Here’s what we know about the C.D.C.’s new mask recommendations for vaccinated people.
The new guidance calls for masks in schools and indoors in areas with low rates of vaccination for everyone regardless of vaccination status.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended on Tuesday that people vaccinated against the coronavirus resume wearing masks in schools and in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the virus is surging, marking a sharp turnabout from their advice just two months ago.
The pandemic in the United States is very different than it was in May, when it seemed as if the worst was in the past. Confirmed cases are surging in parts of the country with low vaccination rates, and there are more reports of breakthrough infections with the highly contagious Delta variant in fully immunized people.
Vaccines are effective against the worst outcomes of infection, even with the variant, and conditions are nowhere near as bad as they were last winter. But the new guidance amounts to a weary acknowledgment that the lagging vaccination effort has fallen behind the ever-evolving virus. Fewer than 50 percent of the country is fully vaccinated, according to federal data.
“This is not a decision we at C.D.C. have made lightly. This weighs heavily on me,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the agency’s director, said at a news briefing on Tuesday.
transcript
C.D.C. Recommends Masks for Vaccinated People Indoors
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that people who have received the coronavirus vaccine should resume wearing masks in indoor public spaces, especially schools.
We acted with the data that we had at the time, the data that we had at the time, the country mostly had alpha — alpha among breakthrough vaccinated infections was not being transmitted to other people. The data that we have right now is different. We have a country that is full of Delta. Delta is a more transmissible virus. And the new data that we have is that Delta is able, in those rare breakthrough infections, to be transmitted to others. The most important thing that we need to say right now is we have — a lot of this country that has a lot of viral burden. That’s driven a lot by people who — mostly by people who are unvaccinated. Those are the people that are driving the new infections. But at an individual level, we believe everybody should be wearing a mask in those areas with substantial and high transmission. We are now a country that is the majority of Delta. We know that our young children, 11 and younger, cannot be vaccinated. We know that our vaccinated individuals, in the rare case that there are a breakthrough, have the potential to pass the virus on to unvaccinated individuals. We know that our 12 to 17-year-olds, right now, have only about 30 percent coverage in fully, in being fully vaccinated. And so taking all of that information together, we believe that the C.D.C. — the C.D.C. recommends that K through 12 schools should be opened for full-time in-person learning. But in those indoor settings, everyone should be masked. And I think the most important thing to recognize is most of the transmission across this country is related to people who are unvaccinated. That is where the majority of transmissions are occurring.
Here’s what we know:
Masks in regions seeing case surges and in schools
The C.D.C. has long recommended that unvaccinated people wear masks indoors. But Tuesday’s regulations mean that even people who have been completely inoculated will once again need to mask up in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the virus is ascendant.
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