‘You have to stop talking about revealing your face as if it were a bonus, because it perpetuates the belief that masks are somehow a punishment for the pandemic. “, she said. “It really isn’t – really, it’s the least we can do to literally protect other people.”
It is possible that public resistance to mask wearing has been overblown. One survey 993 people from December 10 to 13, conducted by Ipsos and Axios, shows that 64% of people nationwide support local and state regulations, and 69% of people say they always wear a mask or leave the house occasionally.
“It’s a balancing act for policymakers,” Jennifer Tolbert, director of state health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Throughout the pandemic, “policymakers have been a bit more reactive than proactive, in part because of the politicization of some of these measures,” she said. And she added, “we’ve been doing this for a long time and there’s an element of burnout, with the public. So it’s a challenge.”
If cases start to explode in the US as well as in the UK, governors and mayors are looking for new ways to limit the spread without placing lockdown measures or closing businesses that could see mask regulations are more attractive.
However, some public health advocates warn that it is better not to wait for an explosion of cases to introduce mitigation measures.
