The American health authorities largely relaxed their recommendations on Friday on wearing a mask, which will no longer be recommended indoors for the majority of the country’s inhabitants, including in many schools.
“We are now in a much better situation as a nation, with more tools to protect us from Covid-19,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Prevention and Control, told a press conference. Against Diseases (CDC), one of the nation’s leading health agencies.
Some counties still required to wear masks indoors
The CDC has so far only used the number of new cases recorded in each county to determine levels of Covid-19 by locality. According to this measure, 95% of the country recorded a high level of transmission of the virus, where the recommendation of wearing a mask indoors for all applied. But the CDC has now decided to include hospital occupancy rates in its measure, as well as the number of new daily hospitalizations.
Consequently, more than 60% of counties, representing 70% of the American population, now register a level qualified as “low” or “medium”, and can therefore drop the mask. Only counties with a “high” level of Covid-19 are still subject to the recommendation to wear a mask indoors.
It is up to the states to take the measures
Important point: in schools, the CDC has so far recommended masks everywhere in the country, regardless of transmission levels. From now on, the mask will only be recommended in schools in counties with a level of Covid-19 qualified as “high” according to this new measure.
However, these recommendations remain indicative, the effective restrictions being taken at the local level in the United States. In practice, many states have already announced that they will drop the mask indoors.
