Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican in Texas, officially ended its mandate for masking his state this week and allowed companies to reopen despite opposition. Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, described the move as “extremely dangerous” and said it “will kill Texans.”
With the coronavirus pandemic officially entering its second year after being officially declared a ‘pandemic’ by the World Health Organization, health workers have denounced measures taken by the country’s second largest state to allow people to visit businesses without wear a mask.
Barbara Alexander, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, had three words for people: “Mask up, America!” “Reports indicating that these reductions have stalled should remind us that our progress is fragile,” she said, referring to the declining number of coronavirus infections.
COVID-19 continues to spread and claim lives. Emerging and more transmissible variants of the virus bring new and increased risks. ‘
Only about 10% of Americans across the country have been vaccinated (33 million people) and many of the people at greatest risk have not yet received a vaccine. COVID-19 continues to spread and claim lives. Emerging and more transmissible variants of the virus present new and increased risks, ”she said.
Austin, Texas’s fourth largest city, needs masks for people to visit businesses. As of Thursday, the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the US continues to rise, recently surpassing 530,624. Texas has the third highest number of COVID-related deaths (46,007) in the country, after California and New York.
Maintaining social distance, avoiding large gatherings, frequent washing of hands and wearing masks should continue, Alexander said. “If we leave them out now, the day we can leave COVID-19 behind us will be postponed. We must not forget the lessons this pandemic has taught us, or its terrible toll. “
The only Americans who should forgo masks are those who have already been fully vaccinated and they should only do so among other vaccinated people, according to the guidelines on how to socialize fully vaccinated people released this week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In a recent study in the Journal of Adolescent Health study, Indiana University researchers said that even most high school-age youths are willing to wear face masks to help stop the spread of COVID-19, though they called for more education about it. wearing masks. correct and more consistent.
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
A literature review on face masks published in January by the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded: is high. “
“The preponderance of evidence indicates that wearing a mask decreases contact-to-contact transmittance by reducing the transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts,” concluded the 19 international authors of the review.
COVID-19 is known to be transmissible in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, and in individuals with few symptoms. “We strongly recommend public officials and governments to strongly encourage the use of widespread face masks in public,” they wrote.
“Wearing a public mask is most effective in reducing the spread of the virus when compliance is high.”
Face masks likely played a role in reducing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Italy in the first half of 2020, and could have reduced the number of official COVID-19 cases there by as much as 30,000 as the number of cases increased in spring. of 2020, research found in the peer-reviewed journal Infectious Diseases.
Morten Gram Pedersen, lead author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Padua, wrote in the study: “We did not see this reduction in places where no additional local interventions were introduced at the time. “
Many previous studies have said that face masks have helped reduce contamination by reducing droplets sprayed into the air. Masks may also help promote healthy behavior and encourage people not to touch their face during or after they are in a public environment.
This study says medical-grade N95 masks help filter viruses larger than 0.1 micrometers (one micrometer is one millionth of a meter). The coronavirus is 0.125 micrometers. These products “have been shown to be effective at filtering out smaller particles and are designed to fit tightly on the face.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Getty images
When asked last month if Americans will still wear masks in 2022 and when life will return to normal, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN. “It may be, and again, it really depends on what you mean by normality.”
“If normalcy means exactly the way things were before this happened to us, I mean, I can’t predict that,” he said. “Clearly I think we are going to have a significant degree of normalcy beyond what we have all had to endure over the past year.”
But he warned that the new, more contagious versions of the COVID-19 virus will also determine whether people will still wear masks in 2022. “There are so many other things that would make a projection that I give you today on this Sunday wind. will no longer be the case in six months. “
“I think we’re going to have a significant degree of normalcy beyond what we’ve all had to endure over the past year.”
Fauci has said that if 70% to 85% of the US population were vaccinated, that would equate to good “herd immunity,” and the country should see a return to normalcy by the fall. Of course, that can depend on the age, circumstances and underlying conditions of individuals.
In January, US President Joe Biden signed a mask mandate for all federal workers and everyone on federal property. They should, according to the mandate, “all wear masks, maintain physical distance and adhere to other public health measures, as stipulated in CDC guidelines.”
Pfizer PFE,
and BNTX from the German partner BioNTech SE,
and Moderna’s MRNA,
mRNA-based dual vaccines are approximately 95% effective. J&J vaccine is a vaccine based on adenovirus vectors, and it requires only one injection in the U.S. It has a 72% efficacy.
Despite some Americans’ reluctance to get the J&J vaccine, all three vaccines can prevent serious illness, hospitalization, and death, even though people are not given a choice. “Each of them is very effective in preventing clinically apparent diseases,” Fauci said Friday.