Can someone explain the CDC’s guidance today that says fully vaccinated teachers and students don’t need to mask?
Are they trying to keep this virus going for as long as they can so they stay in the news and feel important?
Well California, at least, is ignoring this latest guidance from the CDC. Only a few minutes after the CDC came out, California public health officials announced that masks will still be required in all schools in this state.
I’ve given up trying to make sense of CDC guidance. In general, the public health response to this pandemic has been a mixed bag of rational caution, misinterpretation of data, recommendations that seem to have been held up in some bureaucratic approval process for weeks past when they should have been announced, an inability to establish some reasonable metrics for imposing or relaxing public health measures, and a general inability to accurately forecast or acknowledge when information is lacking. You would think that the public health infrastructure in this country would be more robust and able to respond to a novel pathogen with science and data, but the actual experts seem to be largely ignored in favor of political expediency and whoever can speak loudest.
Stranger
I don’t get why they seem to be ignoring the data on the delta variant, either. If the vaccines are less than 90% effective at avoiding “severe disease,” that’s enough to say we should be masking.
Sure, if you’re only with other people who are vaccinated, the risk is arguably low enough that you can not mask. But in schools there will be a mixture of vaccinated and unvaccinated kids, even in schools which contain no one under 12 (e.g. the high schools).
The only way it makes sense to me at all is if they’re expecting the schools to require proof of vaccination to let kids not wear masks, and thus are hoping that peer pressure from seeing the others without masks will push kids to beg their parents to let them get vaccinated.
But that seems highly unlikely. The places that care will just keep the masks up, and the places that don’t will just see this to mean “no one has to wear a mask,” even while they beg people to get vaccinated.
Where did you get the 90% from. Initially the CDC was looking for a vaccine that achieved at least 50%. The JnJ vaccine is 66.3% and is approved. Not understanding why the bar was thrown up to 90% in your example. The 95% and 94.9% of the other 2 just seemed like a lucky break.
While I would like that, it may run afoul of privacy. The anti-covid vaxeers let it run its corse are the very ones to disregard wearing a mask when they are the ones to wear it.
The key part is “severe disease.” All the vaccines, even the J&J one, were 99% effective at preventing severe disease from the original coronovirus, but not with the delta variant, which is taking over.
Sure, we were willing to tolerate vaccines that would be less effective than that. But, the less effective the vaccine, the more people need to get it for it to protect everyone.
Right now, even highly vaccinated countries are seeing cases go up due to the variants. When cases are going up is a bad time to relax restrictions.
If those countries are anything like the US with what can most kindly be called pockets of resistance, you should be looking at states or whatever other geographical segmenting the countries do. Look at the highly vaccinated states in the US, where vaccinations are high and cases are very low despite delta now making up about 40% of the cases in the US. And yes, delta is here in the northeast and has been for two months (the article linked is from 3 weeks ago and notes that there were cases a month prior to then), so it’s not still merely looming on the horizon.