Today Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said the agency is working on updating and evaluating its mask guidance, but said COVID-19 transmission and hospitalization rates were still high throughout the country, and the recommendation of masking in indoor settings regardless of vaccination status remains in place.
"We are working on that guidance. We are working on following the trends for the moment," she said during a White Hour press briefing. "We are encouraged by current trends, but we are not there yet."
Massachusetts, NY drop mask mandates
Today, Massachusetts and New York state joined other blue states in the Northeast in announcing they would let mask mandates in indoor settings (New York) and schools (Massachusetts) expire in the coming weeks. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said he would let the state's school mask requirement expire on Feb 28.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said mandates on both masks and vaccine requirements in businesses would expire tomorrow. "Numbers are coming down, and it is time to adapt," she said.
Hochul said for now there will be no changes to New York's mask requirements in schools, and officials in Los Angeles County said yesterday that they also have no immediate plans to drop their school mask mandate, ABC News reports.
But according to the current guidance from the CDC, people in more than 3,200 US counties, or 99% of the country, should still be wearing masks indoors regardless of their vaccination status, NBC News reports.
Daily cases, hospitalizations drop
The HHS Protect Public Data Hub shows 99,925 inpatient beds in use for COVID-19 patients, and the 7-day average of COVID-19 hospitalizations is down 30% from its peak in January, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The new 7-day average of daily cases is 247,000 cases per day, a decrease of 44% over the previous week. Hospital admissions dropped to 13,000 per day, a decrease of 25%. Daily deaths rose by 3% to 2,400 per day.
The United States reported 198,738 new COVID-19 cases yesterday and 3,227 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracker.
Today during the White House press briefing Anthony Fauci, MD, the chief medical advisor to the White House, said getting a booster dose of vaccine was the best way to protect against the Omicron variant.
The CDC COVID Data Tracker shows 64.2% of Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, 75.7% have received at least one dose of vaccine, and 42.2% of fully vaccinated Americans have received a booster dose.
