Most fully-vaccinated Americans can finally stop wearing their masks almost anywhere - indoors or outdoors, the CDC announced on Thursday. The new guidance still calls for wearing masks in crowded indoor settings like buses, planes, hospitals, prisons and homeless shelters, but could ease restrictions for reopening workplaces and schools. It will also no longer recommend that fully vaccinated people wear masks outdoors in crowds. CDC's announcement comes as the agency and the Biden administration have faced pressure to ease restrictions on fully vaccinated people - people who are two weeks past their last required COVID-19 vaccine dose - in part to highlight the benefits of getting the shot. In a seemingly prescient moment, Speaker Nancy Pelosi removed her mask in public for the first time in months on Thursday during her weekly Capitol Hill press conference. She took off her face covering once she got to the podium, and cited new House rules that require all members to wear masks on the floor - unless they are speaking. The CDC's expected easing of guidance also comes two weeks after the agency recommended that fully vaccinated people continue to wear masks indoors in all settings and outdoors in large crowds. In that update, the CDC also exaggerated the risk of Covid transmission outdoors as accounting for less than 10 percent of cases when the figure is likely less than one percent, experts say. That's sown distrust and confusion, fueling claims that the CDC has been keeping mask guidelines in places longer than it needs to. Things came to a head earlier this week, as Republican lawmakers grilled CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky over masking guidelines, claiming that the agency had let them drag on too long. To-date, more than 117 million fully vaccinated Americans are still advised to wear their masks anytime they are inside (besides at home) and in crowded places outdoors.
Newspaper & online reporters and analysts explore the cultural and news stories of the week, with photos frequently added by Esco20, and reveal their significance (with a slant towards Esco 20's opinions)
February 11, 2021
CDC Says Double-Masking Offers More Protection Against The Coronavirus
Updated at 1:30 p.m. ET
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new research on Wednesday that found wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask offers more protection against the coronavirus, as does tying knots on the ear loops of surgical masks. Those findings prompted new guidance on how to improve mask fit at a time of concern over fast-spreading variants of the virus.
For optimal protection, the CDC says to make sure the mask fits snugly against your face and to choose a mask with at least two layers.
In laboratory testing, researchers simulated coughs and breathing and tested how well different masks worked to block aerosol particles — comparing no mask, a cloth mask or a surgical mask. They also tested two methods to optimize the fit of cloth and medical masks: wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask, and tying knots on the ear loops of surgical masks and then tucking in and flattening the extra material against the face.
Both methods produced substantially improved protection against transmission of and exposure to infectious aerosols.
"In the study, wearing any type of mask performed significantly better than not wearing a mask," said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in a briefing from the White House COVID-19 Response Team on Wednesday.
"And well-fitting masks provided the greatest performance at both blocking emitted aerosols and exposure of aerosols to the receiver. In the breathing experiment, having both the source and the receiver wear masks modified to fit better reduced the receiver's exposure by more than 95%, compared to no mask at all," she said.
Walensky said the laboratory findings underscore the importance of wearing a mask correctly and ensuring it fits snugly over your nose and mouth. The new information does not alter the CDC's guidance on who should wear a mask and when.
As of Feb. 2, masks are now required on planes, buses, trains and other public transportation traveling into, within or out of the U.S., as well as in U.S. transit hubs such as airports and stations.
The CDC's guidance on improving mask fit now recommends:
- Choosing a mask with a nose wire, which prevents air from leaking out along the top
- Using a mask fitter or brace over a disposable or cloth mask, to prevent air from leaking out. These small, reusable devices cinch a cloth or medical mask to create a tighter fit and improve mask performance, Walensky said.
- Make sure your mask fits snugly over your nose, mouth and chin: "If the mask has a good fit, you will feel warm air come through the front of the mask and may be able to see the mask material move in and out with each breath," the CDC says.
- Add layers of material – either by using cloth mask with multiple layers of fabric or by wearing a disposable mask under a cloth mask.
But double-masking isn't recommended for all masks. Don't combine two disposable masks, the CDC says: "Disposable masks are not designed to fit tightly and wearing more than one will not improve fit."
And don't layer another mask on top of a KN95, either. That mask should be used alone, the CDC says.
June 23, 2020
When the Mask You’re Wearing feels Unmasculine
THOMAS EDSALL, NY TIMES
We destroyed our entire country and sacked the Constitution all for a very narrow and specific problem that required a precise and balanced approach.
We do know that gatherings spread the virus. Again and again, when groups get together, attendees get sick. Some have died. And we don’t know the extent to which they’ve spread it to others, though we know it’s a terribly contagious virus.
