When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month unveiled updated COVID-19 guidelines that relaxed masking recommendations, some people no doubt sighed in relief and thought it was about time.
People have become increasingly comfortable being out shopping, attending live events, or meeting up with friends at restaurants. And many are ready to cast aside their masks.
Still, a recent KFF poll pointed to an underlying tension. Just as a large swath of the American public, 62%, said that the worst of the pandemic was behind us, nearly half were worried about easing COVID-related restrictions — like indoor masking — too soon. The poll, conducted in February, found that 49% of adults were either “very worried” or “somewhat worried” that lifting pandemic restrictions would cause more virus-related deaths in their communities. About 50% were “not too worried” or “not at all worried” that death tolls would rise in their communities.
The CDC’s move triggered some of the same mixed feelings from the public that the poll uncovered and laid bare a split within the health care community.
On the one hand, there’s applause.
The CDC’s protocol change is an indicator that the nation is approaching a “transition from the pandemic phase to an endemic phase,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. Rather than pushing messages of prevention, Benjamin said, the agency is changing its focus to monitoring for spikes of infection.
On the other hand, there is criticism — and worry, too.
“When I hear about relaxing regulations,” said Dr. Benjamin Neuman, a Texas A&M University professor and chief virologist at its Global Health Research Complex, “it sounds a lot like people giving up. And we’re not there yet, and it’s a little bit heartbreaking and a little bit hair-pulling.”
What are the new guidelines, and how are they different?
Before the update, the CDC considered a community at substantial or high risk if it had had an infection rate of 50 or more new cases for every 100,000 residents in the previous week.
According to the agency’s new community-based guidance, risk levels can be low, medium or high and are determined by looking — over a seven-day period — at three factors: the number of new COVID-19 cases in an area, the share of hospital beds being used and hospital admissions.
This change had a profound impact on how COVID-19 risk was measured across the country. For example, the day before the CDC announced the new guidelines, 95% of the nation’s counties were considered areas of substantial or high risk. Now, just 14% of counties fall into the high-risk category, according to the agency.
The CDC doesn’t make specific mask recommendations for areas at low risk. For areas classified as medium risk, people who have other health problems or are immunocompromised are urged to speak to their health care provider about whether they should mask up and take other precautions. In areas deemed to be high risk, residents are urged to wear masks in indoor public spaces.
“This more stratified approach with this combination of those factors gives us a better level of understanding of COVID-19’s impact on our communities,” said Keri Althoff, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Specifically, the impact of severe disease and death.”
But people shouldn’t get rid of their masks yet, she said. Even as the nation’s infection rates fall, the virus continues to spread on a global scale. “We have to fully recognize that there are so many people on this Earth who are unvaccinated internationally, and this is where the variants come from,” Althoff said.
Roses and thorns from experts
The same week the CDC rolled out its new guidelines, it reported a national seven-day average of about 71,000 new COVID-19 cases, along with 5,400 hospital admissions. Around 2,000 people were dying because of the disease every day.
