People vaccinated against COVID-19 in high-risk parts of the US should resume wearing masks indoors, the top health authority said Tuesday.
This is a major reversal in guidance that underscored the country’s struggle to suppress the Delta variant.
President Joe Biden said the announcement showed that the US needs to “do better” on vaccinations, adding that a vaccine mandate for the country’s more than 2 million federal workers was now “under consideration.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky cited new data that shows rare breakthrough cases involving Delta have an increased risk of onward transmission.
“In areas with substantial and high transmission, CDC recommends fully vaccinated people wear masks in public indoor settings,” she said.
As recently as last week, the CDC had defended its surprise decision in May that vaccinated people did not have to wear masks indoors in most circumstances. In another setback, the White House on Tuesday also ordered its staff to mask up again due to local transmission rates in Washington.
According to the latest CDC data, 63 percent of the country’s more than 3,200 counties are experiencing substantial or high transmission.
In a separate address to the US intelligence community, when asked about a possible vaccine mandate for US federal workers, Biden replied: “That’s under consideration right now.”
Walensky stressed that so-called “breakthrough” cases among people who are vaccinated remain rare.
However, new CDC research showed that when a vaccinated person does become infected, their viral load is similar to an unvaccinated person.
“That leads us to believe that the breakthrough infections have the potential to forward transmit at the same capacity of an unvaccinated person,” Walensky said.
To stem the spread of the variant, the CDC will recommend schools adopt universal masking regardless of vaccination status when they reopen in fall, she added. The latest seven-day average of daily cases is more than 56,000, similar to levels last seen in April.
“What we really need to do to drive down these transmissions in areas of high transmission is to get more and more people vaccinated,” added Walensky.
People spend time at the National Mall in Washington DC, the United States, May 6, 2021. US COVID-19 case count rose to 32,603,556 with a total of 580,054 deaths, as of 8:20 pm Eastern Time (ET) on May 6, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.Photo:Xinhua
