How experts are thinking about masks as guidelines and mandates evolve.
— to direct its recommendations on masks and other precautions. That metric relies on hospitalization numbers and local case counts, but primarily the former, to determine whether masks are necessary at a given time., it is appropriate to change the goal metric from infections to hospitalizations and deaths," Dr. Megan Ranney, emergency medicine physician and associate dean for strategy and innovation at the Brown School of Public Health, told TODAY.
But"cases will always matter," he told TODAY. That's because hospitalization numbers tend to lag behind cases, he explained, and you never want to rely on a single indicator — the more data the better.much of the country had a low community COVID-19 level The recent uptick in cases due to BA.2 variant may lead to reintroducing mask mandates or might delay the lifting of mandates, “but I don’t think it’s fundamentally changing the way we think about this,” David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told TODAY.
"If you are someone who is older, unvaccinated or has a compromised immune system, you should be looking around at your local cases," Dowdy said. If cases are going up around you, it makes sense to start wearing masks again, especially in riskier situations, like large indoor gatherings.
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