Several of the leading health experts are issuing new federal guidelines on practices considered safe for populations fully vaccinated against COVID-19, while emphasizing the importance of masking in public and high-risk environments.
The highly anticipated guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued this week gave the green light to unmasked internal meetings between fully vaccinated individuals and also suggested that fully vaccinated people mingle indoors with unvaccinated people at low risk of COVID -19 severe presents low risk, among other recommendations. However, the CDC advised that everyone should avoid large internal meetings and be masked in public and high-risk environments, regardless of vaccination status.
“This guidance is very attentive,” Dr. Anne Liu, an infectious disease physician at Stanford Health Care, wrote to Fox News. “It balances the removal of some precautions in low-risk conditions, keeping them in public and high-risk situations.”
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Liu said that guidance on wearing a mask in particular was reasonable, given the persistent spread of the virus in communities and considering that the majority of the country’s population still needs to roll up their sleeves and receive a vaccine. According to data compiled by the CDC, approximately 90% of the US population is not yet fully vaccinated.
Dr. Andrea Cox, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explained that not everyone responds to the vaccine in the same way, so jabs cannot completely eliminate the risk of symptomatic infection or transmission.
“It is still important to wear a mask to protect yourself and others after vaccination,” Cox wrote in an e-mailed statement. “It is especially important not to interact with other people who don’t wear a mask, even in small groups, if they don’t get vaccinated and are at risk of serious infection. Because we don’t know that about people in large public settings, wear a mask when you’re out safe. “
On the other hand, Fox News medical collaborator Dr. Marc Siegel argues that the guidance is still very strict, given the low risk of fully vaccinated individuals transmitting or contracting the virus.
Separately, the guidance comes as public health officials continue to discover cases of variants circulating in the United States, some of which are believed to be more contagious and possibly even more virulent than the original strain, although they remain unknown about the impact on vaccine effectiveness.
“I wonder if the CDC will also incorporate guidance on whether we should behave differently around unvaccinated people at high risk of exposure to COVID if we start to see more spread of variants that vaccines block less effectively,” wrote Liu.
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While the agency’s travel-related COVID-19 guidelines remain unchanged, Dr. Jessica Justman, associate professor of medicine in epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told Fox News that she anticipates that the CDC will adjust the travel and workplace guidance “in the coming weeks.”
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said during a meeting at the White House on Monday that “many of our variants [that] they came from international places and we know that the travel corridor is a place where people mix a lot. We are really trying to restrict travel in this period of time and we hope that our next set of guidelines will be more aware of what vaccinated people can do, perhaps travel between them. “
Finally, in a separate note, the new guidelines consider closed and closed meetings between fully vaccinated people (for example, some grandparents) and a single family of unmasked and unvaccinated family members with low risk of serious illness as insurance, ” low risk “activity.
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“This example from grandparents will be warmly welcomed by many, especially as so many older adults have been impacted by the pandemic in the past year,” wrote Justman. “Hopefully, these new guidelines will encourage those who are not sure to go ahead and get vaccinated.”
The data compiled by the CDC on more than 380,000 COVID-19-related deaths for which age was available point to those aged 85 and over with the highest percentage of deaths (32%), and mortality decreases by age group; those 75-84 accounted for about 28% of deaths, the 65-74 age group had 21% of deaths, and those aged 50-64 had 15% of reported deaths, while each age group under 49 was responsible for less than 3% of deaths, respectively.