‘A third of US should consider masks’
7-day average of daily cases rises 26% to 94,000 cases per day
Covid-19 cases are increasing in the United States — and could get even worse over the coming months, federal health officials have warned in urging areas hardest hit to consider reissuing calls for indoor masking.
Increasing numbers of Covid-19 infections and hospitalisation are putting more of the country under guidelines issued by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention that call for masking and other infection precautions.
Right now, about a third of the US population lives in areas that are considered at higher risk — mostly in the Northeast and Midwest. Those are areas where people should already be considering wearing masks indoors — but Americans elsewhere should also take notice, officials said.
Prevention strategies
“Prior increases of infections, in different waves of infection, have demonstrated that this travels across the country,” said Dr Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said at a White House briefing.
For an increasing number of areas, “we urge local leaders to encourage use of prevention strategies like masks in public indoor settings and increasing access to testing and treatment,” she said. “With regard to a fourth dose for those under the age of 50, that is going to require action from the FDA, and we’re in conversations there,” Walenksy said.
Hospitalisation up
Cases have steadily risen over the past five weeks, Walensky said at a White House briefing, with the current seven-day average of daily cases rising 26 per cent from the previous week to 94,000 cases per day and up threefold over the last month. The seven-day average for hospitalisation was up 19 per cent to about 3,000 per day and the average for deaths was 275 per day, she said.
However, officials were cautious about making concrete predictions, saying how much worse the pandemic gets will depend on several factors, including to what degree previous infections will protect against new variants.