WASHINGTON POST
In other nations, there is no such divide. In many Asian countries, surgical masks were socially acceptable long before the coronavirus pandemic, partly as a result of experience in past pandemics, like SARS in 2003.
Progressives have grown more likely to embrace a culture of “safetyism” in recent years. This safetyism seeks to protect them and those who are deemed the most vulnerable members of our society from threats to their emotional and physical well-being.
progressives are willing to embrace the maximal measures to protect themselves, the public, and the most vulnerable among us from this threat.
many conservatives are most concerned about protecting the American way of life, a way of life they see as integrally bound up with liberty and the free market.
express significantly less personal worry about the quality of the environment and about eight environmental problems than do other adults in the general public, even controlling for the effects of several relevant social, demographic, political, and temporal variables.
If you are a conservative, a key tenet of your ideology is that unregulated markets naturally produce good; they are the most efficient way that humans have ever seen for distributing goods, services, wealth, etc. Any attempts to regulate, intervene upon, steer, etc. an economic market will make it necessarily less efficient. A government driven by some sense of altruism — ‘dogooderism’ by ‘bleeding hearts’ — will only muck up the functioning of an efficient market.
do not hold nearly as much belief in the power of unregulated markets to necessarily produce good without substantial negative side effects. As such, liberals are more supportive of governmental intervention to protect public health, environmental quality, the poor, etc. In other words, liberals accept some degree of economic regulation, and perhaps slower growth, reduced profits, etc., if it means improving public health, environmental quality, etc.
conservatives value economic growth; markets with little or no governmental intervention; little to no constraints on ‘individual liberty’ and private property rights; etc. Liberals value educational opportunities; support for the vulnerable; environmental protection; checks on economic power; the extension of rights to previously oppressed groups; etc.
a strong hostility toward expertise in general, as obvious in the Trump Administration. Both of these strands build upon a tradition of anti-intellectualism in the U.S., but have taken it to far greater lengths than ever before. We see this in the current dismissal of scientific evidence and expertise in dealing with Covid-19, and more recent outright attacks on the experts — because experts do not play along with the charade that the coronavirus does not represent a serious threat.
there is good evidence of sex differences in responses to the coronavirus; women are more likely to report favoring and practicing social distance measures than are men.
While liberals adopt their nurturant role, bemoaning the climbing infection and death rates and are willing to accept economic carnage in favor of minimizing the loss of human life, conservatives are more likely to, in effect, tell the American people to “walk it off,” increasingly staking out the position that some loss of life must be endured for the greater economic good.
more likely to question conclusions of scientists because they are more likely to question their motives — seeing them as typical liberal pansies who just can’t accept the reality that people die. At the extreme, hard right conservative thinking manifests in conspiracy theories painting Fauci, the CDC and the WHO as malevolent agents whose hidden agendas having nothing to do with saving American lives.
Exposure to objectively threatening circumstances, such as terrorist attacks, was associated with a “conservative shift” at individual and aggregate levels of analysis. Psychological reactions to fear and threat thus convey a small-to-moderate political advantage for conservative leaders, parties, policies, and ideas.
Pool shot of audience at Pres. Trump’s speech in Arizona - the nation’s latest coronavirus hotspot - shows a single mask-wearer among the students sitting shoulder-to-shoulderconservative parties (i.e., Republicans) are perceived as more effective dealing with terrorism, whereas liberal parties (Democrats) are perceived as better at handling health care and environmental issues.
From the perspective of moral foundations theory, conservatives’ greater concern for purity and fear of contamination would suggest that they would respond more vigorously to a virus than would liberals. This was indeed the case with the Ebola crisis during the Obama Administration when conservative voices often expressed extreme concern about and even fear of Ebola spreading in the United States, while roundly criticizing President Obama’s more measured reaction.
assessed disgust sensitivity and found conservatism in our present sample predicted greater disgust-proneness. The emotion of disgust functions to curtail disease-transmission, suggesting that conservatives should, all else equal, be likely to take greater disease precautions.
to authority messaging, from the president as well as other conservative political and media figures. There are theoretical reasons to expect that, had conservative authority figures encouraged them to do so, conservative Republicans would be as likely — perhaps even more likely — as conservative Democrats to engage in precautionary behaviors.
I don’t think these political differences are due to any underlying values differences between liberals and conservatives. I think it’s due to the almost immediate politicization of the threat, with Trump and Fox News downplaying the seriousness of Covid-19, and ‘left-leaning’ reality-based sources issuing the more dire warnings.
June 21, 2020
The battle over masks in a pandemic: An all-American story
WASHINGTON POST
Parsell need not worry: Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has not made mask-wearing mandatory here in Florida. That’s in sharp contrast with what’s happening more than 2,000 miles away in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Thursday reacted to rising caseloads by making mask-wearing mandatory.