NPR (“Authorities are urging indoor masking in major cities as the ‘tripledemic’ rages“):
Public health officials are revisiting the topic of indoor masking, as three highly contagious respiratory viruses take hold during the holiday season.
Over the past few weeks, a surge in cases of COVID, the flu and respiratory syncytial virus — known as RSV — has been sickening millions of Americans, overwhelming emergency rooms and even causing a cold medicine shortage. The triple threat has been called a “tripledemic” by some health experts.
Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted this past week that the simultaneous combination of viruses has been straining healthcare systems across the country.
The center’s map that tracks COVID-19 community levels has been showing more orange recently, a color indicating an area of “high” infection, Walensky told NPR’s Alisa Chang on All Things Considered.
“To protect communities in those circumstances at those high levels, we have recommended and continue to recommend that those communities wear masks,” she said.
CDC’s latest COVID-19 community level map indicates that over 9% of counties in the country were considered to have a high risk of infection. The federal agency recommends that people living in those areas practice indoor masking. Generally, children under the age of 2 are not recommended to wear face coverings.
Nearly every state on the map released Friday included at least one county where the COVID-19 community level is high or medium. Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire and the District of Columbia are the only U.S. jurisdictions where all of its counties have low community levels.
You can look up your county on the CDC’s page here to see what the local risk level is and whether masking is advised where you live.
It turns out that the area where I live is in the “low” risk category, so masking isn’t being advised here. Even though we had high rates of compliance during not only the height of the pandemic but even well after everyone over 12 who wanted a vaccine could have gotten one, I’m dubious that most people will be willing to go back into masks at this point.
