CDC GUIDANCE:
Concern over surge prompts agency to call for masks indoors when not at home
soaring With across coronavirus the nation, infections federal health officials on Friday urged
Americans in the most forceful language yet to take steps to protect themselves — starting with
“universal mask use indoors” — and pressed local governments to adopt 10 public health measures deemed necessary to contain the pandemic.
The guidance ref lected deep concern at the agency that the pandemic is spiraling further out of control and that many hospitals are reaching a breaking point, potentially disrupting health care across the country.
The CDC has for months encouraged mask-wearing in public spaces household. with The people new outside guidance, the published Friday, asks people to put on masks anywhere outside their homes.
The urgent recommendations came on the same day California recorded another daily record number of cases, with 22,018, and hospitalizations topped 9,000 for first time.
The number of Americans hospitalized with COVID-19 hit an all-time high on Thursday at 100,667, according to the COVID
Tracking Project. That figure has more than doubled over the past month, while new daily cases are averaging 210,000 and deaths are averaging 1,800 per day, according to data compiled by Johns Hop
kins University.
Federal health officials have issued increasingly stark warnings in the waning weeks of the Trump administration, and Presidentelect Joe Biden has promised a new national strategy to turn back the virus. On Thursday, Biden said he would call on Americans to wear facial coverings for 100 days.
To some experts, the CDC’s appeal appeared to augur a more comprehensive and coordinated national approach to controlling the pandemic.
“We’re seeing CDC and other public health institutions awaken from their politics-induced coma,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, who served as the agency’s director under President Barack Obama.
“This is them aligning themselves more with science, which also aligns them more with the Biden administration,” he added.
While most of the directives are not new, experts said the rising case numbers demonstrated a need for a more uniform approach, rather than the patchwork of restrictions adopted by states.
“The role of the CDC is to lead with the science,” said
Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious-disease physician and member of Biden’s COVID-19 advisory group. “In the absence of strong national guidance from the CDC, we’ve had a variety of responses across the country, some more scientifically grounded than others.”
The scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of certain health measures, such as wearing masks, has been accumulating, and those measures are urgently needed now to stop the spread, CDC officials said.
Though the agency has issued most of the recommendations in earlier guidance, the new summary represented the first time the CDC had published a multipronged list of strategies for states, a sort of battle plan.
“This idea of a 50-state solution is completely impractical when we live in one nation,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We are not going to get past this pandemic unless we have a concerted national approach.”
Mask use is most crucial indoors, and in outdoor spaces where social distancing cannot be maintained, the CDC said in its report. The agency recommended mask use at home when a member of the household has been infected or potentially exposed to the virus, including those with high-risk occupations such as meatpacking or agricultural processing.
“Compelling evidence now supports the benefits of cloth face masks for both source control (to protect others),” the report said, “And to a lesser extent, protection of the wearer.”
Mitigation measures are particularly essential in light of recent research that suggests roughly 50 percent of transmission of the coronavirus is from asymptomatic people, the report said. It also recommended that communities make a plan for distributing masks to people who might struggle to access them.
In addition to stepping up mask use, the CDC also recommended postponing travel plans. For those who do plan to travel, both domestically and internationally, the agency encouraged staying home, getting tested before and after traveling and quarantining for a week upon return, regardless of test results.
The new recommendations place high priority on keeping schools open, from kindergarten through 12th grade, saying schools should be both “the last settings to close” and “the first to reopen” because of the critical role they play in providing meals and support services to children. Closures take a disproportionate toll on lowincome families, the agency noted.
Failure to implement the preventive measures will lead to continued spread of the virus and more unnecessary deaths, said Margaret Honein, the first author of the CDC report.
She emphasized that Americans could take many important steps on their own: wearing masks, physically distancing from others, limiting their contacts and avoiding nonessential visits to indoor spaces.
“We want to make sure every person is aware that it’s within their power to take this critical step: Wear a face mask and prevent transmission, and maintain physical distance from others,” said Honein, a member of the agency’s COVID-19 emergency response team.
Scientific evidence that masks can both prevent an infected individual from spreading the disease and protect the user from infection is “compelling,” she added. “Clearly, not everyone is hearing how important that is,” she said. “It’s an action everyone can take to protect each other.”
The CDC emphasized Americans should avoid indoor spaces outside the home, as well as crowded outdoor spaces.
Faced with the acceleration in COVID-19 cases, California on Thursday pulled an emergency brake — announcing new restrictions tied to regional strains on critical care services.
For purposes of the new statewide order, officials carved California into five regions: Southern California, the San Joaquin Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Greater Sacramento area and rural Northern California.
Additional restrictions — such as closing hair and nail salons, playgrounds, zoos, museums, aquariums and wineries; and requiring restaurants to return to takeout service only — would be implemented when a region’s intensive care unit capacity falls below 15 percent.
The new stay-at-home order takes effect Saturday, although the earliest it would be imposed is Sunday.
So far, none of the regions has dipped below the stateset threshold — though officials have said they expect all of them will do so soon.
Though their regional ICU capacity has yet to fall below the designated level, health officers for Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, as well as the city of Berkeley, announced Friday that they would proactively implement the additional restrictions.
“We cannot wait until after we have driven off the cliff to pull the emergency brake,” Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody said in a statement.
The new closures are scheduled to take hold across most of the Bay Area starting Sunday and will stay in place until Jan. 4.
Nationwide, the coronavirus is blamed for almost 277,000 deaths and 14 million confirmed infections.
An inf luential modeling group at the University of Washington said Friday the expected U.S. vaccine rollout will mean 9,000 fewer deaths by April 1.
But even with a vaccine, the death toll could reach 770,000 by April 1 if states do not act to bring current surges under control, the group said.